To Selena, With Love (2 page)

Not long after I started having those thoughts, I got a phone call from my good friend Carlos. He was one of the few people I told about being in love with Selena back when she and I had to be so secretive about our relationship. It was a strange phone call at first. Carlos wasn’t saying much, even though he was the one who’d called me. Finally I mentioned that I was thinking about writing a book.

“Man, that’s so weird,” Carlos said.

“Why? What’s going on?” I asked.

“I had a dream about Selena last night. That’s why I called you,” he told me. “I was doing this show with my band in the dream and she came backstage. She was smiling, and she gave me a hug.”

“That all sounds good,” I said.

“Yeah, but the strange part is that at first I couldn’t get any words out in the dream to talk to her,” Carlos said. “Then Selena asked me how you were doing and I lost it. I told her you’ve been having a really hard time lately.”

“Then what did she say?” I was picturing all of this just like it was happening in front of me.

“Selena gave me this big hug,” Carlos said. “She told me not to worry about you. ‘I got him,’ she said, just like that.”

I was quiet for a minute, feeling Selena close to me. Then I said, “I think it’s time I wrote that book.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Selena would want you to do it.”

So here it is: the story of my life with Selena. She deserves to be remembered not only for her beautiful voice and talent as an entertainer, but as a real woman who loved the ordinary everyday things, like walking barefoot in the evening to feel the warmth of the sidewalk on her skin.

Selena loved as hard as she lived. We loved her in return—her family, her friends, her fans, and me, her husband, who felt like the luckiest man alive every time Selena said my name. This book is for her.

Courtesy of Patricia Perez Ratcliff

T
he seat next to me on the plane ride home from Acapulco was empty, but not for long. After a little while, Selena joined me. I had been playing guitar with Selena y Los Dinos for a year by then, but our journey together really began at that moment, as we started sharing our lives and falling in love while defying gravity in the bright blue cloudless sky over Mexico.

We started off with small talk, chatting about music and the trip we had just taken. Selena’s brother, A.B., had treated me and some of the other band members to a vacation in Acapulco in exchange for writing a Coca-Cola jingle for Selena. Selena had started representing Coca-Cola even before I met her; we had written a jingle with a Tejano beat so that the Coke commercial would sound like a Selena song.

“Come to Mexico with us,” A.B. had urged when I hesitated. “It’ll be fun.”

He was right. It was. It was also the trip that changed our lives forever.

Up until this point, Selena and I had always been friendly around each other, but professional. I was closer to her older sister,
Suzette, who played drums in the band and had a warm, wry sense of humor. With Suzette, I was comfortable enough to joke around, but I maintained a certain distance from Selena.

Selena was barely eighteen years old when I first joined her band, but she was already a seasoned professional entertainer. She had just signed with Capitol EMI, which was starting up its Latin division, and had a voice that went right to your heart.

Many singers hit the correct notes in a song. Still, they lack something. I don’t really know how to explain what it is. Maybe they’re singing a song like they’re telling you a story, but they should be asking a question instead. Or they’re growling when they should be purring.

Whatever a song required, Selena could do it all and still bring more. She was smart and picked up lyrics right away. More importantly, though, she had a musical range that went from a deep growl to a high soprano, and she could convey raw emotion with her voice, whether she was singing about love, loss, betrayal, or anger.

When Selena sang, it was always as if she sang directly to you. Everyone who heard her felt that. She had more stage presence and control over a crowd than anyone I’d ever met. It didn’t hurt that she was beautiful and had a figure that could stop traffic.

When my guy friends found out that I was playing with Selena’s band, they always teased me about her looks. The first thing out of their mouths was always something about how fine she was. I can’t count how many times I heard them say, “Man, how lucky are you? You get to stand right behind her in the band and watch it all going on right there in front of your eyes!”

“Yeah, yeah,” I’d say. “But the important thing is that she can
sing
.”

Since joining the band, I hadn’t had the chance to spend time
alone with Selena. We were always in a group, whether we were onstage, on the bus, going out to eat if we were amped up after a show, in the studio, or playing video games.

Still, it didn’t take me long to realize that Selena and I were polar opposites. She was lively and outgoing, and loved being the center of attention. Meanwhile, I quietly observed whatever was going on from the fringes, often just listening to music on my headphones or playing my guitar while everyone else fooled around. It didn’t take Selena long to start joking about me being “too laid-back.”

Sometimes I’d provoke Selena deliberately, just to tease her, and we quickly developed a little comedy routine around this. Selena would start talking while we were together with everyone, and I’d pretend that I wasn’t paying any attention. I’d just keep staring ahead with my headphones on as if I could see right through her.

Selena would come stand right in front of me then and start moving her head from side to side, saying, “Hello? I’m right here!” If I could keep from laughing, she’d act like she was slapping me awake and I’d pretend to be startled. This got a laugh out of her every time.

Selena was always a lot of fun on tour. Besides joking around with me, she would pull pranks on the rest of the band members, challenge us to beat her at video games, or sneak food out of Suzette’s hidden stashes of chips and cookies. It was only in Mexico, though, that Selena was truly free to be herself—and to act like an independent woman instead of everyone’s kid sister.

You didn’t have to be twenty-one to drink in Acapulco, so Selena and I were now able to go barhopping with the rest of the band. She’d stand shoulder to shoulder with me, leaning against me a little and talking excitedly about which restaurant we would go to
that night or what we might do with the others. Once, at dinner, we sat next to each other and I was conscious of her warm thigh pressing against mine. Of course I didn’t complain about that.

On this vacation, beneath the swaying palm trees of Acapulco, I couldn’t help but become increasingly aware of Selena’s physical presence, her body enticing me even though she always wore cover-ups over her bikini. I tried not to stare at her, but I did anyway, watching her out of the corner of my eye when I thought she wasn’t looking. A few times, I had caught her looking at me, too.

When we weren’t on the beach, in the pool, or in the bars, we rented little boats on a cove and sped around. Selena was a daredevil, and she’d get hysterical every time we did this, laughing harder than I’d ever seen her let go. She had a great, contagious laugh, and pretty soon the rest of us would be hysterical, too.

Now that I was sitting so close to Selena on the plane, I was having trouble catching my breath. It was almost unbearable to sit there and not touch her. The air felt charged between us as Selena kept up the conversation, somehow managing to draw me out emotionally. I ended up telling her about how I first started playing music, my parents’ divorce, and my dreams about becoming a rock musician—dreams I had temporarily set aside to play Tejano music.

Finally, Selena leaned a little closer and asked about my girlfriend back in San Antonio.

“She’s fine, I guess,” I answered. “Though I haven’t talked to her since we left for Mexico.”

After we had talked for a little while longer, Selena asked, “Would you look at something for me?” She reached into her purse and pulled out some proofs from a photo shoot she had done recently. “Tell me what you think of these,” she said. “Be honest.”

She handed me the pictures and I flipped through them. For the shoot, she’d dressed in a black bustier top and black tights, and she was standing on a beach. She looked amazing.

“You look incredible,” I said. “You really do.”

At that moment, the plane hit turbulence. I had never flown before this trip to Mexico, so the sudden jolt terrified me. I reacted by grabbing the armrest between our seats.

Selena laughed because I looked so scared. I laughed with her, but I was aware at the same time of feeling the side of her hand brush against mine. I wondered what would happen if I grabbed her hand. I thought it would probably either be a huge mistake—or the best idea ever.

And then we hit another bump, and Selena took my hand. As she assured me that everything would be all right, I forgot all about the turbulence. I probably even forgot that we were on a plane. I was too busy freaking out: I was happy, I was scared, and I didn’t know what to do next. I just sat there with my fingers entwined with hers, hardly able to speak, my heart pounding.

Calm down
, I told myself. Lots of friends hold hands. Selena took mine because I was scared. That’s all it was: friends holding hands.

Selena must have read the emotions playing on my face, because when I dared to turn and look at her again, she said, “Is this okay? Are you cool with this?”

“Sure,” I said. Meanwhile, I was dizzy, breathing in her scent, and inside I was screaming:
Yeah, it’s cool!

We sat there for the rest of the plane ride, talking and holding hands as if that were something we did every day. That was it. But something had changed between us.

When the plane landed, nobody seemed to have noticed anything. Or, if they did, they kept it to themselves. Selena and I hugged good-bye, and we did the same with everyone else. The rest of the band drove back to Corpus, but I went directly to my apartment in San Antonio, my girlfriend at the time, and my life as I knew it.

I was determined to discount everything that had happened on that flight home from Acapulco as a onetime thing. There was no point in getting involved with Selena, I reminded myself, because her protective father would never allow it. At the very least, it wouldn’t be professional behavior on my part. At the very worst, I might lose my job.

However, as the days passed between my return from Acapulco and my next tour with Selena and the band, something started happening to me. I began to think about Selena constantly—her eyes, her lips, her body, her laughter—and feeling anxious to see her again. Part of me hoped that she felt the same way about me—while part of me hoped even more that she didn’t, so that we could stay friends and keep playing music together.