When I was 10, I had a 12-year-old sister, Denise, and two brothers. Lenny was 14 and Danny was 5. We boys slept in the same room in a small, single-story house in a modest, riverside neighborhood known as Pleasureland.
The neighborhood’s name derived from a nearby park with two swimming pools and many picnic tables. On weekends, people from all over North Jersey and even New York City went there and to the adjacent, similar Muller’s Park, where I got my first job, at 15, as a garbageman. Both parks closed in 1985 after two were killed and nine more were wounded in an assault rifle shootout during a late Sunday afternoon, late summer Brooklyn/Jamaican gang picnic. I had swum and dived off the high board there at twilight on Friday, two days prior.
In the week before our last Pleasureland Christmas, in 1967, my Mom expressed to me her concern that Danny no longer believed in Santa Claus. She thought that one of the neighborhood kids had told Danny that Santa wasn’t real. The ...
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