To Selena, With Love (17 page)

I tried to talk to her about why I liked this group’s music so much, but Selena wouldn’t listen. This was rare for her; usually she was open-minded about being introduced to any kind of new music, no matter what genre.

“I don’t want this CD in the house,” Selena announced.

“Are you serious?” I asked in disbelief.

“Yes,” she said. “You have to get rid of it.”

“But why?”

Selena held the CD at arm’s length, as if it stank. “It’s the cover,” she said. “I hate it. It’s wicked.”

I frowned at the album cover, which had a gray background and “Kiss” printed in tall black letters, with the word “Revenge” written in what was supposed to look like red blood. It might not have been a pretty cover, but it was striking, and there wasn’t anything particularly horrible about it. “I think you’re tripping,” I said.

Somehow, the conversation blew up into a big argument, since I couldn’t believe Selena would be that irrational, and Selena was being as stubborn as always, insisting that I toss that album cover out immediately.

Finally, I said, “All right. Okay, already! I’ll keep the album, but I’ll just take the cover and throw it out! Will you be satisfied then?”

At that, Selena started crying. Not sniffling, either, but sobbing hard and starting to shake. That’s when I knew that our argument wasn’t just about a CD.

“What is it?” I asked gently. “Talk to me.”

Selena tried to speak, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying, she was crying so hard. She had been standing up and leaning against the wall; now she slowly started sliding down to the floor.

What was going on? I had no idea. All I could think to do was grab her and hold her.

I held Selena close for a long time, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
For what, I didn’t know, but I kept saying it over and over again until she calmed down.

More often than I liked, I was caught between Selena and Abraham. Occasionally I got the raw end of the deal, like the time we were returning from playing at the Colorado State Fair.

It was late at night and we knew we had a long drive ahead of us. By then, we had a crew, a security guy, and a driver for the bus. Everything was in place for us to leave except, of course, Selena. I had gone back to the hotel room to check to see if she was ready to leave, but of course she wasn’t.

“Go back in there and get her to come out,” Abraham commanded.

I did as I was told. “Hey, everybody is at the bus waiting for you,” I said.

“Tell Dad to hold his horses. I’ll be there in a few minutes,” Selena said. “Can you carry this bag out for me and send somebody back for the rest of my stuff?”

I returned to the bus—a much nicer one now than our old tour bus, Big Bertha—and informed Abraham that it would be a few minutes yet before Selena was ready, but somebody from the road crew could go collect her bags.

Abraham was standing halfway up the bus steps. The rest of the band and the crew were there as well, just sitting in the front of the bus and watching. Abraham gave me a really nasty look, and I thought,
Oh, man.
Why am I in the middle of this crap? I’ve had enough of this guy. I don’t deserve to be treated this way
.

Out of respect for Selena’s father, though, I held my temper.
I walked past him and everyone else to put some of Selena’s gear in her bunk.

“Where’s Selena?” Abraham snapped. “Why isn’t she out here with the rest of us?”

I worked to keep my voice calm. “I told you. She said that somebody can come out and get her stuff. She’s a grown-up woman, Abraham. She’ll be here when she’s ready.”

Abraham shot the rest of the way up the bus steps, making a lot of noise, and barreled down the hallway toward me. Startled, I took a step back. I had no idea what Abraham was going to do. I didn’t want to hit him, but I wanted to be ready in case he hit me. I stood perfectly still and let him come at me. I could have pushed him or fought him, and believe me, I thought about it.

Then I stopped myself. What was I doing?

Abraham pulled himself together, too. He slammed shut the door to the bunk room so that nobody else could see us, and gave me a hug. “Sorry, son,” he said. “I’m just in a bad mood because I’m in a hurry.”

“It’s cool, it’s cool,” I said, and that was that.

Or so I thought. I have no idea what Abraham told Selena about this incident to save face, but it must have been some version that made me into the bad guy, because she was angry at me for days.

“You need to apologize for what you did to him,” she lectured.

“He’s the one who needed to apologize, and he did!” I argued.

“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.