Who's Sorry Now The True Story of a Stand-Up Guy

Introduction Kiss My Ass and Make It A Love StoryThere I was, sitting in the back of a New York City detective car in Hoboken, handcuffed and wondering how the hell I had gotten myself there. "We have an outstanding warrant for your arrest, Mr. Pantoliano," the detective had said, very politely. "You can call me Joey. What the hell did I do?" "Multiple E-ZPass Violations, Mr.-Joey. I hate to do this to you, but the city's doing a major sweep on all EZ-Pass violators. We have to bring you in." With all the stuff I pulled off as a little runt in these very streets, I can't believe it's a measly toll-paying white box hiding behind my rearview mirror partially out of sight and totally out of mind that gets me in the end. My teenage counterpart would be laughing in my face (or perhaps pelting the car with jumbo grade A nonorganic eggs) if he knew what this old cigar-puffing geezer was getting turned in for. And not like you asked, but no need to wonder about what my mother would think - I'd never have mentioned it to her. Not my mother. But I digress. Back in the Crown Vic, my NYPD hosts were explaining that they wanted to spare me the embarrassment because I was a celebrity. So they arranged to bring me in the station through the back to prevent the press from getting their hands on me. They were worried I'd be a Page Six byline by morning, and appeared to feel very strongly about preventing that from happening. They were nice guys, I gotta hand it to them, but don't they know that's just the kind of publicity I could use for my upcoming memoir? Not to mention it's definitely my favorite kind of publicity-the free kind. As I'm getting a courtesy drive to the bar on Tenth and Willow in Hoboken, where my twenty-one-year-old son Marco works and where I had planned to have dinner with my wife and kids, my mind started drifting. It was the same bar where we'd had our dinner the night of my father Monk's wake fifteen years ago. It never had a name as far as I can remember. It was just the bar on Tenth and Willow. What else would you call it? We had walked the four short blocks from Failla's Memorial to the bar that night, four short blocks from where I now keep an apartment that I share with Marco. Failla's Memorial Home was the funeral parlor where I had laid all my immediate family to rest-my mother, my father, my aunts and uncles, my mother's father, his father before him-the list goes on. And here I was, almost fifty-one years old, driving through the streets of Hoboken with a shiny new pair of handcuffs around my wrists and wondering if I ever really left the projects thirty-three years ago. I just knew it would end up like this, that somehow, I wouldn't escape the fate my childhood seemed sure to deliver, and I'd end up with a pair of cuffs not very different from those my "cousin" Florie wore time and time again while shackled for more years of his life than he ever cared to acknowledge. They had to keep the cuffs on me. "Procedure," they said. At least these guys were thoughtful enough to put the cuffs in the front, and place my jacket over them so as not to alarm my two little kids upon seeing their old man in dire straits. Then again, how much harm could that scene have done? I turned out kinda okay, didn't I? My mind flashed to the time when I was eight years old and Aunt Lizzie, Florie's mother, had died. They had given Florie his own courtesy delivery, flying him back to New York from his new home at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was serving a fifteen-year sentence, and had escorted him into the funeral parlor in New York City. I remember watching him, the solemn figure in handcuffs standing over his mother's coffin, as that still moment of bittersweet courtesy forever etched itself into my brain. My situation, of course, was a little different. After all, I was dealing with an EZ-Pass violation. Alright, multipleEZ-Pass violations, but the poiPantoliano, Joe is the author of 'Who's Sorry Now The True Story of a Stand-Up Guy' with ISBN 9780525946779 and ISBN 0525946772.