by Chris Perez
Selena nodded. She understood that, she said, but she still thought it was too soon to tell Abraham. “Let’s wait for the right moment.”
I wondered if there ever would be such a moment, but didn’t tell her that. “Don’t get me wrong,” I said. “I’d never let my guilt about hiding this from your dad stop me from seeing you. It’s just that, if I could change one thing, it would be that. Your dad is a great guy, and I feel like I’m betraying him. But I will always want to be with you.”
I just stopped talking, then, wondering suddenly what Selena thought about everything I’d just said. I was almost holding my breath.
To my relief, Selena looked me in the eyes and said, “I love you.”
That was the thing about Selena: She was one of the bravest people I’ve ever known, not just onstage, but in relationships. She was really quick to put her feelings out there. You always knew where you stood with her. There was no manipulation, no lying or games. Selena was purely herself, and true to who she was and what she believed in.
My heart was pounding so hard that I thought everyone in that pizza place could hear it. My pulse was racing and I just wanted to get up and shout, “Did you hear what Selena just said? She loves me!” I had never been happier in my life than I was at that moment, hearing that declaration of love from Selena.
I grinned. “I love you, too,” I said.
It felt good to have taken that next step and declared our feelings aloud to each other, even as we watched out the window for Abraham. I reached across the table and took Selena’s hand in mine. We just sat there for a while, touching and loving each other, secure in the knowledge that we would never let go.
Selena wore the biggest smile as we walked back to the bus. I still smile, when I remember how happy she looked that day. At the time, though, I had to scold her. “Hey, stop smiling!” I said. “You’re going to give us away!”
But it wasn’t Selena who put our relationship in jeopardy—it was me. A few short months after Selena and I first declared our love in that Pizza Hut, I sat in a San Antonio police station under arrest, wondering if I had destroyed the best thing in my life.
THREE
EARNING SELENA’S TRUST
C. W. Bush / Shooting Star
Imagine how I felt as I stood in the police station, muddied and bloodied and beaten up, when the song “Ven Conmigo” started playing on the radio. It was as if Selena could see me there. At the sound of her sweet, soulful voice, my head dropped, so ashamed was I to be in this situation.
Was I going to lose the woman I loved as soon as I’d found her? Maybe I truly didn’t deserve Selena. Maybe our future together was over before it had really begun.
As I waited for the police to book me, I looked back on my brief, blissful time with Selena and wondered how I could have ended up in this predicament. Everything had been going so well.
Between being on the road and working on the songs that would become our next album, Entre a Mi Mundo, Selena and I spent as much time as possible together during the early part of 1991. She was busier than ever with promotions, but still cheerful and energetic. That year, her duet with Alvaro Torres, “Buenos Amigos,” became her first number one song. At the same time, Capitol EMI was getting ready to launch us in Mexico.
Despite her intense schedule, Selena and I had continued to see each other on the down low, escaping to restaurants, movie theaters, and anywhere else we could be alone together without word getting back to Abraham.
I had learned a lot about Selena in this time. I knew that she hated to exercise, other than an occasional jog—she definitely wasn’t one of those women who would get up early and work out at the gym. She had few friends, but was close with everyone in her family—especially with her sister Suzette and her little cousin Priscilla, who was just starting middle school. She preferred magazines over books and loved to shop.
Selena and her family were Jehovah’s Witnesses. They seldom talked about their faith with me—or with anyone else, for that matter. I had been raised Catholic and had let my faith lapse; I didn’t know much about Jehovah’s Witnesses and thought it must be some kind of radical religion. Sometimes, though, Selena and her family would talk about religion on the bus, and I realized that they used the same Bible I’d grown up with and understood its teachings much better than I did. They lived according to their deeply held values. This made me start thinking about God and the point of faith in our lives in ways that I never had before.
What struck me about Selena more than anything else during this time, though, was her compassion. Her compassion encompassed her friends, her family, her fans—especially those who were struggling in their lives with illness or poverty—women in crisis, children, and even animals.
I remember one time when we were driving alone together and Selena hit a dove. She wasn’t speeding or anything; Selena and I were just jamming to the radio cranked up loud when a flock of doves shot up from the side of the road and started to fly.
This one little dove was slower than the others. It started flying straight along the road ahead of us, and we came up on that poor bird so fast that we hit it. The windshield popped him right on his tail feathers and then the dove flew off. I swear that for a second I could see that bird’s surprised face as he curved off.
The bird wasn’t hurt, but Selena had to pull the car over to the side of the road, she was crying so hard. She was almost hysterical. “I hit that little bird!” she said, sobbing. “I killed it!”
“No, you didn’t,” I reassured her. I leaned over to hug her, holding her close while she cried. “I saw the bird fly off. It’s going to be fine. You didn’t even hit it that hard.”
Selena sat up again and dried her eyes. “Really? You think the bird is okay?”
“I do,” I said.
At the same time, we both noticed this little streak on the windshield. I knew it couldn’t have been from the bird, but Selena made me clean the windshield before she started driving again. “I just can’t stand to hurt anything,” she explained.
Because I was in the band, Abraham had continued to allow Selena to spend time with me without questioning either of us about it. I’m sure he thought that, at least if Selena was with me, she was still beneath the protective umbrella of her family.
Meanwhile, I was growing ever more uncomfortable with the idea that I was betraying this man who had trusted me. I cared about Abraham on a personal level, yet ever since that fateful trip to Mexico, Selena and I had been dishonest. Now I had been arrested and could very well serve jail time, proving to Abraham that I wasn’t worthy of Selena—even before he knew our relationship had begun!
Standing in that police station in San Antonio, I wondered if my thoughtless, stupid actions of this one night were going to cost me the trust of the one woman who had ever managed to break through my defenses and show me what real love felt like—and destroy any hope I might have had of winning her father’s approval.
The evening had started out well enough. I was at a bar in San Antonio with my cousin and a friend when another friend called and asked if we wanted to meet him somewhere else.
“Sure,” I said, forgetting that I’d already been drinking and probably shouldn’t be going anywhere.
We headed out on the highway in my mom’s Oldsmobile. I was driving about eighty miles an hour—over the speed limit, of course, but in Texas the highways are straight and wide, and that night there was little traffic. We were cruising along, talking and listening to music, when I happened to glance in the rearview mirror and see a police car with its lights on. The cop car was so far behind me that it never occurred to me that I might be the one in his sights.
When I took the exit off highway 90 heading west, the cop came off the ramp behind me. He was coming at me really fast. And then, all of a sudden, there were two police cars coming straight at me, head on. They wheeled around and parked across the road in front of my car to form a barricade. Then the doors swung open and the cops were out of the cars
, aiming shotguns at us.
I jammed on the brakes and pulled over to the side of the road. My friend in the backseat just sat there, terrified. My cousin, who was in the front seat next to me, started yelling and swearing. One of the cops came up to the car, yanked open the door and grabbed him by the hair. The cop pulled him out of the car while another officer helped him throw my cousin down on the ground.
I lost it when I saw that. There were six police officers and just the two of us. They had guns, and we were unarmed. My friend remained where he was, afraid to do anything, but I went ballistic. My cousin had protected me through a lot of things as a kid, and this was patently unfair.
There was a brawl by the side of the road, and of course we lost. Within minutes my cousin and I were in handcuffs and being led to the police cars. They let my friend go.
“Run, don’t walk,” one of the cops advised him. “Do not even turn around.”
My friend took off down the highway. In the police car, I tried to calm down my cousin, who was swearing and kicking the seat.
They took us to the police station and booked us. Our clothes were torn, and we were muddy and bruised. Things looked bad for us all around. The police had reported that their car had been right behind us with its lights on, and that they’d seen me turn around, see the lights, then gun the car and initiate a high-speed chase. None of that was true, but I could see that it was going to be very difficult to defend myself. It was going to be my word against theirs.
So here I was, standing in line with the other criminals in a big room waiting to get my mug shot and fingerprints done. All I could think about was Selena, who worked so hard to convey the kind of image that would get her family ahead in the music business—respectable, clean, kind, and professional at all times—while I’d done something that could potentially stain the Quintanilla family’s stellar reputation.
Thank God nobody knows about us, I thought. Selena was really starting to get a lot of airtime, especially in Texas, and she had won several Tejano music awards. Plus, she had a “good girl” image to uphold for her Coca-Cola sponsorship. If people linked us together, things really could blow up in a bad way for her and the band.
As I stood there hanging my head and hearing Selena’s mournful, powerful voice fill the air, one of the station guards recognized me—possibly because he was aware of the song on the radio, too. I also stood out in a crowd because not many people wore their hair in a ponytail the way I did, with the sides of my head shaved short.
The guard took me aside and asked, “What happened? What are you doing here?”
When I told him, he helped me make a phone call and get out of processing fast, then told me where the car was impounded.
All I could think about as I left the police station that night was talking to Selena. I called her right away, knowing that she had probably been trying to reach me and was worrying when I was nowhere to be found.
To my relief, Selena reacted calmly. She came down hard on me for drinking and driving, and rightfully so, but she also saw my side of things and thought the police had overreacted.
I decided to wait and tell Abraham in person. As I boarded the bus for our next tour, I said, “Hey, Abraham. I have to talk to you. I got into a situation the other day, and I want you to hear it from me, not from anyone else.”
I was a hundred percent straight with him and told Abraham everything, despite the fact that my head was buzzing because I was so scared. The upshot of the incident was that I was going to have a court date, and then I’d probably be on probation and have to do community service.
Abraham didn’t go off the way I was afraid he would. Instead, he just nodded and said, “Chris, I’m sure everything’s going to be okay. But you’ve got to be careful. We don’t want you getting hurt. Besides, the band has a lot of good things coming up, and you don’t want to miss that.” Then he actually gave me a hug.
Abraham gave great hugs. He opened his arms wide, and you had no choice but to walk right into them. The hug, of course, made me feel worse than ever. I was extremely happy to be forgiven—while at the same time feeling terrible that I was still keeping my relationship with Selena a secret from him.
Selena and I were still seeing each other any chance we got. This meant that I spent a lot of time in Corpus, so that Selena never had to lie—other than by omission. She would announce that she was going out to run some errands, then swing by to pick me up at a hotel and I’d run the errands with her. We went out in her car, which even now makes me shudder, because it would have been so easy to run into someone she knew. Corpus Christi isn’t that big a place, and Selena’s reputation as a singer was spreading fast.
“I don’t even care if somebody sees us,” Selena would say, taking my hand or putting her arms around me even in public, while I was always warily watching over one shoulder.
Then, one morning, she realized just how much of a risk we were taking. I was staying in one of the hotels on the opposite side of the harbor bridge from downtown Corpus, where I always felt like we were safer, because a big body of water lay between the Quintanilla family and me. Selena drove over to meet me, as she usually did.
When we were ready to leave the hotel room, Selena went out first, acting as cool and at ease about the whole situation as ever. She was the sort of person who always loved taking risks. I spent a few extra minutes packing my shoulder bag, tucking away my sunglasses, wallet, and checkbook.
Suddenly Selena bolted back into the room and slammed the door behind her. “Oh no!” she cried. “I forgot that my aunt works here. I think she just saw me coming out of the room!”
“What aunt?” I asked, panicked.
“She’s married to my dad’s brother. It’s really bad if she saw us.”
I had to laugh. “Look at you,” I teased. “Miss ‘I don’t care, I’m so cool.’”
“Shut up!” Selena snapped. “Seriously, Chris. If my aunt sees us, it’s going to be crazy.”
We waited a while, then sneaked out of that hotel Mission: Impossible style. “Guess I’d better cross this place off my list,” I said, once we were safely on the road.
Sometimes Selena and I saw each other when I came to Corpus to work on songs with A.B., too. I really enjoyed working with Selena’s brother. He and I had a few run-ins now and then, but he always gave me a lot of freedom as a guitarist and really encouraged me to develop my own musical style. Maybe we hit it off because he was a talker and I was a listener, and he always had a strong opinion whereas I was pretty easygoing. Who knows? In any case, we developed a strong friendship.
Like me, A.B. had once wanted to be a rock musician, not Tejano. His rock career had come to a screeching halt because Abraham had insisted on forming a family band to play Tejano music. A.B. had no choice but to play songs other people had written that he didn’t like. Finally, he began to write his own songs and record them—eventually winning awards for his songwriting.
Selena found every way she could to tease A.B., especially when he and I were trying to work on some music. She’d come over to A.B.’s house, put her arms around me from behind while I was playing guitar, and give me a hug and a kiss.
“Come on, guys,” A.B. would say. “Right in front of me? Really?”
Not long after my run-in with the San Antonio police, I got into another scrape that probably caused the Quintanilla family to wonder what Selena ever saw in me—and made Selena herself almost call it quits because she was so fed up.
We were working on songs that would become our new album, Entre a Mi Mundo, at a studio in San Antonio, and the band was staying at a local hotel. Since I lived in the city I didn’t stay there, but after the recording session I went to the hotel with the band to celebrate. Late in the evening, I found myself in one of the hotel rooms with two brothers who were members of the road crew and we started drinking heavily.
At one point, the brothers started wrestling, and before long it became a free-for-all among the three of us. It got really crazy in
there; for instance, we weren’t trying to break the door on purpose, but one of us got thrown into it and knocked the door right off its hinges. There were a couple of holes in the wall, too, where one of the brothers threw me over his back and my feet hit the wall.
Being buzzed like that means that you don’t notice what’s happening at the time. I was just pumped up. A friend of mine came by, and I eventually left the hotel with him and went back to my apartment.
Joe, our keyboard player, had been out in San Antonio having a good time somewhere else. He told me later that he came back to that room and plopped down on the bed. When he felt glass on the bedspread, he said, “What the hell?” But by then the two brothers were passed out on the other bed, so he just brushed off the glass and went to sleep. He woke up with a woman standing over him, going down a checklist on a clipboard.
Joe sat up, looked around the room, said, “Oh, shit,” and bailed. He hid in one of the other hotel rooms, knowing what Abraham’s response would be to the room being trashed.
I knew nothing about any of this until later that morning, when Selena came to my apartment. I stumbled over to the door, still half asleep, and opened it when I heard her knocking and shouting my name.
Selena wouldn’t even cross the threshold into my apartment. She was so furious that she just stood right there in the doorway and let me have it. The two members of the road crew had already been fired, she told me. She didn’t know what Abraham and A.B. would do about me. But she didn’t care.
“That’s it!” Selena shouted. “We’re over! I don’t want to be with anybody like this. I can’t believe you! How could you let yourself drink so much and let things get out of control like that?”
There was nothing I could say in my defense. I just listened and watched the woman I loved walk out of my life because I knew that I had done the wrong thing. What the hell was I thinking? Selena was right. I didn’t deserve to be with her.