by Chris Perez
No single discussion or event sparked Abraham’s anger, but his blood was boiling. Looking back on that day, I’m guessing that he had been obsessing over the possibility that Selena and I were still sneaking around, and he just couldn’t take it anymore.
For whatever reason, as we were driving home from the show, Abraham hit the brakes, pulled the bus over to the side of the road, turned around, and started yelling at me from the driver’s seat. “That’s it! This is over between you and Selena! It stops now. This is not going to happen!”
I glanced out of the window, quickly weighing my options. We had been in a small town just a few miles back; Abraham had at least pulled the bus off the road. I could walk back to that town and call a friend to pick me up if things on the bus got too intolerable.
Still shouting, Abraham was now walking toward me, yelling at both Selena and me about how we’d tried to play him for a fool. “This thing between you and Chris, whatever it is, it’s not going to happen!” he shouted at Selena. “He has nothing to offer you!”
Selena started arguing with him. Meanwhile, I felt caught. I knew that if I reacted the way I really wanted to, by jumping in and shouting to express my own anger at the insults Abraham was hurling in my direction, things could only get worse.
I suddenly felt exhausted, thinking, Really? This has to happen? Why?
It must have looked like I was just passively sitting there, taking everything Abraham threw my way. Finally I got out of my seat and stood next to Selena to show my support.
Abraham glared at me. “You know what you are? You’re like a cancer in my family!”
“Don’t talk to him that way!” Selena yelled. “I love Chris and he loves me!”
“Of course he loves you!” Abraham shouted back. “You’re beautiful and you’re rich!”
They went back and forth while I stood there. I was more hurt than angry that Abraham would say those things. I understood why he was afraid of losing Selena, but he’d known me long enough to know I wasn’t the kind of guy who would be motivated by money.
“If this foolishness continues between you two, I’m going to end this band!” Abraham declared when Selena wouldn’t back down.
I glanced around the bus. I knew that Abraham would never end the band. It meant too much to him. But I saw that everybody else looked pretty freaked out. I felt more exhausted than ever. I just wanted out. I was tired of having these nervous feelings, like I was doing something wrong by falling in love with Selena. I was sick of being around Abraham, who was doing everything possible to make my life miserable.
In the middle of the argument, just like that, I said, “I’m out of here. Screw this. I’ll find my own way home. I don’t want to ride in here anyway.”
“You can’t leave!” Selena cried.
I gave her a quick embrace. “He’s your dad, Selena,” I whispered. “I love you, but this is too much stress for me. I have my family. This is yours.”
She knew I was right. There was nothing else that could happen. Certainly Abraham and I weren’t going to be able to smooth things out by talking. He was too angry and upset for that to happen.
I got off, took a few deep breaths of cool night air, and started walking along the highway as the bus pulled back onto the road with a roar of exhaust.
I had left one of my guitars on the bus when I walked off that night. A few days later, I asked Jesse, a good friend of mine, to get the guitar for me when Selena y Los Dinos played in San Antonio.
Afterward, Jesse told me what happened. As he had searched out the road crew and asked for my guitar, Abraham approached him. Abraham knew that Jesse and Selena were friends, because he had heard a message from Jesse recently on Selena’s phone.
“What do you want to talk to Selena about?” Abraham demanded.
“Girlfriend problems,” Jesse said. This was the truth.
“What about your friend Chris?” Abraham asked. “Is he still seeing Selena?”
“I don’t know,” Jesse said.
“Come on,” Abraham said. “You’re best friends, right? I know Chris tells you everything. Don’t try to bullshit me.”
“What do you have against them being together?” Jesse asked.
Abraham laughed. “Chris has nothing to offer. He’s got no money and no future. He’s just a bum musician.”
“He’s my friend,” Jesse said. “I don’t want to hear you talk that way. And he and Selena love each other.”
“Chris and Selena aren’t going to be together!” Abraham shouted, as Jesse turned away to leave.
Because I was no longer with Los Dinos, Abraham had no way of keeping tabs on me. Selena told me that the band members, though supportive of us as a couple, were frankly relieved that I was off the bus. A.B. had hired back their old guitarist and that was that, or so everyone thought.
I knew that Selena and I were going to stay together. I wasn’t thinking about marriage at that point—Selena and I were still kids—but I definitely knew that I was in love and wanted to be with her.
Back in San Antonio, I continued living in my father’s apartment and playing music. I felt free now to tell everyone about my relationship with Selena and what had happened with her family. It was odd, in a way, to find myself surrounded by people who loved me. I had been immersed in Selena’s family and in Los Dinos for so long that I’d forgotten what it felt like to have so much support. I was reminded of how good my friends and family are.
I started playing music with my friends Rudy and Albert. We managed to land some gigs, and I made decent money. All in all, I was doing fine. More than fine: for me, the pressure was off. I talked to Selena regularly on the phone and we saw each other whenever and however we could. She was still on the road a lot, but that was okay; I was busy working on the weekends and she was, too. We still had our weekdays together.
Freed of that nerve-racking situation with her father and the other members of Los Dinos, I started to enjoy my life again. Selena, though, was still suffering, having to live with the guilt of sneaking around with me behind her father’s back. She was filled with that same nervous energy I’d been feeling before I got out of the band.
Selena had always been a risk taker, but that energy compelled her to do some even crazier things while we were apart. One night, for instance, Selena called to say that she’d hurt herself bungee jumping.
“You did what?” I frowned at the phone receiver, sure I’d heard her wrong.
I hadn’t. Selena had been at a carnival with friends. One of the attractions was a tall platform where you could climb up a ladder, put on a harness attached to a bungee cord, and jump off. Selena had twisted her back in the fall; she even went to see a chiropractor, yet the pain was still acute.
“What the heck were you thinking, doing something that dangerous?” I asked. “What was going through your head to make you want to do that?”
“They dared me,” she said.
I had to laugh. As I’d discovered with Selena, it was a mistake to dare her to do anything, because ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, she would take the dare.
“So how did it feel to do it?” I asked.
“It was pretty scary jumping off and going toward the ground,” she said. “But the really scary part was, just when I was breathing a sigh of relief, the cord pulled me back up and I knew I’d have to come down again. The second time was definitely worse than the first. I will never do that again!”
About a month after leaving Los Dinos, I spent the day in San Antonio with Selena. We went out to eat, did some shopping, and then hung out at my mom’s house. In just the short time I had been with her, I could feel myself opening up, becoming more loving and generous with everyone I knew. I always told my mom and dad that I loved them now, just as Selena did with the people she cared about. I even bought small gifts for people on impulse, because I’d seen how happy those gifts made Selena feel when she bought them—and I’d experienced the joy my friends felt when I remembered them. I never in a million years would
have become a generous person if it hadn’t been for Selena showing me the way.
That particular day, Selena had escaped to see me in San Antonio by explaining to her family that she needed to run some errands and would eat dinner with some girlfriends. I had to push her to leave my mother’s house, finally, because I didn’t want her driving late at night and getting questioned at home.
“Let me take you back to your apartment, at least,” Selena said, wrapping her arms around my waist.
“No, no. I’ll call Jesse to come get me,” I said. “It’s already getting late. Plus I want to be on the phone with you when you’re driving back.”
Selena and I could talk for hours; within a few minutes of Selena leaving, we were deep into our phone conversation. Suddenly, my mother’s doorbell rang. It was after dark. Nobody ever came to my mother’s house this late. Who could it be? I wondered.
I was still on the phone with Selena. “Hang on,” I said and walked over to the window to peer through the blinds.
Abraham’s car was parked out front. I panicked. How had he tracked me down here? Then I remembered that I’d put my mother’s address on the payroll forms when I joined the band.
“Oh my God,” I said to Selena. “Your dad is outside.”
“What?” she shrieked. “What’s he doing there?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to hang up and find out. I’ll call you back,” I promised, and started down the hall, the phone still in my hand.
Clearly, Abraham was here to confront me. Maybe he was even checking to see if Selena was here.
Before I could make it down the hall to the front door, my stepfather opened it. I came around the corner of the hall and saw Pops with the front door slightly open. He had poked his head outside a little.
“Can I help you, sir?” Pops asked in a stern voice.
That’s when I saw that Pops had a gun in his hand. The pistol was older than I was and I’d never seen him use it; he kept that gun around only to scare intruders.
Pops had met Abraham before and knew who he was. He knew what Abraham was doing to Selena and me, too, and he didn’t like it. I guess this was his way of showing his displeasure.
“Hey, Abraham, what’s going on?” I called from behind my stepfather.
Pops turned around and said, “Oh, you know this man?”
“Yeah, Pops,” I said, keeping one eye on the gun. “That’s Abraham, Selena’s dad.”
My stepfather opened the door a little bit wider and moved out of the way. Still, he kept looking Abraham up and down, his face saying, Just try something. Go ahead.
I didn’t like it that my stepfather was carrying a gun. At the same time, I thought it was great that Abraham—a man so used to intimidating others, a man accustomed to having the whole world revolve around him—was seeing that I had friends and family, too.
I didn’t invite Abraham inside. I walked down the front walk toward his car, knowing he’d have to follow me, and said, “What’s up, Abraham?”
“Have you spoken to Selena?” he said.
His voice was surprisingly friendly, but maybe that had something to do with the gun. “No,” I said. “Why?”
I felt terrible for lying. At the same time, I didn’t want to make things harder on Selena than they already were. I wasn’t about to tell Abraham that I’d spent the whole day with his daughter and that he’d missed her by just a few minutes.
“She’s supposed to be home, that’s all,” Abraham said. “I was worried.”
“I’m sure she’ll be home soon,” I said. “You would have heard if something had happened.”
We had reached Abraham’s car, and that’s when I saw the map folded on the front seat in that awkward way maps get folded when people are in a hurry. This guy really had hunted me down. He wasn’t about to give up trying to destroy whatever was between Selena and me. He just had no idea that our love would be such a formidable opponent.
FIVE
A SECRET WEDDING
Courtesy of the author
Selena and I were in a holding pattern for the next couple of months. Her father continued to see me as a threat, she said. Abraham was worried that if Selena was with me, I might pull her out of the band, and all of the work he’d done would “go down the tubes,” as he put it to Selena. He showed no signs of relenting no matter how much Selena argued, begged, or cried.
Then, on April 2, 1992, I woke up in a Corpus Christi hotel room to the sound of someone pounding on the door.
I had seen Selena the night before and spent the night in Corpus because we were out until late. My hotel, the Gulf Beach II on Surfside Boulevard, was on the other side of the harbor bridge from the city, and I usually stayed here whenever I visited Selena. We felt safer and more secluded if we were on the other side of the bridge from her family.
In fact, nobody we hung out with in Corpus ever crossed the bridge much, so I didn’t have to worry about somebody seeing my car and word getting back to Abraham that I was in town. I had the feeling that he probably drove around to every hotel in Corpus Christi, Texas, looking for Selena and me whenever she wasn’t home at sunset. For that reason, she never spent the night with me.
Selena had been valiantly keeping up her performance schedule despite her disagreements with her father—she was a professional, and she knew that her family’s livelihood, as well as her reputation, depended on her showing up to do the gigs Abraham booked for the band. I knew that Selena was due to leave early that morning for a show in El Paso. I didn’t have anyplace to be, so I had decided to sleep in and leave at checkout time.
The pounding on the door continued; I opened my eyes and glared at the hotel alarm clock. It was just after ten o’clock. The hotel maid must be knocking on the door, I decided, thinking I’d checked out.
“No, not right now,” I yelled without getting out of bed. “Come back later. Checkout is at noon.”
The knocking continued, more insistent now. “Come back later!” I shouted again. “Don’t you see the sign on the door?”
More knocking. Grumbling, I got out of bed, yanked on my jeans and looked through the peephole.
It wasn’t the maid. It was Selena.
My first thought was that something must have happened with her father. I fumbled with the lock and got the door open. “What’s the matter? Why aren’t you in El Paso? Don’t you have a show? Did something happen?”
She was crying too hard to answer. I just held her for a while on the bed, feeling her body tremble against mine and trying to coax her to talk about whatever was going on.
Finally, Selena sat up and started telling me that she couldn’t stand to be apart any longer. “I don’t want anybody to be in our way,” she said. “Let’s get married right now.”
Stunned, I just stared at her. “Wait a second. I love you. I want to be with you. You know I want to marry you someday. But why do we have to do it like this, right now?”
“There’s no other way,” she said, and started crying again. “We have to elope.”
I felt all twisted up inside. Half of me knew that she was right, while the other half of me was worried about what she would be giving up to do this. I wanted to marry Selena. But I also understood, from being with her when she saw a wedding scene in a movie, or a picture of a bride, how much Selena had always dreamed about her glorious wedding day. She always talked about what she would do when she planned her own wedding, every detail, right down to the invitations and the cake. If we eloped, that would never happen.
“No, no, no,” I told her. “I don’t want to get married behind everybody’s back. We can figure out a way. It’s just going to take some time for your dad to get used to the idea.”
“He never will,” she said. “You’ve seen how he is!”
I kept resisting. In the back of my mind, I was terrified that if we got married in a hurry without that fairy-tale ceremony, Selena would always regret our relationship. “You’ve always wanted a wedding,” I reminded her, smoothing her hai
r and pulling her closer. “I don’t want to cheat you out of that white gown and the bridesmaids and the flowers. You’ve dreamed about it all your life. You want your family there, all around you. You want your father to walk you down the aisle.”
Selena broke in, stopping me cold. “That’s never going to happen, Chris.”
And when she said that, I believed her. “All right,” I said finally. “There is nothing that would make me happier than to marry you. What do we need to do?”
“We can go to the courthouse and get married,” she said. “We can do that right now. It’s the only way he’ll ever leave us alone, Chris. Then we can be together.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it. Let’s get married.”
I couldn’t believe that those words had come out of my mouth. Married? Me? I was only twenty-two years old! But what else could I do? Selena was right. We loved each other, and there was no way that she and I were ever going to be together unless we were married. Abraham wouldn’t be able to stop us from seeing each other if we were legally husband and wife. I loved the sound of that word, “wife,” as I looked at Selena and repeated, “Come on. Let’s go get married!”
I’ll never forget Selena’s smile when I said that. I could just feel all of the pressure and stress leave her body as she watched me get dressed for the courthouse. I had nothing to wear but a T-shirt and jeans; Selena was wearing a skirt and boots.
“I couldn’t wear my best clothes,” she admitted shyly. “Otherwise my dad would have suspected something was up.”
On our second wedding anniversary, Selena and I started talking about renewing our vows after five years of marriage. We would have a real ceremony then, we promised each other. Selena bought a wedding dress and started cutting out pictures of floral arrangements she liked for our centerpieces at the reception. She even ordered a wedding registry book with a gold metal plate on it. The book had our names embossed on it, along with the date of our wedding: April 2, 1992. She had it all planned out, and it would have been a beautiful ceremony. It almost breaks my heart to think about it now.