Unbreakable: My Story, My Way (21 page)

The next few months were so brutal, and I was constantly worrying about Fernando. I called his mother almost every day for an update. Sometimes she would know where he was, but other times she had no clue. He could have been anywhere. One day in April of 2007 I was in Mexico for a concert and I called her from my hotel room. The second she picked up the phone, I knew something was wrong. Fernando had jumped off the roof of a four-story building because he thought someone was chasing him. He’d shattered his leg in twelve places. He was in the hospital.

As soon as I got off the phone with his mother, I called him at the hospital and was able to get through to his room.

“I’m coming back,” I told him.

“No, please. Do your concert and then come back. I’ll still be here,” he joked.

I performed that night and then flew back to LA and went straight to him. He was a mess. So thin and beat-up and a shadow of the man I’d known. But I could still see the spark of light in his eyes. I knew my Fernando was in there somewhere, and I vowed to stay by his side until he found himself. He stayed on the couch in his mother’s house, and many nights I slept on the floor right next to him. I was seeing another guy at the time and he was so pissed at me. The guy and I broke up over it and I could not have cared less. My brother Pastor Pete and his wife, Ramona, would come over and pray for Fernando.

Slowly we started to see him coming back. Because he was immobile, he couldn’t go anywhere to get a fix. Out of all of the things we had tried, the only remedy was his jumping off a four-story building.

We didn’t officially get back together after that. We always stayed in touch, though, and we’d meet up for lunch or dinner. We’d meet up to talk, or not talk at all. Despite everything we had been through, I felt happy because I had my best friend back. I had gotten back the love and passion I had been missing for so long. But I was not going to be a fool either. I wanted to see if he was going to stay straight. I waited for him to get a steady job and a place of his own. I wanted the assurance that he was going to be okay. I could not go through that scenario all over again, and I could not put my kids through it either.

I knew that I would never love another man the way I loved Fernando. But I also knew that to truly love him, I had to love myself first. And to truly be there for him, I had to stand back and let him find his own way.

19

“Celibacy” and Sex Tapes

No tengo aires de la Salma

con la Machado nada que ver.

No tengo fama de la Trevi

estrella porno no quiero ser.

(
I do not have the airs of Salma

I have nothing to do with Machado.

I do not have the fame of Trevi

I never wanted to be a porn star.
)

—from “Dama Divina”

_{In October of 2007}
my ex-husband Juan was arrested for drug trafficking and sentenced to ten years in prison. My two youngest children, Jenicka and Johnny, were devastated, and so was I. In the same year both the fathers of my children were put behind bars, and the man I loved was facing down the demons of a drug addiction. My father and brothers told me, “You are so good at everything else, but you are so shitty at picking men.” I did not argue their point.

Throughout my heartbreak with Fernando I cried so much. “Why
would God have me meet the love of my life and then not have me be able to be with him?” I used to ask Rosie.

To try to cheer me up she would say, “There is a man for you out there. Tell me what he is like.”

So we started to make him up. “My husband wakes up at five in the morning and goes jogging. He takes care of himself. He eats healthy.”

“And what do you call him?” Rosie asked.

“I call him Runner Boy.”

Whenever I got down about Fernando, Rosie would say, “Tell me more about Runner Boy.”

“Runner Boy is an older man. He is already successful. He doesn’t need my money. He can buy me my engagement ring. And he is already retired. That way he has time for me.”

“What does he look like?”

“He is tall and handsome. He knows how to dress and he always smells good.”

“Is he a white man?”

“Oh, hell, no. I can’t deal with pink balls. I want a sexy, romantic Mexican.”

We were always dreaming about Runner Boy. When a man would approach me, Rosie and I used to turn to each other and say, “Oh, that’s not Runner Boy.” Or we would text it to each other from across the room: “Cute. But not Runner Boy.” Or she would whisper in my ear as she passed, “You should F him. But he’s not Runner Boy.”

I should explain that Rosie stopped swearing and fucking around years before. To be exact, the date was Sunday, November 6, 2005. Rosie called me after church that day. Her voice was light and full of joy.

“Sister,” she said to me, “something happened to me in church today. I feel only peace and love. I feel freed. God loves me and I love him and I’m going to live a different life.”

“That’s great, Sister. I am so happy!”

“And I’m not going to drink or do drugs or smoke.”

“Good, Sister. This is all good.”

“And I’m not going to have sex anymore.”

I stayed quiet for a moment, trying to figure out how to respond nicely and truthfully to her.

“Sister, I love and support you, but you mean to tell me that you are going to be celibate?” I meant
abstinent
, but the concept was so alien to me that I didn’t even know the right word.

After that, I would ask her all the time, “How is the abstinence going?”

In 2008 Rosie was dating a guy, and one day she called me, panicked. “I’m in trouble. I slipped up.”

“Well, was it worth it?”

“Yeah, but it’s still a sin! I’m afraid the whole church is going to find out. And I’m the pastor’s sister!”

“How many people go to your church?” I asked.

“About four hundred.”

“Okay, so you’ll be embarrassed in front of about four hundred people? Let me make you feel better: I’m embarrassed in front of about four million.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was giving this guy a blow job and he recorded it, and the video has been stolen. It’s only a matter of time before it is going to show up on the Internet.”

I was devastated. My brothers were going to see this. My father. My children. Could anything be more mortifying? That weekend I had a big concert and I asked Rosie and my mom to come with me. I needed their support.

That Friday night, Rosie and I were lying in my bed and I was still so pissed. I couldn’t believe this little punk. He was one of my band
members, and at the time he recorded the video, we were dating. I couldn’t believe he would do this to me. He copied the video, and then it got passed down the line. Everybody in the
banda
world already knew about it, and in time the rest of the Latin music world would know as well.

“What do I do?” I asked Rosie.

“Just tell the truth. It’s what couples do.”

I decided that I would call my brothers and my dad and tell them about the video before they heard it from anyone else. Juan was ready to fuck up the guy, of course. Lupe was the first one to make me laugh about it.

“Don’t be ashamed,” he said. “It’s good for a woman to suck a man’s dick. We need more women like that. I’m sure you did a good job.”

When I finished calling all of them, I turned to Rosie and said, “People are going to ask you about this. I want you to see it so you know what you are commenting on.” I held the phone to her face.

“No!” she screamed. “I don’t want to see that!”

“Watch it!” I insisted, holding the phone in her face. I wasn’t backing down until she watched it. I waited as she stared at the phone for four minutes. When the video ended, I said, “Aren’t I good at it? I should be a teacher. If I fail as a singer, I’ll just be a porn star.”

In June of that same year, 2008, I was arrested for assaulting a fan. I was onstage at my concert in Raleigh, North Carolina, when a man threw a full beer can onstage, nearly hitting me in the head, but it passed by me and hit one of my band members.

“Who threw that?” I said.

Three rows of fans pointed to one man.

“Get up here,” I told him.

The man walked up to the stage and I popped him on the head
with my microphone. If it had been a normal microphone, it would just have left a bump. But this was a diamond-encrusted mic that my brother Juan had given me as a gift. It split the man’s head open at the eyebrow, and he started to bleed. Security took him offstage and I didn’t think much of it. You throw a beer can at me, you deserve what you get.

The Raleigh police did not agree. As soon as I finished the concert, they were waiting for me with handcuffs. They arrested me and held me on $50,000 bail. My brother Juan came to get me and posted the necessary $5,000. I got a lot of shit from the media for the incident. They said that I treated my fans horribly and I was a horrible person. I did feel bad about it, I will admit that. But if the situation played out again, I would probably do the same thing. I found out that the man’s wife was a big fan of mine and he had gotten drunk that night. He claimed he didn’t throw the beer can and that he only raised his hand because he thought he’d be able to dance with me. Which I guess you can say he did, in a way.

Again, people said I orchestrated the whole situation for the sake of media attention. Again, untrue. But I could see why people thought it was a publicity stunt. At the time, one of my hit singles was “Culpable o Inocente” (Guilty or Innocent). Since I got a pretty great mug shot out of that trip downtown, I decided to make T-shirts with a copy of my mug shot and the words “
Culpable o Inocente
” above the photo.

Fernando called me when he saw the mug-shot T-shirts. Though we were no longer dating, we never lost touch.

“Babe,” he told me, “you are so ghetto.”

“Shit. Thought I wasn’t?”

20

Beso! Beso!

Yo soy una mujer de carne y hueso.

Yo soy una mujer que se enamora.

(
I am a woman of flesh and blood.

I am a woman who falls in love.
)

—from “Yo Soy Una Mujer”

_{The man I’d popped}
with the microphone filed a lawsuit against me a few weeks after the concert in North Carolina. I guess that’s a sure sign that you’ve made it. Nobody pressed charges against me when I was a nobody, but now that I had money in the bank, I had to pay for my stupid mistakes. I settled with him out of court, and I flew him and his entire family to sit in the front row of my upcoming concert on August 16, 2008, at the Nokia Theatre.

My goal when I started out was to make it to the Gibson Amphitheatre, where I had seen many of my idols perform. Of course, after I achieved that in 2006 and 2007, I came up with another goal: I wanted to make it to the Staples Center, which holds 20,000 fans. The Nokia, which holds 7,100, didn’t exist when I was starting out. It had
opened less than a year earlier, in October of 2007, and I considered it another stepping-stone on my way to the Staples. The concert was sold out that night, and for those three hours onstage I worked out all of my problems from the past year: Juan’s going to prison, the trial with Trino, the drama with Fernando, my parents’ ongoing divorce battle, the media backlash from my arrest, and the impending sex-tape bombshell. The tape still hadn’t become public, but I knew it was only a matter of time. For those three hours onstage I was able to air out my private issues in such a public way, but only those who were closest to me knew all the details.

A little over three weeks later, on September 9, 2008, I released my tenth studio album (and fourteenth overall),
Jenni
. It was the first album I produced myself. I wanted to have control, but I also wanted to establish myself as more than just a recording artist. I know I am not going to be singing forever, so it was important to me that the industry and future artists knew that I can also produce.
Jenni
was my first album to hit number one on
Billboard
’s US Top Latin Albums chart.