On Al Pacino – Al Pacino in The New Yorker:

‘And then my father was gone, off to the war. He eventually came back, but not to us.’

(…)

‘Our South Bronx neighborhood was full of characters. There was a guy in his late thirties or early forties who wore a suit and a collared shirt with a loose, tattered tie. He looked like he had gone to a Sunday service and got ashes spilled all over him. He would quietly walk the streets by himself; when he spoke, the only thing he said was “You don’t kill time—time kills you.” That was it. Our instincts told us he was different than we were, but we just accepted him. There was more privacy back then, a certain propriety and distance that people gave one another.’

(…)

‘It was Bruce who told me that my mother had overdosed. I came back to my apartment late one night to find a note on my door, saying that he had an urgent message for me. I went to his place; he lived with his parents in the building next door, and he took me into their kitchen and said, “Your mom’s in a lot of trouble. She’s really sick. You better go, man.” I jumped in a cab to 233rd Street.
Arriving at the building, I looked up and saw the lights on in my grandparents’ apartment. I went up the stairs, walked in the door, and there were my grandmother and grandfather, their eyes wet with tears. I was too late. My mother had died like Tennessee Williams would, choking while taking her own pills.
Some people thought that she had committed suicide, as she had tried to almost fifteen years earlier. But she left no note this time, nothing. She was just gone. That’s why I have always kept a question mark next to her death.
I’ll never forget the image of my grandfather the next morning, sitting in a folding chair in the middle of the room, nothing around him, crouched over with his head in his hands, almost between his legs. He just kept banging a foot on the floor. I’d never seen him that way. He didn’t speak, but I knew what he was saying. No.
I thought that maybe somehow I could have stopped it from happening. Therapy, financial security—these things could have helped my mother. I had known that one day I was going to be able to supply her with all that and more. It sounds like an Odets play, but it’s true.’

(…)

‘I had to make it, because that was the only way I would survive this world.’

Read the article here.

Making it, as the only way to survive is a rather strong argument for making it. Scarface, all over again.

Also: He came back, but not to us, summarizes a lot.

Once upon a time there was more privacy, meaning: people were entitled to deviate.