by Chris Perez
I got my guitar and came back into the bedroom. I set the guitar on the bed, not anywhere near her, and went back out to the living room to retrieve one more bag. I heard another “boom” and thought, No way was that my guitar!
When I rushed back into the bedroom, I saw that Selena had, indeed, thrashed out with her legs and kicked my guitar right off the bed and onto the floor—something that she would have had to really go out of her way to do, since I’d put the guitar on the opposite side of the bed.
I went into a rage. “What is wrong with you?” I shouted.
Selena sat up in bed and we started yelling at each other like a couple of toddlers. “You pushed me on the bus!” she shouted.
“I did not! You were coming after me!” I argued. “You know that’s the truth. All I did was sidestep when you were attacking me!”
Looking back on this moment now, I know that it was just two people in a bad mood. Yet the argument escalated until I got so angry that I told her, “You want to start kicking shit around with me? Fine, then. Here!”
I grabbed my guitar up off the floor and hurled it right over her legs and into a table across the room. It knocked the table down and broke several things that had been on top, but I didn’t care.
“I’m sick of this, and I don’t need this hassle! I’m tired of it!” I shouted. Then I turned around and walked out of the room.
I made it as far as the living room. I was seriously prepared to walk out of that house. I had never been so upset with my wife. How dared she treat me like I was always going to be her servant?
I was just about to open the door when Selena came up behind me and grabbed my arm. She was crying. “I’m sorry. Don’t leave,” she begged. “I didn’t mean to act that way!”
“Then why did you?” I said, giving her a hug. “I don’t mean to act like that either. It’s just that there’s only so much I can take. I have to unload all of my stuff and yours, too, every time, while all you have to do is get off the bus and come inside. I don’t mind doing that, but you have to realize that I’m tired, too.”
We made up, then, and things were fine. Much later, after Yolanda had shot and killed my wife, she would say to the press that our marriage was on the rocks and that Selena had been prepared to divorce me. She concocted some story—one of many lies that Yolanda told over time—about how I had even punched a door and then pulled it right off its hinges.
It is true that Selena and I sometimes argued, but I don’t think that she and I ever experienced anything out of the ordinary. Most couples whose marriages last reach some point in their lives together—or maybe many points, if the marriage is long enough—where they have to decide that they’re still committed enough to stay in the relationship.
During this rough patch of ours, a friend of mine said, “Man, you can’t break up with Selena! She’s like the ultimate rich and beautiful trophy wife!”
“That’s not how I see it,” I told him. But then I stopped talking about it with him, because I was at a loss for words.
How could I possibly explain that, even though I admired the talented person Selena was onstage and her voice went straight to my heart, that’s not why I was in love with her? I loved the real Selena, the silly Selena with the contagious laugh and her love of dogs and kids, the woman who wrapped a bandanna around her hair while she cleaned the house, the daredevil who rode my motorcycle with me at night around the bay. I loved my wife.
Yet, in the worst stress of trying to manage our performing schedule, the house, and Selena’s new business, there was a brief time when both Selena and I had thoughts about whether we should just move on. We weren’t really arguing at that point; it was more like things had just stopped clicking.
Both of us had reached a point in our relationship—and in our lives—when we were feeling disconnected emotionally, and asking ourselves whether we wanted to do something else. I didn’t want to cling to her.
I think that, had I been as old then as I am now, I might have felt differently and worked harder. As it was, though, I didn’t feel I should stand in the way if Selena wanted to live on her own for a while.
During this whole rough patch, which didn’t last more than a few weeks, we danced around the idea of separating, even while we were still thrown together all of the time because of our performances. At one point, Selena and I were seated next to each other on an airplane talking about trying life apart for a while.
“Look, if this is what you need, you know that I’m not going to stand in your way, but it’s not my first choice,” I said.
“Yeah, I know,” she said.
Selena was serious enough about possibly separating to discuss it with A.B. He told me later that she had come to him to air her frustrations and doubts.
“Okay, then,” A.B. said to her. “This is what I’m going to ask you, and it’s the only thing I’m going to ask you. How would you feel if you decided to separate or get a divorce or whatever, and then you saw Chris walking around with some other woman?”
“Oh, no, that’s not going to happen!” Selena answered.
Shortly after that conversation with her brother, everything came back around. To Selena, I said, “I don’t want to keep fighting like this. I love you. But if I can’t make you happy, you deserve to go find your way and be happy with someone else.”
She started crying. “I don’t want to be happy with anyone else,” she said. “I just want to be happy with you.”
I pulled her close. “Then let’s be happy together,” I whispered into her hair. “We can do it. I know we can.”
The odd thing was that, after that one short, rough patch, everything between us was even better than before. It was as if we were newlyweds again, loving each other and finding our way together in the world as a team.
We decided that it was time to take the next step in our relationship and move away from her parents. We wanted to buy land and build a house of our own, so that we could be ready when it was time to start a family. Selena was still talking about five kids. Even crazier than that were the names she wanted to give those children of ours: long, fancy names like “Sebastian.”
“That’s crazy. Think about what a tough time our kids would have in kindergarten, trying to spell their own names,” I teased. “I think we should just give our sons regular-sounding names, maybe like ‘Eric’ or something.”
One thing we definitely agreed on, though, was that we wanted to buy a big piece of property that was still close to central Corpus Christi. There weren’t many properties that fit that bill, so it didn’t take us long to look.
Fortunately, after seeing just a couple of tracts of land, we found the property that spoke to us. “This is it,” Selena declared, the minute we stepped out of my truck and started following the Realtor around to see the property lines.
It was ten acres, with a hill that would be the perfect site for the house that we planned to fill with the sounds of music, children, and laughter. There was a pond for our children to fish in, and a creek where we could wade or just dream in the shade. Selena could have her horses, finally. Those ten acres were custom made for us, and we placed an offer on that land the same day we saw it.
“I can really see us here,” I said. “When I’m, like, eighty years old, I’m going to sit right here on the porch of our house. I’ll be so bored that I’ll spend the afternoons cracking pecans with a pair of pliers, and we’ll have so much time on our hands that there will be hundreds of coffee cans full of shelled pecans all over the damn porch.”
Selena laughed. “And what will I be doing, if the kids are gone and I’m not singing anymore?”
I looked her over, keeping a straight face. “You? You’ll be sitting right here on the porch next to me, knitting.”
Our love had been renewed because Selena and I had truly examined what we had discovered in each other—and how much we stood to lose if we parted. Now we were ready to accompany each other into a future filled with love and family. We had found a plac
e to build our home and grow old together.
We might never make it back to Jamaica, but this would be our own retreat, a private piece of paradise just for Selena and me. It was perfect.
THIRTEEN
THE DAY THE WORLD STOPPED
AP Photo / Houston Chronicle, John Everett
What we didn’t know, of course, was that the cancer was growing while we went on with our lives. Yolanda seemed to be everywhere now, determined not to just have a finger in every pie, but her whole hand. She had become so involved in running the boutiques that Selena had given her complete access to all checking and credit card accounts.
Honestly, it was probably Martin Gomez, the fashion designer working closely with Selena on her clothing designs, who first started noticing something off with Yolanda. He would bring little things to Selena’s attention, examples of how Yolanda was manipulating people or trying to control too many aspects of the business.
Martin told us that some of the other employees in the boutiques were having run-ins with Yolanda and were threatening to quit. “She’s mean and controlling,” he told Selena. “There’s a lot of tension at work. She yells at my seamstresses and even at me. I don’t think I can work under these conditions.”
It was true that when Selena first started the boutiques, she had friends working for her. Yolanda had slowly gotten rid of Selena’s friends. Now, according to Martin, Yolanda had also started telling people that they shouldn’t call Selena directly anymore—they should call her instead. She was acting more like Selena’s bodyguard than a personal assistant. When one of Martin’s seamstresses went to Yolanda’s house to pick something up, she had been startled to discover that the walls were covered with Selena’s photos.
“I just think it’s kind of weird how Yolanda is trying to get in between you and everybody else,” Martin told Selena. “She’s obsessed with you and I’m a little scared of her.”
Martin’s concerns should have been a red flag for us. As always, though, Selena and I were so busy that we overlooked all of the signs showing us that Yolanda was truly becoming unhinged. Truthfully, Martin was opinionated, like most artists, and we figured that like most artists he didn’t want anyone telling him what to do. When it came to Yolanda and Martin and their conflicts, we really didn’t think there was anything going on beyond a couple of people having too much attitude and going at each other.
Selena, meanwhile, still trusted Yolanda. In fact, she was glad to have Yolanda take calls and otherwise run interference for her at the boutiques. She even gave Yolanda a key to our house.
In addition to keeping up with her intense performance schedule, Selena was becoming more and more determined to get her clothing factory and boutique up and running in Mexico, and Yolanda was helping her. Since Yolanda was fluent in Spanish, she would go into business meetings in Mexico with Selena—something I would have been useless at, since I neither spoke Spanish fluently nor had much knowledge about the fashion industry.
Gradually, though, even Selena and I started noticing that Yolanda was becoming clingier and odder. Whenever Selena was in San Antonio, Yolanda would try to insist on going everywhere with her. Or Yolanda would call Selena at odd hours and tell her, “We have to go to Monterrey, because so-and-so wants us to have a meeting. We have to go right now!” Then she would get irritated because Selena wouldn’t jump when she said “jump.”
Selena, though, was loyal—especially to anyone in her close circle of family and friends. She tried to shield Yolanda for a long time. When Martin said that certain employees were complaining about Yolanda, Selena responded, “Those people are probably only complaining because Yolanda is the boss and they don’t want to listen to her.”
Besides, Yolanda always did everything in her power to make what seemed like her undying devotion to Selena abundantly clear—especially when she gave Selena a ring shaped like the Fabergé eggs Selena collected.
She had gotten her first one a couple of years earlier on one of our trips to Miami. We were staying in the Intercontinental Hotel there and, as always, Selena insisted on going into the gift shop. There, she saw her first Fabergé egg—an ostrich egg encrusted in gold with different precious stones set into it.
“It’s so beautiful,” she said.
For some reason, Selena was fascinated by that egg, so I bought it for her. She loved it, and from then on, I continued to buy Fabergé eggs for her whenever I saw them. I think that she was intrigued because, to her, eggs represented the beginning of life. The Fabergé eggs were also incredible handcrafted works of art. Selena’s egg collection became her pride and joy. She eventually started displaying the collection in our house, in glass-fronted cabinets—probably thirty or forty eggs in all.
Yolanda knew this, of course, so when some of the staff members at the boutiques wanted to pool their money to buy Selena a gift, she told them to give the money to her and she would have a ring made that she knew Selena would love. The ring was beautiful—a gold ring with a white-gold egg set on top of it. Fifty-two tiny, glittering diamonds were embedded in the egg; on the fourteen-karat band itself, the letter “S” was engraved three times.
“I bought this for you,” Yolanda said, never mentioning how she had asked the other coworkers to contribute to the gift, or the fact that she had charged the $3,000 price for it on Selena’s corporate American Express account.
Selena was thrilled with the gift and started wearing it right away. “Look, Chris,” she said when she showed it to me. “See how thoughtful Yolanda can be?”
Why didn’t we detect the cancer? We were oblivious partly because we were even busier than ever. Our shows included playing for twenty thousand fans at Six Flags AstroWorld’s Southern Star Amphitheater in July, and performing with Mazz and Emilio Navaira in the third annual Tejano Superfest.
In December 1994, Selena headlined the New Year’s Eve dance at the George R. Brown Convention Center, and in January, she played a concert at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo in the Houston Astrodome for over sixty-five thousand fans. She was the headliner at Miami’s Calle Ocho Festival as well, which drew over one hundred thousand music lovers. Our album Amor Prohibido was nominated for a Grammy in 1994, and Selena recorded a duet called “Donde Quiera Que Estes” with the Barrio Boyz that hit number one on Billboard’s Hot Latin Tracks.
New opportunities for Selena continued to open up. In early 1995, she began making plans to create a perfume line. She was also excited to be given opportunities to explore acting. She really wanted to try being an actress and, as we had all discovered through making music videos and television commercials, she was good at it, too—a natural in front of the camera.
One of our promoters arranged for Selena to make guest appearances on Dos Mujeres, Un Camino, a popular Latin American soap opera, to give her exposure to an even broader audience. Selena was excited by the chance to appear on TV, but she was disappointed by that particular experience. She didn’t really enjoy playing the character as it was written for her, especially when the director told her that she had to kiss an actor playing a musician in a band.
“I’m not going to do that,” she protested. “I’m married. I just can’t. It’s not right.”
A friend of mine later asked if Selena had refused to kiss the other actor because of me, but I knew that wasn’t it. I was not insecure with her in any way. Maybe that’s another thing she saw in me: the fact that I wasn’t ever going to be one of those possessive men who was out to control her. People made comments about her body all of the time, but I never reacted to them, because I knew those rude remarks came with the celebrity turf.
If Selena had decided that she needed to kiss another actor to play her role convincingly, I would have been supportive. One thing that did bug me, though, was a Mexican tabloid that came out during Selena’s soap opera stint; the tabloid ran an interview with the guy who played Selena’s main love interest in the soap opera. The interviewer asked him the usual stupid questions, including, “If you could be wi
th anybody one night, who would you pick?”
“Selena,” the actor answered.
But I wasn’t worried about Selena, simply because of how she was. Selena wasn’t in any way a flirt. She didn’t use sexuality to get what she wanted. She used her brains and her talent to achieve her goals. That other stuff just happened to come along with her when she was onstage. She was comfortable in her own skin, so she didn’t have to put on that kind of act so many celebrities do, where they walk into a room and expect everyone to turn around and stare in awe. Selena was always too down-to-earth to behave like a movie star.
Selena’s second acting experience was much more fun than the first. She was asked to play a small part as a mariachi singer in a movie called Don Juan DeMarco, starring Faye Dunaway, Johnny Depp, and Marlon Brando. We were both really excited about this, not only because it was an opportunity for Selena to be seen by many moviegoers who probably had never listened to Tejano music in their lives, but because of the high caliber of the actors involved.
We flew to Los Angeles, where the scene was filmed in the Biltmore Hotel, and when we arrived, Selena was really cool and calm. I was the one freaking out.
When it was her call time, we walked downstairs to the lobby of the Biltmore. Johnny Depp was there, and he came right over and introduced himself. Selena was still collected and poised, completely unfazed. She went off to do her scene—over and over again—and I finally went back to the room because the filming took so long.
Selena eventually came back upstairs, exhausted but happy. “Man, that Marlon Brando, he sure likes to flirt,” she said.
Shortly after Yolanda gave Selena the ring, things started going from bad to worse in the boutiques. Our paperwork wasn’t matching up and money was missing. There were charges on our credit cards that weren’t accounted for. Selena noticed these financial discrepancies because she was the one who went over her business accounts and the bills.
