by Mario Lopez
My mother believed how contrite I truly was and knew that the mistake I owned had already cost me emotionally, spiritually, and now financially. She could have berated me, but by then it was pretty clear that I was doing a good job of that on my own. Mom asked me just to make sure this was what Patty Lynn wanted.
In fact it was and I always would respect her decision. After our ordeal, Patty Lynn seemed more relieved than anything and we came out of it better friends than we had been before. A short time later we went our separate ways without any wrenching breakup or good-bye.
When you’re young and you make a mistake, it can feel like the end of the world. Time does have a way of healing the wounds. We both moved on and life brought other ordeals and other joys. Sometimes I still think about it all and wonder if she had any children, if she’s married now. What if I had married her after all or if she had changed her mind? What would that child be like and how would the rest of my life have been different? In those moments, a chill runs through my body and I try to shake the thought from my head. Patty Lynn made her choice. It was always hers to make. Sure, I could have tried to stop her, but I chose to respect her choice and our mutual decision that we weren’t ready to be parents.
As time has passed and I’ve matured, I have wrestled with the mistake that I made out of arrogance, among other missteps I’ve made over the years, and I’ve spent many a night awake thinking how I could have done things differently. Obviously, I can’t change the fact that I was a reckless, horny kid. I wish it were different. Like everyone else, I’ve struggled with my demons and work toward a better me every day. I will say this: I’ve tried to embrace my responsibilities and have chosen not to be in denial or run away from problems. As someone who was always a gentleman with girls, I know that it was right to leave the choice of how to face an unwanted pregnancy up to her completely, and to be there to support her.
For a few months after Patty Lynn and I broke it off, I decided to try to cool it with girls for a while. But then, wouldn’t you know it, for the first time ever a woman entered my life and I fell seriously in love.
Now I was really in for trouble.
• • •
What is it about me and gorgeous Italian girls? Not to throw out a spoiler or anything, but when everything happened with Monica it was not the first or the last time that I was to fall in love with a beautiful dancer of Italian descent.
“In love?” my cousin Victor teased me. “You know you just fall in lust. It’ll pass.”
“You know how I know?” I remember saying. “Because I don’t care about anything else!”
This was around the time that I was auditioning for Saved by the Bell and it may have had something to do with my not trying too hard on those calls. All I could think about was Monica. Did it matter that I was fifteen and she was nineteen? Not to me, but that’s a significant difference in age. She may as well have been thirty-five for how much more experienced she was than me. Monica was one of my dance teachers at a studio in San Diego, about thirty minutes north of Chula Vista, where I studied off and on. Monica and I casually started messing around, and continued from there. She was definitely a woman, not a girl—with a beautiful dancer’s body, curvy and strong. All real woman.
I was obsessed with everything about her. At nineteen, she was an experienced young woman, she was sexy, she was talented, and she was my dance teacher. Fantasy come true? But acting on it wasn’t a plan. Basically, I had started taking lessons from her a couple of years earlier, long before anything happened. One day, she invited me to a party at her house with various friends and family connected to the studio. We started talking and she knew I had a crush on her. Maybe I grabbed her hand under the table and then we started flirting. Soon after, we were a thing. Once we started, like a drug addict, I couldn’t stop. The sex was unbelievable. We did it everywhere, in the car, in the studio, on the mats that we’d pull out for cushioning.
Certainly, I’d been on the rampaging-hormones craze before. But this was amplified by the conviction that there was no one I was ever going to love as much as Monica. How crazed was I? Just to spend extra time with her, I started ditching school and wrestling practice. Me? The guy who was determined to get my team in contention to compete for the title? Dad suspected trouble and began to send his brother, my uncle Tavo, over to the gym to make sure I had been at school and was at practice.
One day, when I was skipping school, I took my ’65 Mustang—which I had only just gotten licensed to drive—to go see Monica. On the way there, I parked in front of the 7-Eleven, dashed in to buy some mints or something, and then when I got back in the car, Uncle Tavo popped up out of the backseat!
“What are you doing?!” I just about jumped out of my pants.
He told me what was what, that I was going to mess up my life if I kept on this path. But luckily he didn’t tell on me. Not so luckily, I got a speeding ticket coming home from Monica’s house.
Even the cousins started to worry about me. Victor warned, “You gotta get ahold of yourself, man.”
He was right. I was so infatuated with this woman, whatever she’d tell me to do, I would do. If she had asked, I probably would have crawled to her house on all fours. Not that she would have asked. Monica was really a sweetheart. It was almost as if some witch doctor had slipped me a potion.
My mom and dad became concerned at how distracted I was, what with ditching school and practice. That was unlike me. In an attempt to be diplomatic, my parents cautioned me to slow down because, God forbid, I could get Monica pregnant or something bad could happen. Besides, they reminded me about the auditions under way and how a serious relationship could hurt my being cast in general, not to mention that if I still wanted to go to college to wrestle, the fact that my grades were suffering at school could come back to haunt me.
This was the most animated I’d seen my dad become about who I was dating. Of course, throughout my upbringing and even later, my father had very strong opinions about who was and wasn’t trustworthy. Dad never held back from telling me which of my friends, in his words, were a worthless piece of you know what. He had no patience for freeloaders. You couldn’t come over to my house and spend the night more than twice and eat his food more than one day in a row or he’d start putting you to work to earn your keep. In retrospect, I think because of his keen eye for others who tried to pull something over or were phony in any way, I would go on to fine-tune my own instincts for who was a true friend and who was just out for a free ride. In show business, that was going to be especially important—whether it came to agents, managers, and other business representatives or to the usual hangers-on and people who gravitate toward the success of others and try to take advantage. Both of my parents are good judges of character and I like to think they passed that torch to me.
But at this time in my all-consuming passion with Monica, I was in full-on “parents just don’t understand” mode. I didn’t want their judgment, warnings, or interference. The more they showed their concern, the more resentful I became.
Everything came to a head one day when my dad answered the phone as I was about to pick it up, knowing it was Monica calling for me.
Without so much as consulting me, he said, “Hey, I don’t want you calling here anymore. That’s it—my son’s not going to talk to you anymore.” And he hung up.
“Dad!” I bellowed like a wounded animal. “Why did you do that?! What’s your problem?” It was the first time I ever talked back to my dad.
To my father’s credit, he saw instantly that I was really in love with her. “Whoa,” he began, taking his time. “You are serious, aren’t you?” He and I had a man-to-man argument and he conceded that he understood where I was coming from. But in the end, he made it clear that it couldn’t go on. His word was the law.
I was heartbroken, beyond comfort. What could I do? I shed tears, no question, but they were mostly tears of anger. Sad and conflicte
d, I obeyed my father’s edict. But I believed at the time it was cruel and unfair. Now, years later, I see that it was probably the best thing that could have happened. Dad did me a favor. In the state I was in, I quite possibly could have tried to marry Monica, gotten her pregnant, and my career would have stopped short.
Don’t get me wrong—I didn’t take it lying down. I kept seeing her behind their backs until she put a stop to that. I even tried toilet-papering her house, because nothing says “I love you” like draping toilet paper from the trees of your lost lover’s front yard, roof, and down the walls of her house. Any excuse to be near her or to have her attentions, even in negative ways, I’d use. These didn’t ease the pain, not surprisingly. And in the end, although I recovered, part of me would always be filled with remorse—because we never said good-bye, and then I never saw her again.
• • •
Not to put too fine a point on it, but as you now know, when the opportunity came along for me to be cast on a groundbreaking popular TV series at such a tumultuous time in my young life, I really was saved by the bell! The timing was ideal for getting over all that teenage angst and going back to savoring all the opportunities and experiences that my crazy life kept serving up for me.
Saved by the Bell had just finished airing its second season when my high school graduation rolled around in early summer 1991. The Spartans wrestling team had made a name for ourselves in San Diego and on the state level. Individually, I placed among the top wrestlers in the state my two last years of high school, placing seventh overall in the state of California high school rankings my senior year. Not too shabby. In keeping with our local nickname of “Sexy Town,” the Chula Vista High School theme song for senior prom was “I Wanna Sex You Up,” by Color Me Badd.
You think I’m making that up? I laugh just remembering how we all loved that song and how we went nuts dancing to it at prom. And, actually, that song holds up to this day. It’s hot and sexy, and so groovy.
A month before graduation I’d confronted probably the biggest decision of my life until then. Ever since I was ten years old, it was implicit that I was working as a child actor to save money for my future—specifically, that is, for college. My parents couldn’t afford to send me to college without my help. But that was the plan. If I dug into my savings and was able to earn a wrestling scholarship too, I could pay for myself and fulfill the dream of being the first in our family to go to college. Sure enough, I was offered scholarships from a few schools—Arizona State, University of Minnesota, some of the California state schools.
“But you know,” I explained to Mom, “I have a job on TV that I love. What’s the point of quitting to go to college to earn a degree to do something else?”
“You’re right, mijo. You are working. You already have a career, if that’s what you want to do.”
Initially, I resolved to do both: go to college and continue working as an actor. Given the production schedule for SBTB, I could pull that off. And I’m very proud to say that among my top choices, I was accepted to UCLA, Pepperdine, and Loyola Marymount. Wow. That was no small achievement in my eyes. Somehow, between having good grades and the admissions advantage of my Mexican background, I was given a chance to walk through the doors at some of California’s top educational institutions.
At the same time, I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that I was already working in the entertainment industry on a regular series in a role that others could only dream of having. All these years, I’d lived a double life, balancing showbiz with school. Now, suddenly, where once acting had been a means to the end, I began to consider that it was the end—or what I really wanted to do after all.
My parents supported me one hundred percent. As I promised, if acting slowed down, I could always go back to college. But while I was thriving in my field, why not focus on that and see where opportunities led? The plan was to focus on acting for the time being and then later on school—in other words, one thing at a time. As a family, we were seasoned enough to know that a career in entertainment might be short-lived. No one said it at the time but as smart and on the ball as Marissa was, if I didn’t make it to college, she was certainly on her way. And yes, my sister was going to carry that banner as the first in the family to go to college and make us all proud.
Once the decision had been made, I went to work that same summer to shoot our next season for Saved by the Bell. One day on the set during a blocking rehearsal, I looked around and nodded to myself. What was I ever in doubt over? I loved being an actor. Taking nothing for granted, I was going to work harder than ever, harder than anyone I knew. So much would depend on forces outside my control and on how lucky I continued to be. But one thing was clear to me: this was where I was supposed to be all along.
Mom and Dad gave me their full blessing. If I hadn’t still been shooting Saved by the Bell or if the show had ended early for whatever reason, I would have jumped right into college. But trying to do both and do them both well wasn’t a viable plan. So I chose my career and never looked back. And even with many life lessons still to learn, I’m grateful to say that my luck never did run out.
CHAPTER 5
LIFE AFTER A. C. SLATER
When I made the decision to become a serious business investor, I’d just turned nineteen years old and was coming up on my last year of working on Saved by the Bell. This wasn’t the end of the ride necessarily, as there was talk of a series sequel that would move us high school students into our college years. We also could look forward to some fun reunion specials to be shot on location in places like Hawaii and Las Vegas. Not only would those projects extend the SBTB franchise and, thus, the life of A. C. Slater, but also, thanks to an anticipated syndication deal, we’d be earning that many more royalty checks from reruns.
Sweet! Little did I know that Saved by the Bell would come to occupy a rare space in syndication heaven—airing every day, all over the world, in more than 163 countries. And even at this writing, it’s still rerunning, twenty-five years after SBTB debuted as a kids’ show on Saturday mornings! Knowing what I do now, the number one item on my list of things I wish I’d known back then is that I should have negotiated a better contract for these reruns. No lie, I receive residual checks that are worth less than the postage on the envelope they’re mailed in.
At age nineteen, however, I didn’t have that kind of foresight. What I did have was a sense of the hurdles I would face in finding my next viable acting role after the series ended—especially after becoming so recognizable as Slater. Five years of playing the same character can cement those images into the public’s mind and, more to the point, in the minds of producers looking to hire actors. With that starting to weigh on my awareness, I thought it would be smart to put on my business hat and explore possible investment ventures beyond the world of showbiz. After turning eighteen, I had finally been given access to all that money that I’d saved over the years as a child actor. The first move I made was to leave my childhood home in Chula Vista and relocate to Hollywood full-time in my own apartment as a self-supporting actor. After that, it made sense to look for ways that my earnings could go to work for me, even before the series came to a close. Right? And, lo and behold, one of the first opportunities to come along when I was nineteen seemed like a no-brainer.
“Mario, if you’re seriously thinking about investing in a real business, I have a possibility that might interest you . . .” was how the owner of Mr. Crowns, one of the hottest joints in Tijuana, first raised the suggestion.
Back in the 1990s, down in San Diego all of us American kids in our late teens and twenties knew all about Mr. Crowns and the wild, fun-filled nightlife to be found just across the border in Tijuana. Again, crossing the border was nothing back in the decade before September 11, 2001, and the main party destination on the Mexican side was Avenida Revolución. Every single spot on Revolución was a nightclub or bar, all of them featuring crazy drink specials and a young A
merican crowd. There was Rio Rita, Señor Frog’s, Escape, House, and more. Like Bourbon Street in New Orleans, the street’s whole ambience was a crazy youth- and alcohol-driven scene. You’d see all stages of uninhibited partying—from make-out sessions in public to girls throwing up in the streets, even dropping their pants to pee right in the parking lot.
American kids flocked there because the legal drinking age was eighteen, not twenty-one as it is in the States. Actually, a lot of us started going down to Avenida Revolución even earlier, like at fifteen or sixteen. Everyone knew that the doormen weren’t exactly enforcing a strict ID policy. In my opinion, eighteen is too young to drink like that, especially with the combination of drinking and driving. Thankfully, I was never that stupid. Never once in my life did I get behind the wheel of a car when I was drunk, not even a little bit. Never. Unfortunately there were those who did, and as a result that corridor along the Mexico-U.S. border was a dangerous place in the hours between nine p.m. and six a.m. Every now and then, someone did get hit in the road.
For the most part, though, a foray to Revolución was a fun, fun time. Bars didn’t close until six in the morning and the only reason they did was so the staff could clean up and restock. The mentality for many people, not so different from today, was that you could visit another country and become someone else. Tourists would leave their inhibitions, and even their morals, back in the States. Girls were naughty and guys went out of their minds. Imagine how drunk you could get on five-dollar all-you-can-drink beer nights.