Love Saves the Day

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.