Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos

Author:Oscar Hijuelos [Hijuelos, Oscar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2023-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

THERE WAS SOMETHING ELSE. HE LOST HIS FEELING FOR MUSIC AND his soul withered. He wrote no songs, picked up neither guitar nor trumpet. And while the Mambo Kings continued to get work, his heart wasn’t in it. The band’s morale was low: it wasn’t a question of finding a replacement trumpet player—there were a hundred trumpet players who could have played the same lines and solos—but his brother’s absence just took Cesar’s spirit out of everything. He tried hard to be a professional about it, but his performances were so withdrawn and tentative, no one would have guessed he was the same aggressive king cock strutting singer of just a few months before. He suddenly had the look of a man who had not slept in a long, long time. On top of that, he really started to drink, just so he could get up onstage. And that started to show: he’d flub his lyrics and screw up his solos. Sometimes, while trying to dance, he’d fly backwards, as if someone had tipped the stage. He sang entire songs with his eyes shut, repeated the same lines, forgot about turnarounds, and stopped giving and taking cues.

He would think about his brother, dead in the ground, and say, “If I could change places with you, bro’, I would.”

Audiences noticed this transformation and word started to get around that Cesar Castillo was getting a little fucked up.

Despite this, some nights he’d have a big horse grin, sing and play the trumpet, and even loosened up enough to joke around with the audience. Those were his reefer nights. But they didn’t last long. Once, in the middle of performing a bolero at the Imperial Ballroom, Cesar forgot where he was and wandered off the stage, with a startled expression on his face, as if he had seen something in the wings.

The worst was that Cesar started to become foul-mooded around others. The Mambo Kings Orchestra went through two replacement trumpet players, who quit because Cesar would deride their talent, making faces at their solos and stopping songs before they were done, shouting insults at them. Then he started picking fights with strangers. Some poor guy had the misfortune of bumping into Cesar while walking out of the men’s room at the Park Palace, and that was it: Cesar was on the man, pounding the shit out of him on the floor. It took four men to calm him down. That kind of thing happened again and again in clubs around the city where the Mambo Kings were playing.

“I was lost,” Cesar thought as he sat in the Hotel Splendour. “I was fucked up and didn’t know what to do with myself.”

His behavior seriously concerned Miguel Montoya. They went out one night and dined at Violeta’s and that’s when Miguel Montoya said, “Look, everybody knows you’re upset about Nestor—we all are, you know that—the fellows in the band think it would be good for you to take a break for a while.”

“You mean, leave the band?”

“For a time.

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