The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (45 page)

“But my greatest gift is that I have my health.” Pérez rapped on the table. “Money, women, possessions mean nothing in the face of death. It all comes down to shit in the end. That’s what I thought, in any case, before I saw the light.”

They’d dined on pork chops and fried chicken, rice and beans, fried plantains, a huge mixed salad, tripe soup, toasted Italian bread, and for dessert they had espresso and caramel-glazed lemon-cream and rum-filled pastries. Then came out the bottle of Courvoisier, which was so smooth and so delicious that Cesar could not resist drinking down glass after glass.

Afterwards, in the living room, they sat listening to the dulcet music of the Ten Thousand Hollywood Strings, Miguel Montoya’s group. Eating from a box of French bonbons, Cesar relaxed and felt an immense nostalgic gratitude for knowing the gangster Fernando Pérez. He was also touched by the huge mahogany crucifix that took up most of the wall opposite the couch.

“I guess we do go back a long way,” the Mambo King said tearfully. “I guess we are really good friends, aren’t we, Pérez?”

“Yes, we can thank the Lord Jesus Christ for that.”

Cesar had spent most of the night feeling that there was something vaguely unjust about the fact that the shady Pérez, who’d once dealt in prostitution and drugs, was so prosperous. The brandy did its work, however, changing the Mambo King’s opinion of the whole enterprise. And he was touched when Pérez, taking the Mambo King by the hand, led him before the crucifix, asking that he kneel down and say a prayer with him.

“I don’t know,
hombre,
” Cesar said, laughing. “I haven’t said too many prayers lately.”

“As you like, my friend.”

Pérez and his wife knelt down and shut their eyes: almost instantly, their faces turned a deep red and tears flowed from their eyes. Pérez was speaking rapidly. A few words which the drunken Mambo King picked out: “Oh, the passion, the passion of Our Lord who died for us worthless souls.”

After this, they watched television until eleven, and then Pérez called a private taxi to take the Mambo King home.

“Don’t you ever forget, my friend,” Pérez told him. “If there’s anything you ever want or need from me, you tell me, okay?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Vaya con Dios.
”

The taxi, whose driver seemed cynical and leering, drove away.

The next day he ached with a sense of failure. It would hit him from time to time, and had seemed to subside now and then, especially when he was busy with music and women, but his life had been slowing down lately. His body was changing. Now he was getting jowls, his eyes ended in a burst of viny wrinkles, and, worst, his hairline had started to recede. He felt much more cautious about women, set his sights on the pleasures of memory, though from time to time he would get bored and call up an old flame. Miss Vanna Vane had become a Mrs., but he would sometimes meet her downtown, where she worked as a secretary, take her out to lunch, reaching out under the table to touch her thighs. He saw other women, but was slowing down. Though his thing got big as ever, it was more lackadaisical. Just walking down the street to say hello to Eugenio on the corner, to meet up with Manny the bassist seemed to take it out of him. And sometimes when he was resting in bed he felt terrible aches in his heart, aches in his kidneys and liver; headaches between his brows.

Hard to take that he wasn’t a young king cock anymore. Delores, who read everything, had told him that he was going through a “middle-life crisis.”

“You feel that way because you don’t think you have much to look forward to, but the truth is, you could live another thirty years.”

(He laughed in his room in the Hotel Splendour.)

And it came down to something else: What would he do when he was too old to earn a living? So he played those jobs, and there was always someone to talk about his making a comeback, like that fellow Pérez, but he was so out of what was happening, jazz-rock-fusion, acid
salsa,
disco boleros, it seemed hopeless. He mostly worked, in those days, when younger bands canceled. The old-timers liked him, but who else remembered him? All this gave him regrets.

Wished he had hooked up with Xavier Cugat.

Wished he had stayed married.

Wished his brother was alive.

Wished he had some money.

On the workroom door, the girlie calendar with the big-tit broad in a clingy wet bathing suit, shoving a fluted Coke bottle in her mouth, did nothing to him. He lay his head down on the paper-covered table for half an hour, got up, strummed his guitar. Then he thought he might revive his spirit by dwelling on his virility, pulling from a drawer a pornographic magazine, and then unzipping his trousers and masturbating. In his workroom easy chair, he drank a beer and started to doze again. Hearing the softest music in the walls, made by the water shimmering through the pipes, he realized that it was the
I Love Lucy
theme. And when he opened his eyes he found himself standing beside Nestor, poor nervous Nestor, as they were preparing to leave the stage wings to make their appearance on the show.

“Óyeme, hombre,
” he said, straightening Nestor’s bow tie. “Be strong. It’ll be great. Don’t be nervous, just do as we did during the rehearsals with Mr. Arnaz.”

His brother nodded and someone said, “Your cue’s coming up, fellows.”

And Nestor said, “Brother, you don’t be nervous. Read that book.”

And then they proceeded, as they had many many times before, to walk into Ricky and Lucy’s life and to sing “Beautiful María of My Soul.”

When he woke from this “dream,” he remembered his brother’s advice, searched his worktable, finding his brother’s old copy of
Forward America!
under a pile of building-complaint and hardware-store slips. Flipping through the pages, he reread one of the lines that Nestor long ago had underlined: “In the worst circumstances, never retreat. Keep your eyes on the horizon! Don’t look back and always march forward . . . And remember: It is the general with the advancing army who
wins the war!”

Feeling restless, he was unable to get much work done that Saturday. The Mambo King hung around the workroom, listening to the radio and organizing the papers in his desk, until about three, when he decided to go out to the Shamrock bar.

It was while drinking a whiskey that he heard the owner, a fellow named Kennedy, tell someone that the bar was for sale.

“And how much do you want?” someone inquired.

“Thirty-five thousand.”

The Mambo King remained there, drinking and occasionally paying attention to the baseball game on the television. Usually he never stayed for very long; but by his second glass of whiskey he was feeling exhilarated, didn’t really want to go back down to the basement.

Then this Irish man came in, sat beside Cesar. His face was covered with Xs, little cuts from this guy who had slashed him up. A mugger had attacked him and cut his face up one night as he staggered home. Thing was, he kept going home by the same route and it kept happening again and again.

“Now, you must take care of yourself,” the Mambo King said to the man.

“Nah, nah,” Dickie said. “I know what’s coming to me.”

He sat in the bar for another hour, watching the owner, Mr. Kennedy, a bony, flush-faced man with shaky hands and a huge age-spot-mottled nose, washing dishes and making drinks. After buying himself and Dickie another drink, he decided to go home. That was the afternoon when, climbing the stairs to his apartment, Cesar found his second-floor neighbor Mrs. Stein standing outside her door.

“My husband doesn’t want to wake up,” she told him.

Good thing he had been fortified by drink. When she took him into the bedroom, Mr. Stein was sitting up in bed with a bundle of papers in his hand, his mouth half open, tongue just slightly out between his teeth, as if he were about to say something. A scholar, he was always preoccupied but polite and never impatient with Cesar in his duties. Once, while repairing an electric socket in that room, the Mambo King had wanted to ask Mr. Stein a question. He’d been inspired by all the papers with odd writing on them—“Hebrew and German,” Mr. Stein had said. “And this is Greek.”

And so he had asked, “Do you believe in God?” And without hesitation Mr. Stein said, “I do.”

That’s what he remembered about him.

Now he was covering the man’s head with a sheet. But not without first shutting his eyes, clear and blue and looking at a crack in the flecking walls.

“Mrs. Stein, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you must call an ambulance. Or do you have a relative I can talk to?”

Then it hit her: “Now I have been sent to hell,” she said.

“Now, please just sit, I’ll take care of everything.”

That night he had trouble sleeping, spent hours in tortured thought. Why was he, a cocksure and arrogant macho in his youth, now relegated to fearful thoughts of lifelong loneliness? Why were his knees aching? Why did he feel at times that he walked around with a corpse slung over his shoulders, as if the days after his brother died were somehow repeating themselves?

Now and then he thought about the bar. For years (since his return from the Merchant Marine) Manny had been after him to go into a partnership, start something up, like a dance hall or a club. And now he was thinking: Wouldn’t be so bad for a fellow like him who knew the music business to set something up, like a Latin cabaret or dance club. The biggest problem would be money. In his head he went through all the prosperous people he knew, people who’d promised to help him out in a jam. There was Miguel Montoya, now living in Arizona; Bernardito, Manny, his cousin Pablo. They all had a few thousand dollars put away. And Pérez. But thirty-five thousand? And beyond that, how much more would he need? That bar was run down, but he could fix it up, repaint the walls, get some lighting, build a little stage. It could be done inexpensively. Certainly he could get a lot of his musician friends to work cheap. Acting as an MC, he’d get up before a microphone and graciously introduce young and old talent. And what if it caught on, becoming as popular as the Havana San Juan or the Tropicana, then everything would fall in place: money, women, and good moods.

Then he thought about the kind of people who would go to his club. Young, respectable, and fun-loving couples with a few dollars in their pockets, more well-to-do middle-aged people who liked a mix of the old standards and the new . . . His speculations went on until the early morning, and then finally, thinking that there might be something to his idea, he fell asleep.

Everybody told him he was crazy to get involved with Pérez, even if Pérez walked around, and went to church, wearing a crucifix around his neck. And he knew it, too, but he didn’t care: he put it in the back of his mind. When he daydreamed about the place, he saw it done up as a lush little tropical paradise. Saw himself making like Desi Arnaz as MC and singer (and on the edge of this thought, Nestor) and perhaps becoming more than just a superintendent and pickup musician. But he ignored everyone’s advice. Even after he had a dream about what would happen: that it would open fine and go along nicely for a while, but that Pérez’s people would take it over and turn it into something else. Still, he went for it. Manny and other friends sprang for seven thousand, with Pérez putting up the rest, half as an investment for himself and the rest as a loan to Cesar.

“I said that I would help you, my friend.”

By June he had assumed the ownership of the Shamrock and its ice machines, meat freezer, meat grinder, horseshoe bar, lunch counter, jukebox, tables and chairs, cash register, speckled mirror and bar stools. Out of his basement he dragged the tinny upright piano, had the thing tuned, and set it against a wall: there was a dining area which had seen much better days. The walls had been covered with wood paneling and light green Con-Tact paper. These he tore out in favor of mirrored tiles, which he purchased for next to nothing from a friend in the Bronx. Then he set out to build a small stage. He wanted it to be about the size of the stage of the Mambo Nine Club, as if that might invite success. It measured six by twelve feet, just large enough to accommodate a small band. He covered the plywood construction with a plush red carpeting, painted the doorway an ebony black.

The Irish in the neighborhood knew things were permanently changing when they saw Cesar scraping the shamrocks off the front window. When he finished with that, he got his friend Bernardito the artist to come in as his art director, filled the joint up with rubber palm trees and papier-mâché pineapples. On one of the walls, he stuck a big painting of Havana that he had purchased in New Jersey. Then he put in a flamingo-pink awning that reached the curb, and a fancy neon sign with the words
Club Havana
flashing in two colors, aquamarine and red, for the window.

Finally he brought over a few of the hundreds of photographs he had in boxes from his heyday in the mambo era, stuck a few in frames over the bar, signed photographs of everybody from Don Aziapaú to Marion Sunshine. And with them went the framed photograph of Arnaz, Nestor, and himself.

He decided to charge two dollars’ cover, a dollar a drink, and to offer a simple menu that would feature such dishes as
arroz con pollo,
rice and beans, fried plantains, and Cuban sandwiches, for which he’d find some poor woman as a cook. Then he had a thousand promotional fliers made up and hired little kids for a buck an hour to tack them up on lampposts, in building lobbies, and under car windshield wipers. When all this had been done, he got into the habit of turning up there after work. He’d walk around the premises, as if it were some kind of dream come true, smoking a big blue cigar and nodding to himself, tapping the counter, posing in front of the bar mirror, and pouring himself drinks.

Of course it was more complicated than that: he had to apply for licenses, liquor, cabaret, restaurant. He had to have everything inspected by the buildings commission and by the Board of Health, which would not let him open until Pérez took care of the inspectors. There were no problems after that. Pedro advised Cesar about bookkeeping and Pérez provided the “security.”