The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (48 page)

Sitting in the Hotel Splendour, he did not like to think that those men had used the Club Havana to sell drugs, as the neighborhood gossip said. But even back then, he knew that something was wrong, because of the way people looked at him. The old Irishman with the strawberry-red chin who always tipped his crooked gray hat looked the other way when Cesar passed by. Even gentle Ana María, cutting his hair, did not smile. And there were the stories, or coincidences, that did not sit well with him. Nice black kid, “one of the better ones,” as he used to say, named Alvin, falling off a rooftop. Irish kid named Johnny G., found slumped and fucked-up in some Broadway tavern, dead. Other Irish kid dead in some basement. Italian kid named Bobby wrecked while joyriding, high on drugs; black kid named Owen sucked into a Far Rockaway sewer. Kids yellow with jaundice and who-knows-what, nodding at the Mambo King and saying, “How are you, Mr. Castillo,” a dead look in their eyes. Kid named Tommy, funniest guy on the street, gone with hepatitis. Blind lady newsdealer on 121st slashed straight down the middle of her face for a few dollars; radio-repair man slashed from ear to ear. Then the others he heard about, slipping from memory because he didn’t want to think about them. Just that a lot of the kids used to hang out in front of the Club Havana at night, noisy and exuberant in their black chinos, V-neck sweaters, and double-laced Converse sneakers. He could have made a lot of money if he had stayed in the partnership, but one day he and the other partners approached Pérez, wanting to sell out. Debt paid, Cesar walked away from the club with five thousand dollars to show for it—Pérez had been generous. Then he flew down to Puerto Rico for two weeks and holed up in a mountain town near Mayagüez with some old friends. By the time he returned, he felt somewhat detached from the whole business, though while walking up the street he could hear the jukebox through the doorway and a murmur of voices. He’d taken all his pictures out from behind the bar, and Pérez was kind enough to change the name from Club Havana to the Star Club. A year later it was changed again, to Club Carib, and the year after that, when Pérez died (lifted to heaven by angels), it shut down for good, its front doors and windows whitewashed and covered up with boards.

A
ND JUST LIKE THAT, ANOTHER
line of music brings back a Guatemalan man, a tall, macho-looking fellow named Enrique, whom Cesar had known from his Park Palace dance-hall days. Ran into him one afternoon in the street, years later, and they ducked into a bar, where he related to the Mambo King the story of his “first intercourse,” as he put it. He was a teenager walking home from school along a dirt road, when he heard a voice calling to him from the bushes, a female voice saying, “Come here,” and when he stepped closer and parted the leaves, he saw an Indian woman on the ground, her skirt hoisted up and legs open for him.

“She had a nice body,” he told the Mambo King, who nodded and smiled. “And said to me, ‘Show me what you have,’ ” and she fondled him and his thing got big, “very big,” he said with a macho’s attention to that kind of detail. And then they “coupled”—that was his word—right by the road, and while he had enjoyed himself and had left her satisfied, he said that if the truth be told, he would have preferred the company of a good-looking boy who lived down the road, a good friend.

Now, this boy had a sister named Teresa, who was always making eyes at Enrique. They flirted with each other, even kissed, but in the end they both knew that, amorously speaking, he preferred the company of men. He didn’t even have anything going with her brother, but everyone knew. That was the first part of the story. And then he picked it up fifteen years later, with Enrique living in New York and receiving letters from Teresa pleading with him to marry her so that she might get American citizenship: that after they were married they could then arrange for the arrival of her brother. Loving Teresa like a sister, Enrique wrote her that he would take care of everything, that he would be waiting for her at the airport. A month after her arrival they were married at City Hall and lived more or less as husband and wife for a year, though they did not share their bed carnally.

The Mambo King nodded.

By that time she had started to make friends, inviting other couples over to the house, and now he really had to behave like a good husband, and that meant that he could not have any of his male companions around. In fact, she began to forbid that his friends come to the house, as she had begun to find them distasteful. And there was another thing: she was tired of going to bed at night and waking up beside Enrique, who tended to sleep, he kept telling the Mambo King, with powerful and virile erections. And even though she knew he was indifferent to women, she would fondle him night after night, until they became lovers, enjoying each other. This idyll lasted for several months and he began to barter with her, the company of his friends in exchange for his virile services, a proposal that made things worse between them, because with that she told him, “Enrique, but you don’t understand, I love you. I’ve always loved you,” and, “If I can’t have you, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” like an actress in a bad Hollywood movie—his words again—but then, when he did not believe her, she stepped things up and went with whatever men she met on the street, and got a reputation as a harlot, so that Enrique, a huge man, had to go out and fight for who knows whose honor, but he did so. And then he tried to keep peace in the house, but she had started to smash plates and scream out the window that she was married to a “queen,” weeping loudly for hours, so that he was ashamed to even leave his apartment.

Then things calmed down. One day, he told the Mambo King, he came home from his job waiting tables downtown and found that she’d cleared out of his apartment: a few days later he was served with divorce papers, the grounds being that he was incapable of fulfilling his manly functions with her. Not only was justice not served, but she was awarded alimony payments of fifty dollars a week, which was a lot of money in those days.

“Thank God,” he said, “that she finally remarried, a few years ago.”

“Sounds crazy to me,” said the Mambo King, shaking his head. Then he stood up and rapped Enrique on the shoulder, saying, “Well, I hope things are better for you now?”

“Yes, they are.”

“Good.” And he left.

And with the Guatemalan man, who’d had bad luck, he remembered the poor rich Englishman, a dapper fellow who also hung out at the Park Palace, the one who fell in love with a beautiful brunette who drove him to suicide.

So many years had passed.

He remembered the short priest from the local parish who resembled Humphrey Bogart and always seemed to be looking down women’s dresses.

Now there’s a man who had made a big mistake.

And, speaking of bad luck, what about his friend Giovanni, who managed the boxer Kid Chocolate, a jaunty Cuban welterweight. Another waiter, Giovanni had a ticket to millions, and what happened? His boxer called the champ a fairy and paid for it in the ring, getting pummeled into a coma.

What happened to his Cuba? His memories?

Having watched the match on Friday Night Fight of the Week, the Mambo King waited for his friend Giovanni, who lived in the building next door, to come home, saw him walking up the street about one in the morning with his son, carrying a canvas bag. He raced down the stairs just to say, “I saw what happened. How is he?”

“Not good.”

“Look, then, come back with me to the apartment and we’ll have a few drinks.”

“Okay.”

And as they sat finishing off a bottle, Giovanni said, “Psssssht, just like that. All his training, all those fights. Psssssht, a crying shame, you know?”

The last bar of that strange line of bad-luck music really pinched his heart, because out of nowhere he started to hear Elva and René, his old dance team, shouting at each other. René accusing his fine-looking wife of cuckolding him, and Elva denying it to tears and then, because he did not believe her, turning it all around and boasting about all her young and handsome virile lovers, so that René lost his self-control and stabbed Elva to death with a kitchen knife. Afterwards he threw himself out the window.

That was another bad-luck thing that had happened in 1963. Thank God, the Mambo King thought, that the music changed swiftly, moving on again.

Toward the end, while listening to the wistful “Beautiful María of My Soul”

I
T HAD COME DOWN TO THIS: HE
had turned around to find that the temporary job he’d taken to fill his idle days had lasted nearly twenty years.

Passing through the lobby, he would remember when he was a cocky and arrogant musician, and think to himself, Who would have dreamed that things would turn out this way? (And millions of people watching him on the rerun of the
I Love Lucy
show could never imagine that he had his own life, never see him as a super.) He’d gotten used to smelling like plumber’s gum, his nails blackened with grease and oil. Tenants tapped the pipes (in claves time) and he answered quickly, some of those jobs being nightmares. (Trapped under a sink in a hot kitchen, the linoleum floor beneath him rotting with roaches, crinkly and gnarled witch’s hair growing out the bottom of the sink, hanging down into his face, the man struggling with a seat wrench to unscrew the J-joint or sink trap for hours in the stinging heat of the day. Or going into an apartment that had been locked up for a month because the tenants had gone on vacation and entering the kitchen to find that they’d turned off the refrigerator but left the door closed so that a blue fungus had proliferated and spread across the floor and everywhere he looked in that room were roaches feasting on that blueness. Or the time he had opened a closet and a million roaches, clinging one to another, had fallen on him like an old coat. These were some of the things he did not like.) But when tenants called him he always answered quickly. Wishing to fill the emptiness of his days, those many years back, he had fixed loosened doors, leaky faucets, cracked windows, saggy walls, faulty electrical sockets. He had installed a fancy bronze-tube lamp, like those found in old post offices and in library cubicles, over the mailboxes, and even found a new mirror for the narrow lobby, taking the old speckled mirror off its mounts and leaving it out for the garbage collectors on the sidewalk. (The children of La Salle Street, loving destruction, gleefully smashed the mirror.)

Rotund and slowly putting on weight, he began to take on the shape of a cathedral bell. He had his old favorite suits let out and retailored about thirteen times in a few years, so often that his tailor put elastic in the waistbands. Amazed by his own immensity, he sometimes stomped down on the back stairway, enjoying the way the rickety structure shook. Though he was having more difficulty breathing and his walk had slowed, the Mambo King was happy there was more of him to take up room in the world.

As he sank into the bathtub, the water would rise unexpectedly to the rim.

That was around the time when the pains got so bad that his old pal Dr. López wanted to put him in the hospital.

He went on the radio that year, a nostalgia hour. The pianist Charlie Palmieri, a bandleader and arranger, was on the same program. Palmieri talked about starting out with Tito Puente and then branching off on his own in the fifties, traveling cross-country before “racial barriers” had been broken, playing dances up in the mountains, and the way he had been the one to discover Johnny Pacheco, a dishwasher who played the flute in the kitchen, jamming along with the featured band, his playing so lively that Palmieri hired him on the spot.

And then it was “Thank you, Charlie Palmieri,” and over the radio an oceanic rumbling and the melody of “Twilight in Havana.”

“My next guest today is someone who was very much a part of the scene in the fifties here in New York. It’s my pleasure to introduce the bandleader and singer Cesar Castillo. Welcome.”

As he sat there telling his and Nestor’s story, what the scene was like then in the dance halls where the Mambo Kings used to play, the Imperial Ballroom, the Friendship Club, the Savoy in the Bronx, and the quirky things that happened, like the all-baldhead contests and the great battles of the bands, stuff like that—the interviewer would occasionally break off and play one of the old Mambo King records, then return for more talk.

“And how did you feel about Desi Arnaz?”

Cesar laughed. “A nice man.”

“I mean, musically?”

“A tremendous talent, untrained, but really good for his musicians. You know, me and my brother once played his show.”

“Yes.”

“But to get back to his talent. I ran into Chico O’Farrill one day and we got into the subject of reading charts. I mean, I had never learned to read, and from what I could tell, neither could Arnaz, and that led me to asking Chico as to what he thought of Desi Arnaz as a talent, and he said the man was very good for an untrained musician.”

“But no one has ever considered him very authentic or original.”