My hometown of "Pleasantville," New Jersey, enjoyed the glorious status of being a regular stop on the Erie Lackawanna train line into Hoboken.   The neat brick train station, with its urine-smelling underground walkway, formed the nucleus of the town.   Storefronts lined the street directly across, and teenagers gathered on Friday evenings in the station parking lot.   When I was eleven, downtown Pleasantville seemed a booming mecca to me.  Just ten minutes on my bike and I could meet my dad’s train in the evening or buy some strawberry Bubble-icious at Plotnik’s Gifts and Magazines.  
 
In O’Brien and McGrath’s Package Liquors, I liked to see Mr. O’Brien’s bald pink pate pop up cheerfully as he greeted my father and me from behind a precarious tower of Jim Beam boxes.   In Giovanni’s Pizzeria, the gray-haired Sicilian owner and his burly 30-something son Vito liked to take turns pinching the young waitresses’ rear ends when they thought no customers were looking.   (I would later experience this local feminine rite of passage when I got my very first job there.)  Blonde Jimmy the pizza chef tossed his crusts high in the air with eyelids half-closed. A long-ashed Marlboro dangled perpetually from his lips, giving him a lopsided half-smile.   (When I turned 16 the sweet but shiftless Jimmy would buy me my very own fifth of Jim Beam from Mr. O’Brien.  "A little sweet 16 from y’good pal Jimmy.  Drink in good health. Blue-eyes.")
 
In Sheffield’s Hardware, one could always purchase a single ¾-inch hexnut and 2-inch brass drawer pull if one so chose.   I never chose, but I found my father’s delight over such things contagious.  And in Plotnik’s, the home of twelve different types of bubblegum, sullen Shirley Plotnik scowled through her underbite and tossed her shellacqued flip hairdo with impatience as I lingered over my selection.   If I took too long, Shirley would turn her back to me and resume her litany of woes to the town cop, a friendly red-cheeked Irishman with spindly legs, no neck, and a bloated belly.   (Poor Shirley had been left to cater to 11-year-olds at the candy counter while her parents lived it up in sunny Florida.)    
 
Fantasy Hair World was the domain of Angie, the town nonconformist.   Angie, who told me I’d be a "haht-breakuh f’shaw" as she gave me my first perm, was a spike-haired, olive-skinned brunette with high cheekbones, tired eyes, and a rose tattoo resting provocatively above her tube top.  She bragged to me of her status as the only stylist the parish priest would trust to perm his hair.  "Great texchah hair, that Father Sal," she confided as I sat in her chair, "but he ain’t much of a priest, I’d have to say."  When I asked her why not, she only smiled a wise smile, adjusted her tube top, and arched an eyebrow.     
 
Once a year the town convened around the train station and stores to celebrate "Pleasantville Day" with a block party.   Free birch beer and hot dogs for all loyal residents of our fine borough   The cold red, syrupy birch beer flowed from kegs into large plastic cups, and my siblings and I gulped it with relish.   Teens carrying boom boxes blasting "Born to Run" and "Jersey Girl" butted in line to grab their cupfulls and ran off to smoke (and urinate?) under the station.   The Erie Lackawanna rumbled through every so often like a busy and important neighbor blustering in for an impatient hello. The store owners mingled with the crowd. Giovanni passed out samples of cold, cheese-congealed pizza like a benevolent town grandpa.  Jimmy smoked on the fire escape above the pizzeria, his expression thoughtful as he ran greasy fingers through his blond curls.  Shirley kissed the cop in the alley next to her shop.  Father Sal offered Angie a hot dog and allowed her to adjust his collar and pat his permed halo.
 
I watched it all from the parking lot, wondering, as I blew enormous strawberry-scented bubbles.