REUNION.('The Boys of 2nd Street Park')(Television Program Review)

Forty years ago, Steve Satin and Madelyne Klein fell in love on a roller coaster, the Coney Island Cyclone. Before long, they were Steve-and-Maddy, the golden couple of Lincoln High, where she sang in musicals and he was co-captain of the basketball team. Their plan was that she would support him through medical school by teaching and they would have two children and live in the suburbs.

Then the sixties went off like a bomb and blew them out of Brighton Beach forever. For their honeymoon, in 1971, Satin and Klein and four friends meandered across the country in a Volkswagen bus, camping out, listening to the Allman Brothers, letting their hair grow. Everything seemed possible.

Seven months later, their marriage was over, and a communal innocence seemed to die with it. Satin's friend Lee Schleifer, whose fling with Klein contributed to the marriage's dissolution, became a drug dealer and was later shot to death. Satin, the sunny ringleader who had always made sure that everyone had the right mix of pot and Quaaludes, also began dealing to support his habit. In "The Boys of 2nd Street Park," a new documentary about Satin and five of his basketball-playing boyhood friends, Klein says, "The counterculture was very bad for our relationship," adding, "I can't say that it was bad for me, but it was really bad for him." During Satin's long addiction to heroin and cocaine, his life slowly fell apart: his second marriage failed; his five-year-old son from that marriage developed leukemia and later died in his arms; and in 1996 he showed up one day at the Manhattan office of his old friend Dan Klores, homeless, toothless, and in trouble for having kited checks at the Port Authority.

Klores, a prominent public-relations executive, got Satin a job as a cabdriver; a few years later, he decided to make a documentary ...