To Selena, With Love (4 page)

Later, after I joined Los Dinos and got to know everyone, I realized that A.B. was like the Wizard of Oz: he was behind the curtain, working the lights and levers, but in truth everyone in that band had enormous talent. It was a magical alchemy when they were all together. Until that time, though, the coolest thing I could imagine was to meet A.B. and ask him how he did what he did.

Amazingly, only a few months after first hearing
Preciosa
, I had my chance. We were in rehearsal one day when Shelly mentioned that Selena was playing in San Antonio that night. “We should go check her out,” she suggested.

“Sure,” I said, but I was in the middle of a song and didn’t really think much about it. When I’m playing music, that’s it—I’m focused on playing music and doing nothing else.

Toward the end of the day, however, the door to the studio opened and in came A.B. with several members of Los Dinos. They chatted with Shelly and her father. I wanted to join them, but I apologized and said that I was still wrapping things up with the band.

“Hey, no problem,” A.B. said. “Don’t mind us. We’ll just watch. Y’all keep on playing.”

I didn’t know it then, but A.B. had actually come by the studio deliberately to scout me out. He was looking for a guitar player who
could not only play traditional Tejano music, but help the band start covering more commercial rock and pop songs because their goal was to make a more mainstream English-language album one day.

I had been working that afternoon on a Pat Benatar song with Shelly’s band. Now, with A.B. and his band members watching, we started the song again from the beginning.

After rehearsal, A.B. invited us to come hear Selena y Los Dinos play in the city, and that was the first time I saw Selena up onstage doing her thing. I didn’t pay much attention to the singer. I was too busy watching A.B. and Los Dinos playing behind her and thinking, “They sound even better live!”

There were some other Tejano groups playing that night after Selena y Los Dinos, but they didn’t interest me much. I went outside after a bit to get some fresh air and hang out with a group of friends. When I saw A.B. walking toward us, I broke away from the group and went to meet him.

“How did you like it?” he asked.

“It was incredible,” I said.

And that’s when A.B. told me that he had come by our rehearsal earlier that day specifically to see me on guitar. “I wanted to see if what I’d heard about your playing was true,” he said.

“And?”

“I really liked what I heard.”

I nodded, thanking him for the compliment, but I still didn’t get what was coming until he dropped it on me: “What would you think about playing with Los Dinos?” he asked.

“I’d definitely be interested,” I said. My heart was pounding hard; already I was imagining how much I could learn from playing music with someone as experienced and talented as A.B. seemed to be.

“Good,” A.B. said. He scrawled his phone number on a piece of paper and handed it to me.

I was more than interested in joining Los Dinos—I was excited. But I had just started working with my friends Albert and Rudy in a new band, and I was conflicted about abandoning our project and being disloyal. I also knew that joining Los Dinos would mean staying with Tejano music instead of pursuing my dream of becoming a rock guitarist. Is that what I really wanted?

It was, I decided. I knew that I’d be playing at a whole new level if I could be with a group as sophisticated and hip sounding as Los Dinos.

A couple of days later, A.B. called and said, “Hey, do you want the gig with Los Dinos or not? We need you right now.”

“I do,” I hedged, “but I need to work some things out with the band I’m in now first.”

The next day, I told Rudy about A.B.’s offer and how torn I was.

“What? He asked you to join Los Dinos?” Rudy said.

I nodded.

“Dude, what are you still doing with us, then?” Rudy asked.

“You mean if he’d asked you, you would have just jumped ship and left us?” I said, laughing.

“I’d already be gone,” Rudy promised.

The next morning, I called A.B. and joined Los Dinos. That phone call set the course of my life in ways I never could have predicted.

But I guess that’s always true in life, isn’t it? You never know which decisions you make are going to be the big ones—even when they’re as seemingly small as deciding to play a musical instrument or who to sit next to on a plane.

Courtesy of Tommie Rodriguez

A
bout a month after our trip to Acapulco, Selena and I were talking alone in the darkened bunk area of the tour bus. I was lying in my bed, one of the upper bunks, and she was standing next to me, her elbow on the bunk. She was close enough for me to lean over and kiss her.

Suddenly, the door separating the bunks from the lounge area slapped open, making us both jump. Her father, Abraham, was supposed to be driving the bus. Instead, here he was, looming in the doorway and glaring at us.

Abraham didn’t say a word. He looked at Selena, she looked at him, and then he walked on through the bunk area to the back of the bus.

Later, she told me that he asked her what we’d been doing. “Nothing,” she had told him. “We were just talking.”

“It didn’t look like nothing,” he said. “You don’t want to make people think that something’s going on between you and Chris.”

Selena apologized and Abraham never said anything to me about it. To him, I was still a cool guy, a friend of the whole family. He thought that he could trust me with his daughter.

What he didn’t know was that our feelings for each other had begun to build after that trip to Mexico, despite the constant scrutiny of Selena’s parents and the other band members within the close quarters of the tour bus.

I hadn’t meant for any of this to happen. As I boarded the tour bus for the first time after our trip to Acapulco, I had firmly reminded myself that becoming involved with Selena would bring nothing but trouble to both of us—and to Los Dinos as well. I was resolved not to let that happen.

The minute her luminous dark eyes met mine, however, I felt my defenses melt away. From then on, I decided to be open to anything that happened. My feelings for Selena were so overwhelming that I knew I had to give our relationship a one hundred percent chance.

Selena clearly felt the same way. Just as it had felt so natural to sit beside her on the plane from Mexico and hold hands while we talked, it felt natural now for us to spend as much time together as we could.

Before that trip to Mexico, I had kept a professional distance from her. Onstage, Selena sang up front while I was off in my own world, playing guitar and adjusting to this whole new life. Offstage, I saw her only with her family and other members of the band. Between gigs, I often stayed with A.B. when we were rehearsing or playing in Corpus, and sometimes Selena might join us to watch TV or talk for a little while, but that was it.

And that was the way it should be, I had thought during that first year I was with Los Dinos. Even if there had been sparks, I would have stomped them out because I knew that nothing could happen between us. I didn’t want to jeopardize my job. I had a
girlfriend in San Antonio. The last thing I needed was for some rumor to start up about us seeing each other.

At the very least, I knew that the Quintanilla family was tight, and Selena’s father, Abraham—whom I liked and respected, and often kept company up front in the tour bus while he was driving—would feel furious and betrayed if he thought somebody in the band had the nerve to hit on his daughter.

That’s why I had worked at maintaining distance from Selena and tried to think of her as a little sister. The only time I had ever wavered from this stance was a pure accident.

I was in Corpus with A.B. We were driving back from somewhere, and as we turned onto A.B.’s street, we saw a limo parked in front of his parents’ house. The limo was for Suzette, Selena, and a group of their friends; they were all going together to a Garth Brooks concert. This was a big night for them and they were all dressed up.

Well, as we came around the corner, I spotted a woman with curly dark hair and an incredible body leaning into the window of the limo. I couldn’t see her face.

“Oh, man, who’s that?” I said to A.B.

A.B. started cracking up. “That’s Selena, stupid,” he said.

Of course, even if I had wanted to get closer to Selena, it would have been difficult. Abraham and Marcella, Selena’s mother, were extremely protective of her. They had to be. On the Tejano music scene, stories were always flying about women entertainers getting stage time because they’d slept with so-and-so. It was important for Abraham to present his band, and especially his youngest daughter, as chaste and pure, no matter what costumes she wore onstage or how much makeup she wore.

Selena was therefore never without a chaperone. She and Suzette slept in their parents’ hotel room when we were on the road, and Selena’s parents accompanied her if she wasn’t onstage, unless they sent A.B. or Suzette to chaperone her instead.

Even on the bus, Selena often sat in the back with her mother. Marcella and Selena could sit on the sofa back there and talk for hours. Sometimes Selena would lie with her head on her mom’s lap, while Marcella played with Selena’s hair or massaged her scalp. I’d walk back there sometimes and Selena would have this glazed look, like a cat. She was always Marcella’s beloved baby girl.

After that fateful trip to Mexico, though, Selena and I started seeing each other secretly. Sometimes we’d just slip off to take a walk before one of the shows, or we might see a movie together or grab a bite to eat if we had a few hours to kill on the road. Abraham seemed cool with this; perhaps he thought it was natural for Selena and me to have a lot to talk about, since we were the youngest members of the band, and I’m sure he thought that Selena was safer in my company than she would have been out on the street by herself.

Meanwhile, Selena and I agreed that letting as few people as possible know about our feelings for one another was the best course of action, because then there would be less chance of anyone trying to tell us to put the brakes on. I didn’t even let my closest friends in San Antonio know what was going on.

And, in a way, nothing really
was
going on, at least not physically. Onstage, it was business as usual. It was easy to act natural together despite our heightened awareness of one another, because Selena and I were so accustomed to playing together at that point. Offstage, we were always surrounded by her family, her fans, and
the other band members. By the time I joined Los Dinos, the band also included keyboardist and songwriter Ricky Vela, and vocalist and songwriter Pete Astudillio. Pete was a Tejano star in his own right, whose duet with Selena in 1989, “Amame, Quiéreme,” was nominated for Vocal Duo of the Year at the Tejano Music Awards soon after I joined the band.

Even though Selena and I were rarely alone, however, our feelings for each other rapidly grew and were soon so intense that I could almost imagine the air crackling with electricity whenever Selena walked into the room. We never touched, and yet I felt that something connected us—a force stronger than either of us.