Unbreakable: My Story, My Way (17 page)

Fernando was so different from anyone else I had ever dated. He was ten years younger than me and living with his mother in a tiny house in the San Fernando Valley. He’d work a nine-to-five if he had a job, but he’d always lose it. He didn’t even have a car when we first met. He’d drive around in his mom’s old green Ford Escort until he blew it out one day after trying to keep up with me on the freeway.
None of that mattered to me. What mattered was that he gave me the passion and the devotion that I’d always wanted.

I had already been through so much in life, but in so many ways I was still quite innocent and inexperienced. For one, I had never smoked pot, and Fernando was something of an expert. He smoked every morning and every night. When I told him, he didn’t believe me. “Come on,” he said, “you’re trying to tell me you grew up in Long Beach and you’ve never smoked weed?”

That night I smoked for the first time and I didn’t feel a thing. That’s how he knew I wasn’t lying. He explained that nobody feels it on their first go-round. The next time we smoked, it hit me right away. I couldn’t stop laughing. Everything he said became the funniest thing I’d ever heard. This was also the first night that I realized how good sex could be. It must have been a combination of the pot and my feelings for him, because that night I finally had my first orgasm. I was thirty-four years old.

I never felt more beautiful than when I was with Fernando. He was handsome and I knew he could get any girl he wanted. All of his ex-girlfriends were thin, model-looking chicks, but he would constantly say that nobody compared to me. He was always complimenting me, and whenever I would talk about losing weight, he would say, “Babe, don’t change a thing. You are beautiful just as you are.”

To him I wasn’t an artist, I was just Jen. He loved my singing and supported me, but it was just a career to him. He loved me for the passionate, down, crazy, gangsta woman I was when the spotlight was off and it was just the two of us kicking it in the Corona house. Or when we were driving around—listening to music and talking—with no destination in mind, but all of our favorite singers bumping through the stereo. Mary Wells, Heatwave, the Delfonics, the Stylistics, Easy-E, Biggie, Tupac, Ice-T, Alejandra Guzmán, Graciela Beltrán, Chayito Valdez, Sade, Whitney Houston, Beyoncé, Alicia Keys. You
name it, we listened to it. Aside from heavy metal and the dreaded
durangeunse
, no genre was off-limits. We both loved the oldies, hip-hop, jazz. Rap, reggae, rock. And I even turned the thug from Boyle Heights into a country-music fan. “Listen to the words,” I would tell him. “These people know how to tell a story.” Our song became Brad Paisley’s recording of “Is It Raining at Your House?” We would dig into the musicians’ backgrounds. We’d find out what influenced them and take inspiration from their choices. With Fernando, I finally had someone I could talk to about different ideas and directions to take in my career.

The first time he met my whole family was at Jenicka’s sixth birthday party, in October of 2003. The party was at Chuck E. Cheese’s, which isn’t a bad place to introduce a guy to your family. It keeps things light.

Even so, my family wasn’t exactly thrilled. They wanted to know what he had to offer. Whenever my mom would meet a guy I dated, she would remember who they were according to what they gave her. One guy gave her sweet bread, so she’d ask, “Where is the guy with the bread?” And when I broke up with him, she’d say, “Oh, now who is going to give me sweet bread?” A few months later I brought a carpenter. Mom was thinking, “Oh, good, he can fix my roof.” She had the guy paint the house.

So when my mother met Fernando, she said, “What is he going to give me?” He wasn’t working at the radio station anymore; he was working at a porn warehouse and selling the DVDs out of the back of his truck. Not exactly what Mom was looking for, I assumed. Nobody was too thrilled about my seeing him. Everyone thought I could do better, but I knew they would come around. He treated me so well and he loved
me
—not Jenni the singer, but Jenni the person. Eventually they saw that too. You couldn’t deny it.

Plus, he was fun and charismatic. He won everyone over, especially
my kids. The Riveras like anyone who can kick back and have a good time. That was Fernie (the nickname they all use for him). My sister would say, “Hanging with Fernie is like hanging with you. You know you’re going to get in trouble, but you know you’ll never get caught.”

After about four or five months Fernie was everyone’s favorite, but I still hadn’t met any of his family or friends. It started to piss me off. “Are you hiding me?” I would ask him. “Are you fucking another girl?”

“No, babe. It’s just not safe for people to know we’re together. I live in the ghetto. I have to think about my mom. You have to understand.”

When I did meet his mother, I adored her from the first second I laid eyes on her. She is an incredible woman. She raised two sons on her own on a minimum-wage job. Her husband left her when Fernando was four, and after that she never had another man. She attends a two-hour mass every single morning, and she can put together a thrift-store outfit and make it look as if it came from a high-end department store. I called her
suegra
(mother-in-law) from the beginning. We shared a special bond, and I would call her to talk things through or ask her for guidance and prayers. I would also go to visit her on my own. I just loved being in her company.

One day I guess some men saw me walking out of her house. That night, at three in the morning, five men came knocking at her door. “We want to see Jenni!” they were yelling. “My wife is dying and her last wish is to meet Jenni!”

Fernando was at a friend’s house three blocks away when his mother called him. He sprinted to her house and found the five drunk men on his mother’s front stoop. He told them to get the hell out of there and then he called me, pissed, to tell me what had happened.

“You see? You live up in your gated community, up in your la-la land, and I’m down here dealing with all the shit. Do you see?”

After that I was much more careful. Together we decided to keep
our relationship private. He never wanted the attention and ran from a camera whenever he saw one in our presence. I wanted something to myself, something that the media could not pick apart. Because such a huge part of my life was becoming public, it felt good to have this privacy, this one element of my world that was my very own.

About six months into our relationship Fernando got an apartment in Van Nuys, though he could barely afford it. He said he wanted us to have a place where we could be alone. We would sneak out of the balcony in the back so his neighbors wouldn’t see us. I had a key, and sometimes I would go to clean for him, leave him a cooked meal, and take his laundry back to my house so I could do it for him. One time I was climbing over the back balcony carrying his laundry bag as if I were Santa Claus. As I was lifting my leg over the railing, I heard a man’s voice say, “Jenni? Jenni Rivera?” It was the trash collector, who recognized me even though I had on sweats, a ball cap, and no makeup. “Yes,” I told him as I waved and smiled awkwardly, “it’s me.”

That night Fernando called. “Babe, thank you! But what did you do to my bong?”

“Your what?”

“The glass thing that was on the counter.”

“Oh, the flower vase! That was the dirtiest flower vase I have ever seen. It took me forever to get all the dirt out of it.”

He loved that I was this tough ghetto girl from Long Beach, but I also had this innocent, naive side that needed to be shown the difference between a bong and a flower vase. It gave our relationship a spark.

When my career started to take off in the fall of 2005, I was traveling a lot more and performing every weekend. I couldn’t stand to be apart from him, and my kids were crazy about him too. I asked him to move into the house in Corona with us and to join me on the road. That’s when the true craziness began.

Fernando and I are so much alike. We are both incredibly passionate, stubborn, loving, prideful—and neither of us is known for backing down. Throughout our relationship, we loved and fought with the same level of intensity. When things were good, they were really good. There was no couple you’d rather be around. But when things were bad, they got ugly. I had been so hurt and broken down by Trino and Juan that with this relationship I was determined that it wouldn’t happen again. I was a bit hardened and I wanted to maintain the upper hand a lot of the time. But Fernando wasn’t going to let me step all over him. If I screamed at him or called him a name, he would tell me, “Don’t talk to me like that. I’ll sleep under the freeway if I have to, but don’t talk to me like that.”

Our fights usually started over something small and stupid, but they would escalate into huge battles. We never hit each other, but we would kick down doors and break furniture. We’d get thrown out of hotels for screaming in the hallways and for wrecking the rooms. Anyone who was nearby would quickly find an excuse to leave in order to escape the drama. All of a sudden everyone would have to go to the 7-Eleven or the hotel bar.

In every single fight, neither of us would back down and apologize. He’d pack a bag and leave for two or three weeks. I would usually be the one to reach out and call for some lame reason. “You left your white T-shirt here,” I’d say. “Are you going to come get it?” Or: “If you’re hungry, I’m cooking tonight.” That was my form of an apology, and he knew it. He would meet me halfway by saying he was sorry first, and then we would be back on as if nothing had happened.

When we were on these breaks, we would inevitably meet other people, give out our numbers, or go on a few dates. But when we were back on and one of those random numbers called, it would start another world war and lead to another period of our not talking. So began our endless cycle of “break up to make up.”

I never stopped loving him through any of it. When we were not speaking, I would be crying onstage and nobody knew why, but it was almost always for Fernando. I would often dedicate songs to
mi pinche pelón
(my baldy), and nobody knew who it was. This was the one relationship that I wanted to make work so badly, and I thought if I protected it from the media, then we might have a shot, so I never talked about him in the press. Of course, I talked about everything else, though . . .

15

Two More Years

Te prometo no dejar ninguna huella

ninguna evidencia de que yo estuve ahí.

(
I promise to leave no trace

no evidence that I was there.
)

—from “De Contrabando”

_{My famous line to}
my family and to Fernando was always “two more years.” I would tell them, “I’m just going to do this for two more years, and then I’ll stay home and be normal.” But I guess “normal” was never in the cards for me.

In 2003 and 2004 I recorded about eight songs in English because I wanted to do an English album. My father said, “You don’t want the Latinos to think, ‘Oh, look, she got famous and now she is leaving us.’ ” I followed his advice and instead worked on my next album,
Parrandera, Rebelde y Atrevida
(A Party Girl, Rebellious and Bold). When it was released in October of 2005, it immediately hit the Top 20 on
Billboard
’s Top Latin Albums chart. In weeks it went gold and then platinum. I got a contract to sing at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.
No other female Mexican artist had ever done that. I said to myself, “Okay, I’ll do the Kodak and then I’ll get to the Gibson and then I’ll be done. I don’t need to prove anything after that. Just give me two more years . . .”

I did an interview with El Piolín on the Los Angeles radio station La Nueva. We were discussing my album and my upcoming concert, and after talking about some of my new songs and lyrics, El Piolín asked me who I would prefer to record a song with if I had the choice, Graciela Beltrán or Mariana Seoane. I was always the girl who didn’t hold back. If an interviewer asked me a question, I answered honestly. I’m sure any publicist would have told me to say, “I love them both, I can’t choose.” Instead I spoke from the heart and said, “From those choices, I would pick Graciela Beltrán.”

“Why?”

“Because for me, she has more talent.”

“What does Mariana have?”

“I don’t know. I think she has
palancas
[connections], people who help her push her career forward.”

That comment started a huge media scandal. Obviously, Mariana heard about it. A few days later my brother Lupillo went to do an interview with El Piolín, and the station called me and put me on air to comment on Lupillo’s interview. But in reality they had a surprise for me; Mariana Seoane was waiting on the air. She was upset with me. I said, “Look, I never said you didn’t have talent. I think you obviously have charisma to be in this business, but you also have people who have supported you and helped launch you. That doesn’t mean it’s anything bad. It would have been great if I had that.” Nevertheless, she was offended. Off the air we agreed to meet to talk it out. I thought we had put it behind us after that, but I was wrong.

Shortly after that, I was invited to sing the national anthem at “Viva Dodgers Night.” Since I have always been a huge baseball fan, it was a
great honor for me. The show
El Gordo y la Flaca
called and asked if I could join them live on the show the next Monday to discuss my singing of the national anthem. I said of course. That Monday I was on my way to the show when I got a call telling me that Mariana Seoane was also live out of Miami on the show. I was surprised, but I was not going to back out of the interview. Lili Estephan and a guest host were doing the show that day since El Gordo de Molina was on vacation.