She locked her mouth on the side of my neck, then swirled her tongue around the inside of my ear.
She was gasping and crying and she had her fingers dug into my back. And every time I tried to get in she would pull back.
We came so close so many times that I could have just taken her if I was a little more forceful. But that has never been my style. I don't like to push my way in. I like women to give themselves to me on their own. It is the greatest compliment a man can get.
We spent all night like that. We kissed until our lips swelled up and our mouths were sore. We threw ourselves into each other, her twisting away at the last moment. By morning I was crazy with exhaustion; from everything that had happened to the band, pushing cars, lack of sleep, and blue balls.
But it was worth it. I could not forget Diane, and don't think I ever will. I kept in touch from the road. Eventually I did make love to her, but it was not that night. Not at Woodstock.
And by then, I was not the first.
We said good-bye in the hotel lobby and before noon the rest of the band and I were back in another airplane, heads flopped on our shoulders, zonked out cold with fatigue, flying to Atlantic City. Another day, another gig. But I had changed my mind.
Woodstock. It wasn't such a bad idea. Glad I went.
2 - THE EARLY YEARS
"Don't forget. Your body is your limitation. The answer = Yoga.
"Love, Noreen
If Noreen Reilly and Alan hadn't turned me on to yoga, I'm sure I wouldn't be alive today. You can't spend your life abusing your body and not expect it to catch up with you.
Noreen was also a wizard at astrology. I gave her all the necessary details: born Adolfo Hector de la Parra Prantl, Mexico City, February 8, 1946, 1:20 in the morning.
A few days later, she handed me astrological charts that turned out to be surprisingly accurate. According to the stars,
I'm a lover of peace and harmony.
•In my quiet way I get what I want and make the other fellow like it.
•In youth stubbornness, but with maturity a fixedness of purpose.
•My strong point is organization.
•I have all the qualities necessary to be a good leader--except the desire to be one.
•My father's line shows material achievements.
•I'm attracted to 'wimmen' (she used to make fun of my accent) and I'm quite unconventional in regard to sexual matters." Not bad for someone who had only known me days and the majority of that time was spent tripping on acid.
I was named after my maternal grandfather Adolfo Prantl, a stern, aristocratic Austrian and a very staunch, ultra-conservative Catholic. I must have inherited my sense of order from him and it's one of the reasons I like traveling in Germany. Offenses aren't just prohibited; there are degrees of how forbidden something is: breaking the law may be verboten (forbidden) or in some cases strikt verboten (strictly forbidden) and if it's really terrible, it's strengstens verboten (absolutely forbidden).
Don Porfirio Diaz, the Mexican dictator who coined the phrase: "Poor Mexico, so far away from God and so close to the United States," invited my grandfather to move to Mexico to help organize customs and the import/export laws.
Don Adolfo's mother and his brother Jacob came with him and he waited to marry until his mother died. A handsome aristocrat who walked with a gold-headed antique black cane, he was never seen without a tie on his high-neck shirt, an embodiment of 19th century values. My chief memory of him is sitting in his smoking jacket, reading a book. He was a great architect and some of his buildings have been declared historical. After 100 years and all the earthquakes in Mexico City, the Prantl buildings are still standing.
One sign of affluence Adolfo refused to acquire was an automobile. The house had a four-car garage, but he didn't believe in them. I guess the environmentalists would have loved my grandfather.
When he was in his forties, he wanted a bride who was untouched by the world and by temptation. What better place to look than a convent. Pilar Baguena was 16 or 17, and had fair skin, brown eyes, and long blonde hair. Her parents, originally from Spain, were both dead and the convent was a safe haven for such a young girl alone. She was a gifted painter and recited poetry. I have some of the letters my grandfather wrote to her; they are very beautiful, very romantic. They really did live happily every after. Relationships like that don't exist any more. In the United States, society is very hung up on age, but in Europe a man twenty years older than a woman is no big deal and in Latin America, it's even less of an issue.
One of the fascinating things about Mexico is the profound European influence and connections, which are very strong to this day. My family was very much a part of that.
People who haven't traveled in Latin America tend to think of Mexicans as a mass of poor, uneducated wetbacks.
They don't realize that Mexico City was a thriving, sophisticated city two centuries before the Algonquins sold Manhattan to the Dutch for $24. In 1864, when Austrian-born Maximillian was emperor and French-born Carlota was the empress, they brought over the same architect, who designed the famous boulevards of Paris, to build Chapultepec Castle and lay out the city's avenues, patterning them on those in the French capitol.
My great-grand uncle, by the way, donated the caballito, the statue of Spanish King Carlos IV on a horse that's one of the main landmarks on the Reforma, the main boulevard of Mexico City.
My father's father was born in Spain and my paternal grandmother, Catalina Luccioto, from Palermo, Sicily, was an opera singer with beautiful green eyes and a heavenly smile. She married Gonzalo de la Parra, a blue-eyed intellectual publisher with the looks of a movie star and the soul of an adventurer. By the time my mother and my father married, his parents Gonzalo and Catalina were already divorced.
Even though my grandfather Gonzalo was very much the free-spirited playboy, while Adolfo was very Catholic and conservative, the two got along well. Both were powerful and wealthy but honest. They neither stole nor killed--rare restraint in an oligarchy.
He was exiled from the country two or three times between the late 1920s and the 1950s for his anti-government rhetoric. He even spent three months hiding in a friend's cellar because the police were hunting for him due to his writings. He also became a well-known adviser to two presidents, a good example of the volatile nature of Mexican political life.
My father was a lot like his father. When he met my mother in church and fell in love with her, he was already married "outside the Church" and had a daughter named Laura. Later he had another daughter out of wedlock, Maria Eugenia, who a few years later would have a big influence on me and my musical upbringing.
For the first eight years of my life I was the only child of my parents' church-sanctified union and my grandparents idolized me. I was a spoiled little kid who went to private school and had all the money in the world because both families were still together, with money and power. Our lifestyle was very much in the tradition of European aristocracy. Grandfather Adolfo's mahogany-shelved library was floor to ceiling with books in three different languages and the centerpiece of the mansion's
