was and she did.
We went to her house where she was waiting in bed with a nice, big smile on her face. She fucked all five of us. One after another. We each were with her maybe four or five minutes, max. He probably recruited her earlier at a local whorehouse. She had a pretty face and a very nice, relaxed manner. God knows what Miguel promised her for screwing the whole band. Whatever it was, I doubt he ever gave it to her.
While I disapproved of the way he cheated people, I did learn from him that there's a certain magic in life, and that it's possible to accomplish the impossible through the power of charisma.
A few weeks after the tour, he was caught by the police in Mexico City and thrown in jail. They found five different passports on him with five different names. He was wanted in several countries in South America and that was the last we heard of him. He was the first, but not the last, guy who came into my life like that--a charming crook who melted away after awhile, without my ever knowing his real name.
Like the music, there were some movies that also changed our lives in the '50s: "Rebel Without a Cause," "Jailhouse Rock" and for me, like a lot of other motorcycle-crazed youth around the world, "The Wild One." I had to have a bike, a real one, not an Italian moped. With a loan from my grandmother Pilar I bought my first true motorcycle, a 1959 Triumph Bonneville, much like the bike Marlon Brando rode in the movie. And just as rock music had become an instant passion for me, I realized that motorcycling was going to be part of my life forever. I was so jazzed I actually slept next to the bike for the first few nights.
This period was one of the best times in my life with my friends, my music and my motorcycle. I joined a popular band called "Los Juniors" and two of our records made the Latin American Top Ten Chart. Then I joined "Los Sinners," already famous with several hit records and known as a "quality" band. They also rode motorcycles, so we naturally developed long-lasting friendships based on our love of bikes and rock n' roll.
The lives of two friends from Los Sinners, Tony de la Barreda and Ramon Rodriguez, would crisscross mine many times in the years ahead, often painfully. But at that time, we were too busy being kid rock musicians to think about the future.
Los Sinners attracted other kids on motorcycles to the coffee houses where we played, turning them into biker hangouts much like the ones I was going to spend a lot of time in, in the years to come. It was all very innocent, no drugs, no crime, and pathetically little sex--just nice kids, hanging out and having a good time.
By now, I was in a top local band, had a motorcycle, had lost my virginity, was a key figure in the biker hangouts and now I was about to score another first that was the start of a lifelong pattern--my first American girlfriend.
In the summer of '64, Kathleen and her friend Carol were Harvard students attending classes at the National University in Mexico City. They were cheerful, intelligent, sexy and they liked motorcycles and rock n' roll. Kathy was tall, blonde, and beautiful with a figure that had my friends rolling their eyes and biting their lips in anguished envy. At 19, she was a little older than me and when it came to love-making, she was a lot freer than Mexican girls. She was my first serious affair with a first-class woman, the first I ever knew. I fell madly in love. I would have proposed to her if she had ever come back to Mexico City, but she went on to a very successful political career in the States.
With Kathy gone, my motorcycle turned on me too. Although it was fast and looked cool, the Triumph was a mechanical nightmare, infuriating my family because it leaked oil all over the garage and driveway of our house, and maddening because it regularly broke down. It was my only form of transportation and life turned into a series of missed gigs or late entrances in dirty clothes. My dates often ended with angry, oil-splattered girls snarling at me by the roadside because they would have to take the bus home hours after their parents' curfew. With a river of pesos flowing straight from my wallet into the hands of the local Triumph mechanic, I frequently ended up traveling by bus or taxi, which I couldn't afford now. Much as I loved the Triumph, it had to go.
Kathy, my first American girlfriend, on my first real motorcycle, a 1959 Triumph Bonneville.
I took the first offer I got and ran all the way to the local dealer in BMWs, motorcycles famous for reliability and class, to buy a brand new R60. The dream was on again. I could actually wear a tuxedo to the gigs and arrive impeccably dressed. I rode the bike for thousands of miles, day in and day out. It never failed me. It was the start of a life-long affair with boxer-engined BMW cycles.
I was about 18 when I accepted an offer to join one of Latin America's most famous bands, "Los Hooligans." They had an impressive career with several gold records and enjoyed wide recognition in Spanish speaking countries, so I was amazed to discover that they were actually bad musicians who played the bouncy, childish crap that came to be called "bubble-gum music."
This was my introduction to a cruel truth in the pop music world: sometimes the worst bands are the most successful, while talent, taste and hard work go unrewarded. Welcome to the music business, Fito.
In 1964, Kathy, who was back at Harvard, sent me a couple of Jimmy Reed records, along with one called "Saturday Night at the Apollo Theater," featuring various black artists. I also got hold of some James Brown and Ray Charles, which really impressed me. Those early R&B records of my sister's, my growing education in jazz, and the black music Kathy turned me on to brought me to a crisis point.
My changing taste made performing with Los Hooligans intolerable. The money and applause wasn't enough to make up for the infantile, commercial music, the frozen smiles, the silly choreographed steps in our red or blue coats and white patent leather shoes. I could barely go through the motions, not after listening to the records Kathy sent me. She broke my heart because she never came back, but she did leave me that legacy.
One night when I was playing in a cafe called El Sotano (the Cellar) with El Tarolas, Javier Batiz showed up and we invited him to sit in. Javier was a singer and guitarist who became a rock star in Mexico for generations; he's one of the best ever, but he just never caught on in the States. He had a raspy blues voice, sang only in English and played guitar like BB King, skills forged by long nights playing in Tijuana, where he had to satisfy audiences filled with black American sailors and Marines.
Up there on the border, Javier taught guitar to a young kid nicknamed El Apache, because that was the only song he knew at the time. Sitting beside Javier, he learned his first guitar chords. Later on, the kid did okay on his own--not as El Apache but as Carlos Santana.
Javier changed the whole scene in Mexico City by doing a lot of Jimmy Reed, BB King, and Ray Charles. He taught us that there was something beyond what the commercial media was giving us, something with more soul.
While I instinctively liked his music, many of the other musicians didn't get it. They were convinced that Mexico City audiences would rather hear imitations of English pop bands like The Beatles, than the hard-edged black American sounds that came from that crazy pocho Javier Batiz.
Sick of the pop scene, I quit Los Hooligans and joined The T.J.s, a hard core rhythm and blues band that backed Javier in Tijuana. But I kept a hand in with Los Sinners, the band I felt most comfortable with. They were just like me: middle-class kids who rode motorcycles, from the same part of town who had gone to the same schools .
One October night in 1964, at a gig with Los Sinners at a cafe called Milleti, I hit two milestones at once: I met my first wife and went to my first orgy.
Sonja came into the club looking very square in her American-coed outfit, a powder blue skirt and pastel blue sweater plus nylons
