Love Saves the Day

by Gwen Cooper

  I looked at her dubiously. Not only was she a foot shorter than I was, but nothing she wore was anything I would ever wear. She had on a black leather jacket with a glitzy, faded panther on the back, whose metal-studded paw reached over her left shoulder. Beneath that she wore a magenta-sequined party dress over skinny black jeans and a pair of unlaced black motorcycle boots. Around her neck was a silver pendant shaped like a holster dangling from a slender silver chain. She looked tough and sexy and surprisingly girlie, but to my suburban eyes she also looked outlandish. “Something that’s you,” she reassured me with another warm smile. “And for God’s sake, buy that dress. You look incredible in it.”

  There didn’t seem to be any way to get out of buying the dress now, so I began digging around in my purse to make sure I had enough cash. “Hey,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Anise.” It was a name I’d never heard before, and it was perfect for her.

  “I’m Sarah.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Sarah.” She made a show of solemnly shaking my hand, her own hand feeling larger in mine than it should have. “Tonight’ll be fun,” she said. “Trust me.”

  The party Anise took me to was held in a loft on lower Broadway, in a building that had once been a warehouse. We had to check in with two girls holding clipboards and hand over two dollars before we were allowed to climb the stairs and enter a cavernous space filled with multicolored balloons, like a child’s birthday party. The balloons were shot through with winking silver sparkles reflected from a mirrored ball that hung from the ceiling in the center of the room. The mirrored ball also caught and refracted colored lights glowing from unseen sources, lights that brightened and dimmed in time with the music. The people who packed the room were even more gorgeous than the lights, glittering in outrageous outfits reminiscent of a carnival. I felt like I’d stumbled into the heart of a prism.

  Later I would come to understand the technical aspects of what David Mancuso, the man who threw this party, had done. Most speakers back then had only one tweeter to transmit high-end frequencies. But David had eight JBL tweeters for his two speakers, grouped to hang from the ceiling in each of the four corners of the room. All I knew when I first walked into that loft, though, was that whatever I’d thought I’d been listening to, it wasn’t music. At least, not the way music was supposed to sound. It was like I’d been listening to music all my life with cotton in my ears. I felt like one of Plato’s cave dwellers (we were reading The Republic in my social studies class) who thought fire was sunlight—until they stepped outside and saw the real sun for the first time.

  Everybody there felt the difference in the sound, even if they didn’t know they did. You could see it in the way their bodies reacted with varying levels of tension to a hi-hat versus a cymbal versus a guitar line. You could see it in the way David controlled the mood of the room with what he played, in the way he told stories with the music he chose. I’d never known that “Woman” by Barrabás could be followed by “More Than a Woman” by the Bee Gees and tell you things you didn’t already know about what it was like to fall in love. That night was the first time I had the sense of a record as a living thing. Seven inches of God. All that sound and all those voices compressed into its ridges and grooves, each song’s pattern unique as a set of fingerprints, awaiting only the lightest caress from that tiny needle to set its music free.

  David gave us what we wanted before we knew we wanted it, except that we did know it with our bodies—when we wanted to speed up, when we wanted to rest. The music changed depending on how we felt, and how we felt changed because of the music. It was like being at a concert or in a crowded movie theater where everybody reacts as one—laughing, shouting, standing up to dance—except we couldn’t see the person who was making it happen for us. He didn’t have to stand, exposed, in front of a crowd the way somebody like Anise would have to when she played with her band. From his hidden booth, David performed without performing.

  And before I knew it, I was dancing. I’d never really danced before, always feeling like I’d rather make my too-tall, too-skinny, and too-boyish body disappear than show it off in any way. But within seconds, the impulse to dance became irresistible. Anise and I danced together and then with strangers who swayed over to join us before dancing away again to form the core of a new group somewhere else. My idea of dancing was the way it was at the handful of school dances I’d gone to, always waiting alone in a chair against the wall for someone to ask me to dance, because dancing meant one boy standing up with one girl. Here there were no partners. Here everybody danced however they wanted with whoever they wanted, yet somehow each one of us was a part of the same whole. For the first time in my life, I fit somewhere. I’d never been much for dating, but I finally understood what girls at school had been talking about when they described the way boys they liked made them feel. It was the same way the music made me feel now—a hot-and-cold fever rush of tingles down my body that took the air from my lungs and made my brain buzz. I was hooked.

  Like the store where I’d met Anise, the party was also called Love Saves the Day. Later Anise showed me her crumpled invitation that bore the inscription, along with images of Dalí’s melting clocks. She said there was no connection between the party and the store where we’d met. I never believed her. “Love Saves the Day” was obviously a code of some kind, a sign of recognition talked about among people who understood things I’d never imagined.

  I’d been waiting my whole life for someone to talk to me.

  I heard everything in disco’s four/four time after that. Walking down the street, I’d set the heel of each foot down before the toe to create a four-count that always sounded in my head like, “One two three four, one two three four.” But it wasn’t just what I heard, it was also what I saw. A chair was four legs with four beats, and the seat was a hi-hat crowning the third beat, for flourish. This was what I was always doing in my mind—counting words, syllables, windows, TV screens, people’s faces (which broke down conveniently into two ears, two eyes, two nostrils, and two lips—two full four/four measures). And where I couldn’t make something break down into a perfect four, I’d imagine anything extra as additional sound and texture—French horn, timpani, clarinet, trombone, harp, violin, anything at all—that transformed a four/four beat into a full, orchestral song.

  Laura, a few years later, lying in her crib beneath the red ribbons Mrs. Mandelbaum had festooned it with to ward off the Evil Eye, was the most beautiful music I could imagine. I would sing “Fly, Robin, Fly” as she drifted off to sleep, wanting her to dream of the two of us flying together up, up to the sky. Her faint, tiny eyebrows were the quaver running alongside the four/four rhythm of her face, and the thin wisps of her baby curls were an open hi-hat on the off-beat. Her delighted gurgles were the strings, sounding more beautiful than anything. With Laura, I didn’t just hear music. Laura was my music.

  I began spending every weekend in the City with Anise—ready with an invented new social life to tell my parents about if they asked why I was suddenly out all the time, even though they never did—until I graduated high school a year early. (Because I was tall and somewhat shy, my elementary school teachers had thought I might “socialize” better with older kids, although it hadn’t seemed to work out that way.) Once I had my diploma, it wasn’t even a question what I was going to do. I moved to the City to live with Anise, where I could try to be a DJ while Anise and her band, Evil Sugar, tried to be rock stars.

  For two years, Anise and I lived together in her loft on the Bowery. Music lived on the streets of New York in those days, and every neighborhood had its own rhythms. Way uptown, in Harlem and the Bronx, there were boom boxes and block parties, and DJs were playing around with sampling and remixes of disco and funk to create a new thing called hip-hop. Down on the Lower East Side, there were salsa musicians on what seemed like every street corner, and a stripped-down rock called “punk” spilling out of the doorways of places like CBGB and Monty Python’s. Disco
was everywhere. It lived downtown at David Mancuso’s Loft, and farther uptown—all the way into Midtown—at places like Paradise Garage, the Gallery, New York New York, and Le Jardin. Anise and I went to Studio 54 a couple of times, but we didn’t like it much. Nothing new ever happened musically there. You would never have the wild and utterly enlightening experience of hearing Arthur Russell’s “Kiss Me Again” for the first time at a place like 54. I picked up a matchbook from every place we went, knowing even then that this kind of life was ephemeral at best, and that I’d never remember it later without something to anchor my memories to.

  I was into disco and Anise was into punk, which probably should have made us natural enemies. But what Anise and I always had in common, right from the beginning, was that we both loved noise. Actually, what Anise loved even more than noise was trouble. She’d moved to New York from a farm in Ohio when she was sixteen, three years before I did, except Anise told her parents before she left that she was pregnant. It wasn’t true—she was still a virgin—but it wasn’t enough for Anise just to go. There had to be trouble of some kind on her way out. And it must have been a lot of trouble, because it was a full year before Anise’s parents finally forgave her for not being pregnant after she’d told them she was.

  Anise was always full of mischief. Mischief and noise and life. She never minded if I practiced with my records while she was practicing on her guitar. The more noise the better, as far we both were concerned. When her career started taking off, and she was finally able to buy a Gibson SG up at Manny’s on 48th Street, she took the amp from her old guitar and hooked it up to my secondhand turntables in a way that made them work together. I was obsessed with mastering beat-on-beat mixing. It was one thing when the songs used drum machines. But if you wanted to throw something like Eddie Kendricks or Van Morrison into the mix, you really had to work to match the drumbeat from the end of one song with the beginning of the next, so they synced up perfectly.

  Maybe it was the overlap between our two separate styles that eventually brought dance rhythms into Evil Sugar’s sound. But even then, when people started accusing Anise of “going disco” (her music wasn’t disco) and “selling out” (she hadn’t), she’d always drop that fifth beat, just to make the music harder to dance to. Just for the fun of making things confusing.

  It was because Anise loved trouble so much that she insisted on living with no fewer than three cats. One cat by itself, Anise said, would sleep all the time. Two cats would probably learn to get along well enough and fall into each other’s rhythms of silence and sleep. But with three cats, her theory went, at least one of them would always be up and into something. Always making mischief of some kind. I guess she was right. Anise’s three cats spent a lot of time hissing and yowling at strays through the metal bars we bought on the street from John the Communist to keep other cats (and burglars) from climbing through our windows.

  Anise loved those cats like crazy. She was forever brushing and rubbing and crooning to them, or bringing home special treats for them to eat (when, God knows, it was all we could do to feed ourselves sometimes), or making up little games to play with them. She’d wriggle her fingers under a bedsheet for the joy of watching them pounce in mock attacks.

  Anise’s music lived in her head, but her art lived in her hands. It was there in the way she played her guitar, even back when most of the people we knew in bands prided themselves on not being able to play their instruments. But it was also there in the intricate highway of cat runs she decorated our loft with from floor to ceiling and along all the walls. She’d find old boards or wooden planks in the streets and bring them home to sand, saw, and varnish. Then she’d cover them with scraps of colorful material before nailing them up. Sometimes you’d be sitting on the couch when a cat would drop—plop!—right into your lap from a board above your head, turning around once or twice before sinking into a deep nap. Anise would make new outfits for us by tearing apart and re-sewing old outfits, then use the leftover material to make clothes for the cats. Taped up all over the walls beneath and around the cat runs were Polaroids of surly-looking felines in vests or tiny feathered jackets and cunning little hats. Nobody the cats didn’t like was allowed into our home, which was also Anise’s band’s rehearsal space—which was one reason why Anise went through so many different band members in the early days.

  Anise’s cats loved her right back. There was always at least one in her lap, purring away, whenever we were home. The oldest was named Rita. Anise had found her as a kitten in a junkyard in the middle of a pile of discarded, rusting parking meters. Then there was Lucy, a tuxedo cat with a white diamond-shaped patch on her chest. Eleanor Rigby was Anise’s youngest, a sweet calico who could never stand being alone. (No matter how far apart Anise and I were musically, one thing we could always agree on was a passionate adoration of the Beatles.)

  One winter night we woke up to all three cats pawing at her frantically, their little faces covered in black soot. The furnace in the hardware store downstairs—which the owner sometimes left on overnight to help us keep warm—had backed up, and our apartment was filling with soot and smoke. We would have suffocated in our sleep if it weren’t for those cats. As it was, we ran around the place choking and throwing open all the windows to let fresh air in. After that, Anise doted on her cats even more. My goddesses, she called them. My saviors.

  Still, Anise knew how to take care of herself. She made a point of knowing everyone in our neighborhood. Not just the kids our age, or the older residents who’d lived there forever. She knew the hookers, the addicts, the bums who slept in parks and doorways and always called her “Tinkerbell” when we brought them blankets and warm winter clothing.

  “You have to let people know who you are and that you live here, too,” she’d always tell me. “That’s how they know to leave you alone.”

  Every so often, though, some new junkie would move into the neighborhood and learn the hard way why it didn’t pay to tangle with Anise. One night, on our way to CBGB, a guy jumped in front of us and pulled out a knife. Quick as a cat, Anise snatched a board with an old nail in it off the ground and swung it at him wildly, missing the guy’s eye only because he had the presence of mind to duck. Then he ran. Anise streaked after him with the board held high above her head, her six-inch heels for once not snagging on any errant cracks or stones. “That’s right, run!” she shouted. “Run, you pussy! I’m a craaaaaaaaaaazy mother—”

  Anise had the face of an angel, but a mouth like a sewer. She may have looked petite and fragile, but you had to be tough if you wanted to be a girl fronting a rock band on the Lower East Side. I was nearly a foot taller than Anise, yet people were afraid to mess with me because of her and not the other way around.

  Every penny I could spare went into buying records. Between that and David Mancuso’s record pool, which distributed demo albums from the labels to New York’s DJ population, by July of ’77 I had a collection almost as extensive as Anise’s. Evil Sugar was taking off by then. They had a manager and a three-record deal with a label, and they were booking proper gigs. Interview magazine featured a four-page spread on them with photos of Anise in dresses she’d made from ripped-up T-shirts, and Rolling Stone did a big photo essay for their Bands to Watch issue. Anise always had that thing—that thing about her that made you aware of her no matter what room she was in. I was still struggling, though. No matter how many demo tapes I put together at Alphaville Studios, where Evil Sugar was recording their second album, once a club owner knew I was a girl he would almost always lose interest in hiring me.

  I turned seventeen that summer, and it was brutally hot. Even the cats, who could always be counted on to snuggle up to us at night for extra warmth no matter how hot it was, became sullen. They’d lie on the enormous windowsills and yowl fitfully when there was no breeze to cool them.

  That was the summer when I met Nick. It was too hot to stay in our apartment at night, so Anise and I started spending time at Theatre 80 on St. Mark’s Place. Fo
r two dollars you could see a double feature and enjoy four hours in air-conditioning. We’d sit in the cool darkness and watch the old Hitchcock films and MGM musicals they showed three or four times in a row, until it was so late it was early.

  Nick tended the polished wood bar, which dated back to 1922, in the lobby. I would see him waxing it every night, when the crowds were slow. His black hair gleamed as brightly as the wood he polished, so brightly that it seemed to cast light for its shadow. Something about the way his shoulder blades moved beneath the thin cotton of his short-sleeved shirt, and the summer-browned, lightly muscled arms ending in tapering fingers that held the rag and wood polish, entranced me. For weeks, I watched him without being noticed. When he finally looked at me for the first time, with eyes that were a dark midnight blue at the rims and faded to a white-blue at the centers, I was gobsmacked. I had never really been interested in anyone before. Anise saw my face turn red when he looked at me, and she teased me about it relentlessly. It was Anise who sat the two of us down at that bar, who ordered a round of drinks and made introductions. Anise knew everything about attracting attention, but she also knew how to recede quietly into the background and eventually leave unnoticed once I got over my shyness and Nick and I started talking.

  I kissed Nick for the first time that night in the theater’s basement. It was the night of the blackout, and all ordinary rules seemed suspended. Later we’d hear about looting and riots uptown, but in our neighborhood, people threw parties and played music on the streets. I went downstairs with Nick, armed with flashlights, to look for candles. He kissed me in what had once been the bunker of a Prohibition-era mobster who’d operated a speakeasy where the theater now stood. When Nick took me in his arms, he smelled like lemon-scented wood polish and the heat of the kinetic air outside. For the first time in nearly two years, the music in my head stopped. All I heard was the intake of my own breath in the dark, which paused for what felt like forever when Nick brought his lips to mine.