FIRST OFF . . .

Actor Eric Roberts pleaded guilty to harassment in a New York courtroom Monday and was told the black mark would be erased from his record if he doesn’t get into trouble for six months. Things would have been considerably worse for Roberts, 31, had the judge not dropped charges of cocaine possession, punching a police officer and trying to hit another. Roberts, who appeared in “Runaway Train” and “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” was arrested an early December morning when police found him banging on a woman’s apartment door, and, police records indicate, he told them a series of disjointed stories. Among the tales he told the officers was: “I brought over a box of dirty books. I was throwing them into the incinerator because they were my brother’s and I did not want my mother to find them.”