That's why the wavy-haired indie rocker was surprised at what happened one day in 1985 when he walked into the East Village apartment he shared with his future wife, Nancy, and saw a calico kitten curled on the floor.

He instantly fell in love.

"I remember saying to Nancy, 'If we're going to keep the cat, then we have to get a second one, because I don't want it to be alone when we're not here,'" Heyman says, sitting in the living room of the 10th-floor lower East Side co-op he shares with Nancy and two cats.

"Then I started to notice stray cats all over the East Village. I had walked the streets for years and not noticed any cats, but now I saw them in alleyways and behind buildings.

"Most people start feeding the cats because they feel sorry for them, but that's not the answer. You have to start getting them off the street and spaying them, neutering them. Someone got me a trap, and the next thing I knew, I was a full-fledged trapper."

There are dozens of trappers all over New York City who work in conjunction with the city's more than 60 nonprofit animal rescue groups - including City Critters and KittyKind, both in Manhattan - to try to find homes for stray animals.

Officially, a resident who knows of an animal that needs adoption can call the city's Animal Care & Control office, with headquarters in each of the five boroughs, between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. weekdays, or dial 311 after hours. However, AC&C's three shelters routinely have to kill animals because of overcrowding.

That's where the city's nonprofit groups come in. Some groups work to get the animals adopted at stores like Petco or at their own mini-shelters, while others spay and neuter strays and release them back outside.

"All these grass-roots groups have sprung up to try to take matters into their own hands," says Heyman. "There are so many cats out on the street. Every courtyard tells a story in New York. It just takes a male and a female to reproduce hundreds of cats. A typical litter is six kittens. The kittens can have another six apiece."

Heyman gets four to five calls a day from individuals and rescue groups who have his number, and he picks up an average of a cat a day. He is only a trapper, though; a person calling him must have a plan for where the animal should go after it is trapped, and other volunteers may step in to have the animal medically treated and adopted.

"Richard would never take an animal to a kill shelter," notes Holly Staver, the unpaid president of the nonprofit City Critters. "What [people like him] do is what nobody else would be doing; they're providing a service to the city and saving money and making good things happen where there would only be unhappy endings. That's what volunteerism is, right? He pays for supplies, gas, maintenance on his vehicle, and you can't even put a price on what it costs you emotionally."

Heyman, 54, is a true '60s rocker who trots out scrapbooks full of Beatles memorabilia and eagerly tells of winning a local TV station's contest with his teenage band in 1966. He's since played drums with Brian Wilson and Jonathan Richman and keyboards for Ben E. King.

On his own, Heyman has put out four critically acclaimed albums and performed all over the country. Currently, he's working at home recording a rock/blues album, "Actual Sighs," which will come out later this year on his own label, Turn Up records.

Heyman and Nancy, 51, look a decade younger than their ages, perhaps a factor of having raised cats rather than children. But it is not as if cat rescues are easy. "A lot of times I get calls for people who can't get their cat into the carrier and have a wildish cat in their apartment and need to get to the cat," Heyman says. "I do a lot of calls for people who are 'hoarders' or 'collectors,' and some have mental problems. There are just people who collect things - sometimes it's magazines and newspapers; sometimes it's animals. They can't or don't take proper care of them."

Heyman remembers a shocking rescue from 1995 involving a man with 80 cats who was being evicted from his apartment because of health violations. A neighbor of the man called City Critters, and Staver and Heyman went to the apartment.

"The stench was unbelievable," Heyman says. "It was a studio with no running water, and the cats were jaw to jaw in there. The apartment was filthy, with 2- or 3-foot piles of junk, and it was covered in feces like icing on a cake. A few days later, Holly called me and said that after all the garbage was removed, they found the guy's dead mother who had been under there, and she had been dead for three or four months." (It was determined that the elderly woman had died of natural causes.)

Because Heyman and his fellow animal lovers get many more requests than they can handle, they constantly encourage people to adopt strays rather than buying pets.

"The attitude that I take is, one cat at a time," he says. "That's really the way. You can't save the whole world. You have to look at one cat's life or a dog's life as a real achievement. If I've gotten one pet's life off the streets of New York City, it seems like a worthwhile thing."

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