Читать книгу Spiritual American Trash - Greg Bottoms - Страница 21

Bad spirits. Maybe that’s how Miami came back to Alfonso when he remembered it decades later. He was there in the late ’30s, as a percussionist and maraca player in Latin Quarter rumba bands. He was wild, man. Wild. People knew him. People remembered him.

He even played for a while with Desi Arnaz, the guy who was later on I Love Lucy. Life was a dream of night and sound and alcohol and women. Women were everywhere. Whores. Haitians, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and even white chicks, real groupies with that mystified, cherished, overvalued Euro-American skin who hung with Desi and the band. Not dark, beautiful saints like his mama. More like tempting pieces broken off the white devil’s soul. All of it blurred through a haze of alcohol.

Miami: Sleep all day. The roar of the band at night. Sweat. Booze and red lights and applause. Band members waking up in strange rooms, a new woman on the other side of the bed. A life of brilliant debauchery, a life, as his mama would say, of sin. Bad spirits, man. Enough, after a while, to make you dread the dark.