Love Saves the Day (18 page)

Eventually I got used to the silence that emanated from my mother like smoke to fill the rooms of our house and choke our words. I spent most of my time trying to disappear into it. Still, I remember nights when I’d lie in bed and pray for rain just so I could hear the sound of it, like a round of applause, beating down on the roof above my head.

All that changed for me the day my parents gave me permission to take the train by myself to Manhattan from where we lived in White Plains. All I had to do was promise I wouldn’t go farther downtown than Herald Square, where Macy’s was. But the subway system, which had seemed so easy to understand when I went into the City with my mother, confused me hopelessly when I tried to figure it out on my own. I took the wrong train from Grand Central, and then another wrong train at 14th Street, and somehow I ended up on Third Avenue. The streets were mostly empty. I saw only a few bums huddled miserably in doorways, and clusters of tough-looking girls standing on street corners. Buildings, even the ones that didn’t look so old, were crumbling from the disrepair of neglect.

By the time I reached Second Avenue, I knew beyond a doubt that I was nowhere near Macy’s. Up ahead I saw what looked to be a newsstand with a yellow awning that inexplicably proclaimed
GEM SPA
(inexplicable because it didn’t seem like you’d find either gems or a spa inside) and, farther down, a store whose black awning extended out onto the sidewalk. The words
LOVE SAVES THE DAY
were written along its side in multicolored block lettering. The store’s window was a riot of color, a delta of ruckus jutting into a sea of gray and dull brick-red. It held exotic-looking clothes and magazines and toys and more than my eye was capable of taking in all at once. I could tell that it was a secondhand store, and I knew how appalled my mother would be at the thought of my buying
used clothing. But against the gunmetal silence of the street, the colors of that store window were like shouts calling me in.

I took the first dress I pulled off the rack, made by somebody called Biba, into the dressing room. It was a muted gold, interwoven with a cream-colored diamond pattern. The sleeves were long and elaborate, blousing away from tight cuffs. The body of the dress fell in pleats, in a baby-doll fashion, from just above my still-flat chest to a hem so far up my thigh that, when I exited the dressing room to look at myself in the mirror, I blushed.

“You should buy it,” I heard a voice say. A girl, barely five feet tall and weighing maybe all of ninety-five pounds, looked at me admiringly. I guessed that she was two or three years older than I was. Beautiful in an impish sort of way, with enormous hazel eyes, a snub nose like a cat’s, and a mouth so small it just made you look at her eyes again. Her hair was short and chopped off unevenly in a careless way that nonetheless looked deliberate. It was mostly blond except for where it had streaks of green and pink.

The girl noticed where my eyes went and, touching one of the pink streaks, she said, “Manic panic.” Later I’d learn that Manic Panic was a store on St. Mark’s Place where they sold off beat hair colors in spray-on aerosol cans. At the time, though, I had no idea what she was talking about. She added, “I go there a few times a week to let Snooky spray my hair, but I think I have to stop. Too many other people are doing it now.”

I nodded, because I wanted to look like I knew what that sentence meant. An entire trend had apparently taken root and flourished here in the City. And I’d known nothing about it out in White Plains, where nothing ever changed except to get drabber.

“You should
definitely
buy that dress,” the girl repeated.

“I’m not really sure it’s me,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s much too short?”

The girl laughed, loud and harsh. She had a voice like a chain saw, too gritty and hard-edged to belong to someone as young and delicate-looking as she was. How many sleepless nights of cigarettes and shouting over music had gone into the making of that
voice? Eventually I’d hear her sing and come to know just how hypnotic and blissed-out she could make it sound when she wanted to. “Girl, that dress is more you than anything you’ve ever had on.” She aimed a dimpled smile at me. “And I don’t even
know
you.”

I laughed, too, at the absurdity of her logic.

“What kind of music are you into?” she asked unexpectedly.

“The usual stuff, I guess.” I tried to think of something to say that would be truthful, but that also might impress her. “I’ve been listening to
Pet Sounds
a lot lately.” Then I blushed again, because what could be less impressive to this girl than
Pet Sounds
, which had come out way back in 1966, nine years earlier?

She looked at me appraisingly. “You sound like you can probably sing.”

“I used to,” I said. “But my parents didn’t like it.”

The girl’s face registered deep understanding, and I saw that I’d unintentionally passed a test I hadn’t realized I was taking. “I’m going to a party tonight that’ll have some really great music,” she told me. “Stuff nobody else is playing. You should come. I’ll meet you somewhere at midnight and we can go over together.”

I imagined all the insurmountable obstacles between me and a midnight party in the City. I’d never been to a party that
started
at midnight. The girl must have sensed something of this because she asked, “You’re still living at home?” I nodded. How old did she think I was, anyway? I waited for her to decide I was just some kid, unworthy of her time, but she said, “Look, call your parents and tell them you’re spending the night at a friend’s house. You can hang out with me the rest of the day if you don’t have anything else to do. I’ll figure out something for you to wear.”

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.