Love Saves the Day

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.