Waiting for My Cats to Die
MUSIC
I DIDN'T SEE IT COMING. One minute my future is endless, and the next minute I have a stomach and a very very short time left before I die, horribly--and I know I will. I read the peaceful-death-fantasy-shattering accounts in Sherwin B. Nuland's book How We Die. (It's going to be bad.) I finished it just before my fortieth birthday, which I then spent in sheer, mortal panic. Now what are you going to do, now what are you going to do, oh God oh God oh God, my thoughts ran, like a faucet turned on full blast. Then I thought, Well, there's always the rock star option, and everything was okay again. Like everyone else in the United States, and perhaps the entire Western world--not that I would know, I never go anywhere--I have fantasies about being a rock star. It would save me. It gives my panic a direction. You're going to be a rock star now. Okay. It's going to be okay. Except I don't have much of a voice, I can't play the guitar,the essential rock star instrument, and I only took a year's worth of piano lessons. I'm so unprepared, I think. Where should I start?
Twenty years ago I was sitting on the corner in the West Village of Manhattan, where I live, where I've lived for my entire adult life, watching the Halloween parade, when a pack of drummers marched by. There had to have been over fifty of them. I stood up and started dancing in the street. I danced with them for twenty blocks straight. I didn't stop until they stopped. Now, I am not a dancing-in-the-streets kind of girl. I would like to think I am, instead of the overly self-conscious, trapped, and paralyzed person that I am, who chants, "I hate myself, I hate myself, I hate myself," every morning in the shower. Why couldn't I be more like my friend Aly's girlfriend, the pretty, vivacious, and Italian Maria? Of course, she had to be from Rome on top of everything else. I met Maria around the same time I first heard the drummers, when we were both just starting out in life. I was a small, dark troll beside the light and lovely and carefree Maria. Watching her made me ache. Maria would have danced in the streets and not thought twice about it. I would think about it. For the next twenty years I would think about it. But it wasn't the dancing I couldn't forget. It was the drumming.
Then, just before I turned forty, I read about a group of drummers called the Manhattan Samba Group. I was sure these were the same guys. I called them. Six months later I was drumming in the Halloween parade. I was so terrified about fucking up that I could have been in any city on any day, and not in front of thousands of oddly dressed people screaming and cheering us on block after block. All I could concentrate on was getting it right. Must! (drum-drum) not! (drum-drum) make! (drum-drum) any! (drum-drum) mistakes! I thought, head down, staring furiously. The angry little drummer girl. I don't think I looked up from my drum once.
The following summer I ran into Maria. I hadn't seen her for twenty years. Quit haunting me, Maria. I had met her at the beginning of my adult life; then she moved back to Rome, and now I've hit the middle and here she was again. Only now, everything about her was all wrong. There was something funny about her mouth. She carried herself like she was still vivacious, but it was as if someone had thrown a blanket over her head. She was muffled. What had been charming in a twenty-year-old was just a little bit unsettling in a forty-year-old who wasn't pulling it off anymore. I fled. I couldn't talk to her. When I was twenty I couldn't talk to her because all I could think about was what a loser I was. I couldn't talk to her when I was forty because she was still supposed to be the life of the party and she wasn't. There was something funny about her mouth. It was the first time I could remember staring mortality in the face, and okay, I'd rather feel like a loser.
So now I'm a regular member of the Manhattan Samba Group. We drum every Saturday night at SOB's (Sounds of Brazil) from two to four o-fucking-clock in the morning, which makes Sunday a total waste of a day for me. I don't care. I never really liked Sundays anyway. They're supposed to be peaceful, a day of rest. The only thing I've ever felt on Sundays is dread.
I'm not a rock star, but I'm close enough. Sometimes when we walk through the crowd, carrying our drums up to the stage, a few people raise their fists and yell "Manhattan Samba!"
WAITING FOR MY CATS TO DIE. Copyright © 2001 by Stacy Horn. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
