by Chris Perez
I was oblivious to all of this. I was barely conscious, imprisoned inside the walls of my own grief. A big part of me had died with Selena. I was, for all practical purposes, dead myself after we buried her.
I would have given anything to have her back.
Somehow, I made it through the trial that October. The jury deliberated for only two hours before finding Yolanda guilty of murder and sentencing her to life in prison for murder with a deadly weapon. The trial judge ordered that the .38 pistol Yolanda used to shoot Selena be chopped into fifty pieces that were scattered across the bay in Corpus Christi.
From her cell in the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville, Yolanda continued to maintain that she was innocent, saying that the shooting was an accident. She also tried to spread rumors about Selena and her family about everything imaginable—and about many things that weren’t. No one ever uncovered any evidence to support her ugly rumors.
I paid no attention. I was still numb and didn’t care about any of it. I was dimly aware of being glad that Yolanda had gotten life in prison. Death would have been too easy for her, and she deserved to have to live with what she had done. The justice system had done what it could. No verdict could change the fact that Selena was gone. Meanwhile, I continued to live, though many wouldn’t have called it that.
I stayed on in our house in Corpus for a while. I wanted to surround myself with Selena’s family, with her belongings and our dogs, with anything that could help me keep Selena close. The hardest thing was going to bed at night. Selena and I had a king-size bed; it was so big that sometimes I’d wake up and joke around when I saw her on the other side of the mattress, waving at her like we were standing across a river from each other. Selena would wave back. Now, when I woke up, I was alone on one side of the river. She had crossed it but I couldn’t see her.
I shut myself off from everything. I didn’t want to go anywhere, do anything, or see anybody. I was just trying to be. There were periods when I slept a lot and other times when I stayed up for three days straight. I started to drink heavily.
The months crawled by. People kept trying to pull me out of my well of grief. Nothing worked. I slept with pictures of Selena, snapshots of her doing ordinary, everyday things, like dusting or playing with the dogs, because that’s how I saw her. I even carried stacks of photos around with me, so that I’d have her with me everywhere I went. I’d go to a friend’s house, maybe, and be surrounded by well-meaning people, but I’d still be that weird guy sitting alone, off in a corner with my pictures of Selena. I ached for her every day.
Occasionally, Abraham would insist that I come over to Q Productions. He, A.B., and Suzette all went back to work, coping with the murder of their beloved daughter and sister in their own ways. They were trying to keep Selena’s memory alive and hoping to bring me along with them into a future where I no longer felt like I had a place. Why would I want to live in a world without Selena?
Whenever I did make that rare appearance at Q Productions, I would walk in and hear a gasp from Selena’s aunt Dolores, who worked at the front desk. Dolores scarcely recognized me anymore. I was so thin that my pants didn’t fit and my shirts were just barely hanging on my body. People kept trying to make me eat lunch or dinner with them, but I’d always say that I wasn’t hungry. That was the truth, too.
My mother visited regularly. She was trying to help me rejoin the living any way she could: talking to me, cooking, cleaning the house. One day, she was scrubbing out our bathroom when I heard something crash to the floor.
I snapped out of my stupor and ran to her. “Mom? You okay?”
She was standing in the bathroom with a hand over her mouth, staring at a pill bottle on the floor. It was a bottle of folic acid tablets—pills that women take during pregnancy. My mother looked at me, a question in her eyes.
“I know what you’re thinking, but no, Mom,” I said gently. “Selena wasn’t pregnant. She took these pills for a while because she’d heard that folic acid is good for your hair.”
The truth was that Selena and I had been talking about having children just before she died. Once the mainstream album was released, once we had promoted it and played some shows, we had decided it was time to move forward with our own family.
If Selena had lived, would she have become the next Gloria Estefan, conquering the pop charts? I thought so, but in a way it didn’t matter. Selena and I already had each other. We were ready to build our dream house on those ten beautiful acres of land in Corpus and get started on the next chapter of our lives.
Now I was thankful that at least Selena wasn’t pregnant, and that I hadn’t lost my child as well as my wife.
After about six months, Selena’s death no longer felt like that constant, piercing pain. Instead I had an empty, hollow, sad feeling that I imagined would never go away, punctuated by silent howls of despair when something reminded me on a deeper level that Selena was really gone—like when I picked up the phone to call her, and realized how much I missed hearing her voice. I tried to dull my emotions with drugs and alcohol, slipping further out of the life that seemed so pointless now.
Occasionally, though, I began to have moments when I’d force my grief into a corner and try to start over. “She wouldn’t want you to do this,” I’d remind myself. “You have to keep on living for her.”
When I could, I wrote a little music and lost myself in my guitar. Somehow this was possible: I could express my grief through music, when words just wouldn’t do it.
Around this time, I met a charismatic, talented singer named John Garza who became my friend and, in many ways, my protector during my darkest times. John moved into my house and made sure that I made it home in one piece each night no matter what I did to escape the body that trapped my soul inside it, preventing me from joining Selena.
John and I started working on music together, just a little bit here and there. I admired John’s voice, because whenever he sang, it seemed as if he could convey the rush of feelings behind the words I was writing.
John didn’t know me before Selena passed. He saw the crazy lifestyle that I was leading, but to his credit, he never judged me or made me feel bad about the things I was doing to myself. He understood what I was going through and simply watched my back as I struggled to find some meaning in my life again, even though I was looking for that meaning in all the wrong places.
Once, John and I found ourselves in a hotel in San Antonio. I was preoccupied with some football game that was about to start. We didn’t have any alcohol, so I said, “Dude, I’m going to run out and get some beer real quick.”
We took off from the hotel. I was in a hurry because I didn’t want to miss the kickoff. I started jogging across the parking lot, John maintaining a steady pace beside me.
All of a sudden, I realized that my mouth was moving but no sound was coming out. I knew that I was talking. Yet, I couldn’t hear anything but this incredibly noisy wind in my ears, or maybe it was inside my head.
I stopped running and froze in place. John stopped beside me. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“My heart stopped,” I said.
John put his hand on my chest. There was nothing, he said. No sound. Then, suddenly, “boom boom,” my heart started beating again and my hearing returned.
I went right on over to the liquor store and bought some beer. That’s the state of mind I was in.
Selena’s mainstream album, Dreaming of You, was released in the summer of 1995. The album combined songs in both Spanish and English. It was Selena’s biggest musical success yet, debuting at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart—the first time for any Hispanic singer. The album sold over 175,000 copies on its release date, a record for any commercial woman singer, and it sold two million copies in one year alone.
I heard songs from that album everywhere I went, and it was torture. Anytime I heard Selena’s voice come on the radio, I had to change the station. If I heard one of the songs in a restaurant, I wouldn’t want to make a scene by
walking out, but I’d pretend not to hear it. I got really good at just sitting there and acting like I couldn’t hear any music at all.
Watching the music video for “I Could Fall in Love,” one of the hit tracks from that album, was even worse. It was like slashing the wounds open all over again.
It took me over a year to really begin clawing my way out of that trench of despair. For a long time, I had kept everything in the house just the way it was, including Selena’s belongings, but little by little I started putting a few things away. Some days, walking by them made me feel good, because I had such fond, loving memories of Selena. Other times, though, I would see something of hers and sink into a depression that lasted for days, consumed as I was by grief. I had to find a way to move on.
With John, I decided to finally pursue a dream that would have made Selena proud: I formed a rock band that included my old friend and former La Mafia member Rudy Martinez on bass; Joe Ojeda, who had played keyboards with us in Los Dinos; and Jesse Esquivel on drums.
Abraham and A.B. would probably have helped me out with producing, but I decided that I needed to make the album independently. I was finally going to try to create the record that I had been hearing in my head, and I was determined to work with people who could get me that sound. I put the band together. In 1998, the Chris Perez Band—not my idea to name it that, but the guys insisted—went to Los Angeles to record our music at Henson Studio.
The most unlikely song on the album was one that I had written about Selena a few months earlier. Called “Best I Can,” that song cataloged a lot of the despair I was feeling and my struggle to go on.
I remember that I was sitting alone in the living room when I wrote it, barefoot and in my sweats. It was during that time of day that Selena loved so much, when the sun was setting and it hit a certain spot on our living room floor. We always put our feet in that spot of sunlight to warm them.
I picked up my guitar and the music just flowed out of my fingers. Part of me knew that it was a good song, but another part of me didn’t want anyone else to hear it. I was reluctant to reveal my emotions to the world, much less use my personal tragedy to sell a record. It was bad enough to be known as “the widower of the slain Queen of Tejano Music,” or whatever the media was calling me. I didn’t want to also have to hear people saying, “Yeah, well, that record got made only because he wrote about Selena. He’s just pulling on heartstrings by putting that one out.”
When I finished writing the song, I felt okay but bad at the same time. I was split in two; great songs deserve to be heard, but this one would be mine alone.
I put down my guitar and then started writing the lyrics. Those, too, came out fully formed, which is rare—not just for me, but for any songwriter. Usually I have to sit and think about a song before I can start writing, then rewrite the lyrics over and over again until they seem perfect. With this song, however, it was as if Selena’s spirit was there to guide me as I wrote,
I can’t erase this lonely heart that keeps on remembering.
Every day I live, I live with you, and with all the things we’ll never do.
Heaven holds a place for souls like mine.
Try to leave my troubled past behind.
You know it’s so damn hard letting go…
Standing here, holding my heart in my hands
Yes, I am…
Trying to live every day the best I can.
After I’d finished writing “Best I Can,” I worked on the music for another of our songs, “Solo Tu.” Joe had written the words and left them on a sheet of paper on my mixing board. He had been thinking of turning it into a romantic ballad, but I picked it up and decided to make it into a rock song.
By the time John and Joe came over that night, I had two songs to show them. I played “Solo Tu” for them first, and we worked on that one together for a while.
Then I said, “I also wrote this other thing. But, before I show it to you, I want you to know that I don’t want to ever put this song out.” I got out the lyrics, sat down with my guitar, and started playing “Best I Can.”
“Wow,” they both said when I finished. “We’ve got to at least do a demo, even if you don’t want to release it.”
So we recorded “Best I Can” with studio gear, but with no intention of including it on the album. When we arrived in Los Angeles and started recording, however, I was outvoted by the other band members and by the people at our label, Hollywood Records, who had accidentally heard the demo and loved that song more than any other. Together, they all managed to talk me into it.
“Selena always supported you one hundred percent,” Joe said. “She would love it that you wrote this song for her, and that you’re going ahead with your dream to have a rock band.”
There was another song about Selena on the album called “Another Day.” I don’t know why I was cool with sharing that song, but not “Best I Can,” especially since “Another Day” was about how much I loved Selena. It was just one of those personal, maybe irrational, feelings.
The thing is, making music has never been about making money for me. I had never tried to see the road in front of me. I just wanted to write songs that people could hear and relate to their own experiences, whatever situations they’re going through. I ended up deciding to release “Best I Can” not only because it was a good song and the other band members wanted it on the album, but because I thought that hearing it might help others who had lost loved ones. That’s what music has always been about for me, as it was for Selena: connecting with other people in ways that you can’t through words alone.
It took us a couple of months to record the CD. In the final production, I ended up working with another childhood friend, bass guitarist Adriel Ramirez, and drummer Alex Tamez, as well as with my friends John and Joe. I also brought in musicians from other genres to conquer the unique sounds I was after. These included percussionist Luis Conte, horn players from the Voodoo Glow Skulls, Mariachi Sol de Mexico, and even members of the band Cheap Trick. If we succeeded in the U.S. rock market, I knew we’d be conquering new territory as U.S.-born, Latin musicians.
When Resurrection was released in 1999, it included nine tracks in Spanish and six in English. I wanted this Latin rock album to break new cultural ground, in the sense that its bilingual mix reflected the daily reality for many Hispanic-Americans who were growing up the way Selena and I had.
In a bold move, our label released two different singles at the same time to both English and Spanish radio stations: the rock song “Resurrection” as the first English-language single, and “Por Que Te Fuiste,” a ballad that I knew would appeal to Spanish-speaking listeners. I started going to different radio stations and working with promoters in the U.S. and abroad. Oddly, hitting the road to do the interviews and shows brought me closer to Selena, because now I was experiencing that life again. What’s more, because the Chris Perez Band carried my name, and because I had written or cowritten nine of the songs on the album, I was the one the media was interested in now.
Anytime I felt tired or irritable from marketing the music, I would remember how Selena would get up every day and do whatever it took to help her family, support and love me, care for our house, reach out to fans, and bring her music to the world. I never fully realized how much Selena was juggling, or how much courage she had, until I started going on the road and revealing my own vulnerabilities in the music I was writing.
I used to say to her, “Just ignore what people say. There’s always going to be some negativity, and you can’t worry about it or take it personally.” Now that I was feeling the sting of negative remarks sometimes, I realized how tough and determined Selena truly was. I vowed not to let her down.
Our album was aptly named: this was my personal resurrection, I decided. I would live and work in a way that made Selena proud of me from now on.
A few months after I’d returned from the promotional tour for Resurrection, I got a call early one morning from my friend Robert Trevino, w
ho works for Gibson Guitars. “Congratulations, Chris!” he said.
“Dude, do you know what time it is?” I said, blinking hard at the clock.
“Yeah, but I wanted to be the first one to congratulate you.”
“For what?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
“You’re nominated for a Grammy,” Robert said.
“Shut up,” I said. “Somebody told me you can’t be nominated for a Grammy until you’ve got three or four CDs. That’s impossible.”
“Oh, man, sorry,” he said. “I guess I screwed up.”
“Where did you hear this, anyway?” I asked.
“I’m on the Web site. The nominations came out today,” Robert said.
“Well, you must have read it wrong,” I said.
We hung up, but of course I had to go and check it out for myself. Sure enough, there was my name on the list. I called Robert right back to apologize. “You’re right! We were nominated!”
He laughed. “I told you, pendejo.”
“Yeah, well. It doesn’t matter, because look who we’re up against,” I reminded him. “We’re never going to win. Still, it’s an honor to be nominated, right?”
I called everyone in the band and told them the news. We decided to fly out to Los Angeles for the ceremony and just watch the show and enjoy the ride.
When we walked into the theater, I saw A.B. and his bandmate, Cruz Martinez. They were dressed up in these weird outfits. I’d worn background clothes, a nice suit, and I’d brought my whole band. When I saw A.B. dressed like that, along with all of these other artists whose music I admired so much, I suddenly felt like I shouldn’t be there at all. Whoever nominated us must have made a mistake. These other people had put out lots of albums; I hadn’t worked nearly hard enough yet to deserve this honor.
But we were here, so I said hello to A.B. and then went to my seat. I was seated near the stage and A.B. was sitting up in the bleachers on the side. As I looked at him, I wondered if A.B. was remembering, like I was, Selena’s Grammy award and her speech that night.
