by Chris Perez
“You disrespected him, Chris, and he’s my father,” she said. “I can’t let you do that.”
I refused. But Selena gave me the cold shoulder from that moment on, and her will was usually stronger than anybody’s. By the third day, I was sick of the whole stupid argument. I realized that it wouldn’t cost me that much to apologize—and it would make Selena happy.
So I went up to Abraham and said, “I’m sorry for the other night. I shouldn’t have gone there. Nothing like that should have happened between us.” I deliberately left the apology vague because, although I was definitely sorry that things had gotten to that point between us, I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong.
Abraham, though, got this maddening little smirk on his face, as if he thought he’d won somehow. Then he opened his arms and gave me one of his famous hugs.
Another time, an argument started up between Selena and her dad in the kitchen while I was in the living room. He had just stopped by, unannounced, the way he loved to do, and the three of us had been hanging out. It was a relaxing evening. Then Abraham must have started in on Selena about something or somebody in our lives, the way he often did.
Things started quietly, as a discussion—I could hear them talking in the kitchen because the apartment was such an open space—but rapidly escalated into another full-blown argument. If Selena made up her mind about something, it was very hard to get her to change it. And, once Abraham didn’t like something, he would do everything in his power to try to force people to do things his way, so interactions between them could get pretty intense. Often it really scared me when they started arguing.
“You can’t always tell me what to do!” Selena cried, and that’s when I decided that I needed to intervene.
I went into the kitchen and saw that Selena had lost it. She was trying to talk, but she was crying so hard that she couldn’t take a breath. “What’s going on here?” I asked, looking from Selena to her father.
Abraham turned and looked at me. “What are you doing to her?” he shouted.
“What are you talking about? This is all you, right here,” I said.
Selena sank down to the floor and folded into herself, still sobbing. I went over to her and held her, putting her head on my chest and rocking her as if she were a small child as Abraham left and shut the door behind him.
Abraham and I continued to have these uncomfortable power struggles. Most of the tension between us was the result of incidents where I had to run interference and support Selena when she and her father were butting heads. Luckily, despite the fact that Abraham had tried in every way conceivable to keep us apart, once we were married, Abraham was old-school enough to honor me as Selena’s husband. I think that he genuinely respected me, too, because I generally spoke my mind but was polite while doing it. I kept thinking that, as time went on, Abraham would learn to pick his battles, but that wasn’t really in his nature. It wasn’t in Selena’s, either.
Once, for instance, the three of us—Abraham, Selena, and myself—went to the Hard Rock Cafe’s grand opening in San Antonio. Selena was having a great time—she even went up and sang a song with the band Cheap Trick. After a while, though, Abraham was tired and wanted to leave.
“I’m ready to go now,” he announced to Selena. “Enough fun. It’s getting late.”
“I don’t want to leave yet,” she said, and went off to find me. “My dad keeps telling me he wants to leave. Are you okay with it if we stay a little longer?”
“Yeah, I’m cool,” I said.
“Good,” Selena said, and went back to the stage.
Within minutes, Abraham had sought me out in the crowd and was standing in front of me, shaking his finger in that way he had. “You need to tell Selena that it’s time to go,” he said.
Of course, Abraham had always been the absolute authority in his family, so he believed that I must hold the same status in mine. He still didn’t understand the egalitarian nature of my marriage with Selena.
“I’m sorry, Abraham,” I said. “She doesn’t want to go yet. We’re going to stay.”
He just shook his head in disgust and stalked off.
Another time, we were all eating in a restaurant after a show when a fan approached the table. I was sitting at one end with Selena. Most of the band members were present with their girlfriends or wives; Abraham was seated at the far end of the table.
The fan suddenly tossed a piece of paper between Selena and me. “Sign this!” the woman demanded.
Selena spun around. “I’m sorry, can you please wait until we’re done eating?” she said. “Then I’ll be happy to sign it.” She turned her back on the woman and the fan left us, fuming under her breath.
This angered Abraham. “Why did you have to be so rude to that woman?” he demanded.
“She was rude first!” Selena said, equally infuriated. “How is it that somebody can just come up while I’m eating and toss something at me and you think that’s perfectly okay?”
The argument continued to rage between them all through dinner, and even after we were back on the bus. Finally, I had no choice but to intervene.
“Look, man,” I told Abraham. “Selena has every right to have a little peace and quiet to eat her dinner, just like the rest of us. There have to be some boundaries or she’s going to burn out.”
Abraham backed down, then, in a way he never would have done if it had been Selena telling him the same thing.
Despite these family quarrels, Selena and I were happier than we had ever been. I would come home from running errands and often find Selena cleaning or cooking. She loved playing her new role as wife. She was good at it, too. She even learned how to make a recipe for black-tipped shark that immediately became my favorite meal ever. I still don’t know what ingredients she used to marinate that shark, but it was better than anything I’d ever tasted.
When we weren’t on the road, Selena and I reveled in each other and in our new life. On some weekends, we went to San Antonio to visit my family and friends. Selena fit in right away with my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles. She might have even been a little more outgoing with my family than with her own. Nobody saw her as a superstar, because she wasn’t, not yet. Selena also had this thing about her that made people feel comfortable, no matter how famous she got—that was true from the first day I met her, and it was true until the day she died.
My family saw Selena as a normal, happily married young woman who loved to hang out in the backyard for a barbecue, toss a football, or lounge in a tire swing hanging from a tree. Then she’d get all dressed up and we’d go to a club, where she’d get onstage and have all of these people tripping out on that same person. It never failed to amaze me how Selena could cross between those two worlds without missing a beat.
Selena really knew how to have a good time, too. I remember showing up at my cousin Kenny’s house in San Antonio one time, and walking in with Selena just as my cousins were mixing drinks that looked like creamy orange juice.
“What is that stuff?” I asked.
“Oh, you don’t want any of this, this is for big boys only,” Kenny said, waving his glass high in the air.
“What’s it called?” Selena asked.
“A Salty Dog,” Kenny’s wife said.
Selena and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. “Let me try it,” I said.
“I want to try it, too!” Selena insisted.
After a couple of Salty Dogs, Selena was the life of the party, sitting on the edge of Kenny’s sofa and telling jokes with a bucket on top of her head. I don’t know what she was doing, but she was being a goofball and making everybody laugh.
Because Selena was a Jehovah’s Witness, she had never celebrated Christmas. Truthfully, I seldom did, either, because the band usually played on holidays. The first year we were married, however, the band was free on Christmas, and I took Selena home to my mom’s house for the holiday.
My family had all bought Selena Christmas gifts, even though I�
��d told them that she didn’t observe the holiday. Out of respect for Selena, they piled the gifts in my mom’s room instead of putting them under the Christmas tree.
When I took Selena in there, she was floored. My family does it up big on Christmas. The bed was covered with brightly wrapped presents, all for her. Selena had never been part of a family Christmas celebration before and she loved it. Her religion was a serious subject to her, and a private one, too—one of the few subjects Selena never felt comfortable talking about to the media. That day she went wild, though, just ripping into those presents and enjoying herself like any excited little kid on Christmas. It was a joy for me to watch her.
Whenever Selena and I weren’t visiting friends and family, we loved staying home to cook, putter, and watch TV. We fully enjoyed experiencing what we’d never had before: an open, loving relationship that we could share with the world, even holding hands on the street if we felt like it. Our love felt fresh again because we no longer had to tiptoe around and hide how we felt about each other.
It seemed that, despite Abraham flinging every possible obstacle in our path, we might be able to live happily ever after, even without Selena’s fairy-tale wedding.
NINE
A HOUSE OF OUR OWN (SORT OF)
AND OUR PRACTICE FAMILY
Courtesy of Carmen M. Cadena
“That winter was so cold in Lake Jackson that my baby pigs died,” Selena said. “But my mom brought them back to life.”
I laughed. “You’re not serious.”
Selena was telling me this story as we walked around a mall in San Antonio. We were headed for her favorite store—the pet store—and she was telling me about having a pet chicken and pet piglets as a little kid. I loved her stories, because I’d never had a pet as a child.
“She did, really!” Selena said. “The pigs were dead and I was crying, so my mom decided to bring the pigs into the kitchen. We turned the oven on low and laid the piglets out on the oven door.”
“That couldn’t possibly work,” I said, taking delight in my wife’s brown eyes, which were dancing at the memory of her mother’s heroics.
Selena grew solemn all of a sudden. “Those piggies warmed right up and walked again,” she promised, and then started giggling.
Selena was an animal lover, and so was I. Maybe that’s why, as soon as we had a house of our own, we started our practice family. Or maybe it was just because Selena loved to buy things on impulse.
The house had been the subject of many late-night debates between us. Around the time Selena’s lease on her apartment was due to be renewed, Abraham announced that he was making an offer on a house in his neighborhood—a house on Bloomington Street with a yard that connected to his own. A.B. already lived next door to Abraham, on the other side; if we moved in, the entire Quintanilla family would live in three adjoining houses.
“Uh-uh. No way am I going to live next to my father,” Selena announced.
I had some doubts about living that close to Abraham, too, given his strong will and his temper. At the same time, I respected the man as both a manager and Selena’s father, and I didn’t usually feel like he could railroad me; we had developed a mutual respect, and occasionally Abraham called me “son.”
By now, I had a better understanding of the Quintanilla family’s dynamics. I knew how vitally important family was to them. Selena and her family members could really make each other angry to the nth degree, but eventually their disagreements usually blew over and things would be fine. They had worked hard to build their lives together. I didn’t want to just come in and say, Okay, we’re married, now we’re going to get as far away as we can. That wasn’t my style. I wasn’t afraid of getting lost or railroaded if we lived next to Abraham. I had a strong sense of self even at that age.
Plus, there was a certain logic to us all living nearby, since we spent so many hours working together on music. Not only that, Abraham was generously going to buy the house himself and let Selena and me live in it rent-free.
“If we do this, we could save up for a house,” I pointed out to her. “And we see your family all the time on the road anyway. What’s the difference?”
“The difference is that they’d be right next door,” Selena argued. “If we had friends come over or any kind of get-together, you know my dad is going to want to be there.”
“Well, we’d probably invite him anyway,” I said. “We usually do. Look, I’m cool with the idea. You know that I’m fine with being around your family. You decide. Either way is fine with me. We can always live in San Antonio if you want more distance.”
My family and friends were all in San Antonio, but Selena’s family was all in Corpus. In the end, she decided that it made sense to accept her father’s offer. “That way we can take our time and maybe even build a house we really like,” she said.
So, within three months of being married, Selena and I had our own house. After painting it, tearing up the carpets, and putting in new floors, Selena and I went to a furniture store in Corpus to buy a few things. That’s when she spotted a headboard that was also a huge aquarium and declared that she had to have it. It was Plexiglas, eighteen inches high, with a black border all around it.
“It’s completely art deco,” Selena said. “It’ll be perfect with our black carpet and black sofa.”
I was doubtful. “It doesn’t even have a filter,” I said. “I’d have to build a filtration system into it. And if you want a saltwater aquarium, well, that’s a lot of maintenance.”
“Come on, please?” Selena said. “It would look really cool in our bedroom.”
I couldn’t ever say no to her when Selena turned her big brown eyes on me and made that sad puppy face. I started buying books on saltwater aquariums and figuring out how to build the filtration system. It was a lot of work, but eventually I managed to slit the aquarium in a way that allowed me to insert a PVC pipe into it and mount it to a pump. For a while we had a beautiful aquarium with no fish in it at all, because I had to keep adjusting the filter and making sure the water stayed clear and had the right levels of salt.
Meanwhile, Selena was poring through books on saltwater fish and exclaiming over their colors and shapes. They weren’t cheap fish, and I knew that keeping them healthy would be a big job. But we were both really excited when the day finally came that we could add fish. And the aquarium was, as Selena had predicted, the perfect addition to our bedroom, a moving work of art.
But why stop there? With Selena, more was often better. One day, I came home and she said, “Look what I bought!”
It was another aquarium. This one was octagonal and taller than I was. It had a black base about a foot tall, and another black piece with a clock set into it. Luckily, this aquarium came with all of the necessary filtration equipment, but I still had to put it together. It was worth it, though, because Selena loved those fish so much.
Now, as we walked to the pet store, Selena spotted a pen full of puppies outside the door. Immediately she ran over to it and put her fingers in, letting the dogs lick her and nip at her fingers. She was nearly bouncing up and down with delight, making me smile as I watched her.
They were cute puppies, to be sure: fuzzy, lively little Pomeranians tumbling all over each other in their nest of newspaper shavings. Most were tan and white. They were sweet looking, but Selena was captivated by the only black puppy in the litter. “Look at this one!” she squealed. “Doesn’t she look just like a little bear? I really want her!”
What would we do with a dog while we were on the road? Still, I could never deny Selena anything. “Let’s check her out,” I suggested.
There was a room in the back where customers could sit and play with dogs they were considering buying. A store clerk led us back there and talked to us about the pros and cons of Pomeranians as pets, and the particulars about this puppy’s birth date and vaccinations. She might as well have been singing opera. Neither of us was listening. Selena was down on the floor, rolling around with the dog, a
nd I knew the deal was done.
We acted like parents with a newborn, buying every possible accessory for that puppy. We named her Pebbles and took her on the road with us until she was old enough to stay home with our housekeeper whenever we were gone.
Pebbles became queen of our house. She also started our dog collection.
A few months after getting her, my friend Jesse came to Corpus to visit. He and I went shopping at another mall and happened to walk past a pet store. I glanced in the window and spotted four Siberian husky puppies. One of them had incredible markings on his face, including a black cross straight up and down his nose and across his eyes.
“That’s a cool-looking dog,” I said, reaching down to pat him.
“Why don’t you get him?” Jesse asked.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, but I wasn’t serious.
When I got home later, I started showing Selena the clothes I’d bought at the mall.
“Did you see anything else you liked there?” she asked.
“Hey, tell her about the dog,” Jesse said.
“Oh, yeah, we saw a cute husky puppy. Really cool looking,” I told her, and described the dog’s markings.
Right away, Selena said, “Let’s go see him. Can we go back there and see him?”
I laughed because she was so excited. “Another dog? Pebbles would kill us.”
“Come on,” she pleaded. “I really want to see that puppy. Let’s go back there and check him out.”
Oh, man, here we go, I thought, but I drove us all back to the pet store anyway. I gave Selena a little speech on the way there. “We’re just going to look at the puppies,” I reminded her. “We’ve already got Pebbles. Now don’t freak out and all of a sudden want to buy him. Don’t get carried away.”
“Okay,” she said. “I promise.”
As soon as we got to the pet store, though, Selena went crazy. “Which one is it? Is that him right there?”
She ran over to the cage and picked up the puppy with the black face markings, holding him close. “Oh my God, I love him. Let’s bring him home. Can we?”