To Selena, With Love (20 page)

Selena went straight to bed that night, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about Bugsy. Instead, I lied. In the morning, I said, “Hey, I think Bugsy got out of his cage.”

“What, really?” she asked.

“Yeah, well, he’s not in his cage anymore,” I said. I just didn’t have the heart to tell her.

Selena grew increasingly comfortable having the python in the house, and even watched me feed it mice from time to time. She had no trouble showing the snake to friends and telling them everything she knew about pythons. She’d act like the queen of snakes sometimes, even sticking her hand in the aquarium to touch the snake’s muscled back like she had no problem at all with reptiles.

One time, however, we went out on tour and came back to find the snake gone. Usually we’d get dropped off by the bus early in the morning after a show the night before. I’d wake Selena and she would just sit up, walk out of the bus, and go straight to bed, where she’d pull the covers up and go right back to sleep.

Meanwhile, I would check the house, turning the lights on in each room to look around and make sure everything was okay. When I reached the room where we kept the snake, I realized that all was not as I’d left it. We always kept that door shut on the off chance the python escaped, but the door was wide-open.

“Shoot,” I said, and went straight to the aquarium. Sure enough, it was empty.

I looked all over for the snake. Finally I went into the bedroom and said, “Hey, Selena?” I shook her shoulder a little to wake her. “I’m going to tell you something, but don’t freak out.”

“What?” she mumbled.

“The snake isn’t in the aquarium.”

She sat right up. “What?”

I repeated it. “I looked everywhere.”

Selena climbed out of bed and we started combing through the
house. She was a little jumpy now, because we didn’t know where that snake might pop out from; even though it was almost four feet long, I knew the python could fit in a pretty small hole.

A few days went by. Finally, one morning I was outside with the dogs when all of a sudden I heard Selena screaming my name hysterically. “Chris! Chris, get in here!”

I ran inside and found Selena standing on top of the bed, jumping up and down and yelling. We had a king-size mattress; beneath it were two box springs pushed together.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked, panting.

Then I saw it: the snake’s head was poking out from between those two box springs. That poor python looked just as terrified as Selena, and I started laughing.

“It’s not funny!” Selena said.

“It’s okay, I got him,” I said. “You’re fine.”

Nothing I said could coax Selena off that bed. Finally I separated the mattresses enough to reach in and pull the snake out, talking gently to it the whole time, knowing that the poor thing probably couldn’t even hear me over my wife’s screams.

Finally, when Selena calmed down and the snake was safely stowed in its aquarium, I said, “I thought you weren’t afraid of snakes. Or was that all just big talk?”

“Shut up,” she said. “You know how I am.”

“I do,” I said, and kissed her.

Courtesy of Ernest “Choco” Garza

T
he front door slammed so hard that the walls shook. I had been playing guitar, trying to work something out. Now I looked up. “Selena?” I called.

She stormed into the house but walked right past me without saying a word, her face dark with anger, her hair flying, muttering something I couldn’t quite catch.

“Selena?” I followed her into the bedroom, where I found her just sitting there, her hands balled into fists, tears streaming down her face. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“We have to move,” she announced. “I don’t want to be here anymore. I can’t stay in this house!”

“Why not?”

“It’s my dad,” Selena said miserably. “We need our own space, Chris. We need to be on our own. Really on our own!”

I knew what she meant. We had been living in the house next door to Selena’s parents for almost a year, and we often felt like we were being watched. The entire Quintanilla family was still living in the same modest Corpus Christi neighborhood; Abraham and Marcella in one house, A.B. with his wife and kids in another; and
Selena and me in the third. Now it looked like Selena had gotten into another argument with Abraham. Most likely it had been about the boutique that she wanted to open.

Whenever Selena tried to discuss her desire to get into the fashion business, Abraham’s standard response was to try to talk her out of it. “What do you want to do that for?” he’d say. “That’s a crazy idea. You’re making plenty of money and you don’t have enough time as it is. Why don’t you just sit back and enjoy life?”

I could see Abraham’s point. It was true that the band was making considerably more money now than we ever had before. Selena and I were comfortable financially. I earned a good salary as a guitarist under the umbrella of Los Dinos, and Selena and her family were commanding more money than ever for live shows.

While some people accused Abraham of controlling Selena and her money, that simply wasn’t true. Whatever Selena and the band earned, Abraham would first take care of the payroll. Then the family split whatever was left in four equal parts. They divided the money from the Coca-Cola sponsorship as well, with the family splitting the first three payments in a year three ways and Selena keeping the fourth.

Opening fashion boutiques probably wouldn’t add much to Selena’s income, at least not at first, and getting this kind of business up and running would be extremely time-consuming. On the other hand, living with Selena had shown me firsthand that she was an incredibly hard worker, and I knew how much she wanted to do this. Her family didn’t fully grasp how badly Selena needed to do something just for herself.

The longer I knew and loved Selena, the clearer it became that she loved me in part because I accepted her completely. No matter
what she wanted to try—whether it was something as small as wanting that aquarium headboard or a new dog, or a plan as complex as starting a fashion business on top of her musical career—I loved Selena for who she was, and never put up the kind of resistance she often felt from her family and even from certain friends.

Selena was creative and she could be exceedingly impulsive, but no matter what ideas she expressed to me, I was never negative—I’d had enough negativity in my own family when I first tried to become a rock guitarist, so I knew how bad that could feel. Instead, she and I would talk things through in an attempt to encourage Selena to be less impulsive, do a little planning, and articulate her vision clearly enough so that she could see whether her idea was workable or not. Her dreams were my dreams. If something was important to Selena, it was important to me, too. That’s how much I loved her.

Selena was quick to appreciate this about me, too. “Thank you, Chris,” she’d say, whenever I supported her position on something. “Thank you for helping me.”

Now, Selena brought the newspaper into the kitchen, where I watched her comb through the classified ads and circle various houses for rent.

“You really want to move this time?” I asked. We had been down this road together before, usually after similar family arguments.

“Oh, I really do,” Selena said. “We need to get out of here.”

Without much more discussion, we got in the car and started driving around, even pulling into the driveways of houses at the addresses she’d circled. Afterward, Selena made some phone calls, but that was the end of it. I’m sure part of the reason she dropped the idea was that it would be a lot of work to move, and she was
usually exhausted just from her recording and performance obligations. But Selena wasn’t ready yet to put even that much distance between herself and her family.

To me, it didn’t really matter where we lived. What mattered to me was Selena’s happiness. As long as she wanted to live in that neighborhood, and in that house alongside her father and brother, I could be happy there. If Selena ever really wanted to leave, I would be right beside her, helping her every step of the way.

Selena was as supportive of me as I was of her, with one important exception: the time I talked about leaving Los Dinos to pursue my dream of starting a rock band, she shut me down cold.

We were nearly at the pinnacle of our success by 1993, and I loved making a living playing in a Tejano band as successful as Los Dinos. That was my work and I took pride in it. I even developed a certain love and respect for Tejano music. Still, I was a musician before I met Selena, and I had my own taste. I continued to listen to rock music and even introduced Selena to a lot of the bands I liked. A big part of me still longed to play that music.

Selena and I always listened to music on road trips, and she was open-minded. She could appreciate most of my choices, which included everything from Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam to Green Day. We had a sort of unspoken agreement that she would listen to my music if I listened to hers; at the time, her favorite artists were Bonnie Raitt, Whitney Houston, and Janet Jackson. Selena especially loved Jackson’s song “Black Cat,” which Janet wrote for her
Rhythm Nation 1814
album. I can’t even count how many times Selena and I listened to that single.

After we had been married for a few months, I confessed to Selena that I still harbored those desires to play a different kind of music. I had become a fan of Latin rock, and I was listening to a lot of that on my headphones or with her. I thought maybe I could start a Latin rock band and make my own way in that direction.

“I love Tejano music,” I told Selena, “and you know I love playing with Los Dinos. But you have to admit that Tejano music isn’t really geared toward guitar players. I’m just playing the same chords over and over again.”

“That’s not true,” she protested. “A.B. lets you play a lot of things the way you want.”

She was right, but even though I was pushing the boundaries a little bit in the context of Tejano music, I still couldn’t see any way to continue developing as a guitar player if I restricted myself to this genre. The music just wasn’t challenging enough and I was feeling stifled, I told her.