Unbreakable: My Story, My Way (5 page)

My parents would seldom let us hear their fights. My brothers and I never witnessed any physical violence at home. I never heard of any cheating or any big arguments. At times, however, I would notice that my mother’s eyes were puffy and swollen after walking out of their bedroom. I wondered what was wrong, but never dared to ask. Was she upset because money was scarce? Would my daddy dare hit her? Did she find out that he had cheated? I didn’t know. What I admired most about my mother was that no matter what, through thick and thin, she had my daddy’s back. She was a soldier for their love.

She didn’t know it, but she was a proper gangster wife, as we used to call it in the hood. My father was her first boyfriend, her first love, the first man she gave herself to, and the man she stayed with, no matter what. She was not going to raise her children without a father. I loved my mommy’s strength and determination to make the relationship work. I vowed that when I grew up, I would be just like her. She set an example that I wanted to follow, an example that would affect my life more than I could even imagine.

My First Love

I never wanted to be your weekend lover.

I only wanted to be some kind of friend.

—from “Purple Rain”

_{In the fall of}
1982 I was in eighth grade at Stephens and first met the man who would later change my life. I was walking home from school with my girlfriends Ruby and Alma. They wanted to stop by the Pioneer Chicken Stand on the corner of Santa Fe Avenue and Willow Street to see if they could get a free combo meal from a friend who worked there, Trino, short for Trinidad. When we got there, he looked at me in a way that made me a bit nervous. He asked me my name as I shyly lowered my face to the ground. I looked up at his beautiful, hazel eyes lined by long, dark eyelashes. “Janney,” I responded, feeling myself turn pink in the cheeks.

“I like your friend,” he told the girls.

At the time he was nineteen and lived in the apartment next door to Ruby’s house on Parade Street. Ruby was my best friend and I would be allowed to visit her on the weekends or after school as long as Pupi came along with me. I would see Trino around sometimes
during the next few years. According to Ruby and Alma, he was the hottest thing on the block. He would always make an effort to talk to me and get my attention. Once, he told me that every time he heard “Así te quiero yo . . . inocente y sencilla” by Los Yonics, he’d remember me. “I love your innocence,” he’d say. “You’re such a simple girl. One day you will be my wife.” He said that at thirteen I was still a little too young for him. “When you’re a bit older, we’ll talk about it again.”

When I was thirteen and fourteen, I had my puppy loves with Sergio and Alfredo while Trino became Gus’s friend and would come over to our house sometimes. My dad warned Gus and my other brothers about bringing guys over to the house: “You open the doors of your house to your friends and they take your sister or your wife.” He still believes that to this day. Because of this, Trino stopped coming over, but one way or another, call it destiny, the devil, or God’s will, our paths crossed again one day on Parade Street. On that day in 1984, it wasn’t Pupi walking with me to my friend’s house, but a beautiful, blond living doll—my little sister, Rosie, who was almost three years old. I remember how cool and charming he was and how I was so infatuated with him. Now my stomach turns at the thought of finding Trino so attractive. My story with this man is horrific, but of course it did not start out that way.

By June of that year, Trino and I had started to see each other in secret. I thought he was incredibly attractive. He dressed like a rebel and listened to Spanish rock. He was very charismatic, funny, a good storyteller. Most people who met Trino liked him instantly. I know I did.

On July 2, I turned fifteen. I wasn’t able to have the traditional quinceañera that most Mexican families have for their daughters. We couldn’t afford it. My daddy made a deal with me. I had a choice between my parents’ somehow getting the money to pay for a quinceañera, or my getting a car later when they could afford it. Of course I
went for the car (which I never got). Meanwhile, my celebration was to dress up in my fanciest dress and take a ride, top down, in my dad’s old convertible.

I felt like a princess sitting on top of that beat-up car, cruising with my daddy, my hero, through the streets of Long Beach. I now realize this was my daddy’s way of confirming to me that I was, as he always called me, not the princess, but “la Reina de Long Beach.” I was so content and happy.

However, my daddy wasn’t too happy when the ride was over. I told him that since I was now “of age,” Trino wanted to come over and talk to him about officially dating me. Back in those days, the custom was for boys to meet with a girl’s parents and ask for permission, face-to-face, to date their daughter. I thought it was so manly of Trino. Although I had been “seeing” Alfredo previously, my parents okayed Trino’s request, and I considered this to be my first true relationship. Actually, he became my first true everything. I was perfectly convinced that he was “the love of my life.”
¡Pobre mensa!

One day, during “visitation time,” my father caught Trino and me kissing under the avocado tree. I guess that must have been hard for him to see. When I came in the house, my father stopped me at the dining-room table before I went into my bedroom. “
¡Janney, si te va a chingar!
This motherfucker is going to screw you!” he told me. Daddy knew that, at age twenty-one, Trino’s intentions were not on the same level as my teenage desires.

That September I started high school at Long Beach Polytechnic High. Even though it wasn’t in the best neighborhood, everyone I knew wanted to go to Poly High, “the home of scholars and champions.” My brother Pete had graduated from there in June, Gus had attended temporarily (before getting kicked out for punching a teacher). So had baseball player Tony Gwynn and tennis legend Billie Jean King, among many other famous alumni. When Lupillo was there, a few
years later, Snoop Dogg and Cameron Diaz were also students. Of course we didn’t know any of them would become such huge stars then. One day, I thought, they will say that Jenni Rivera went here too.

I was doubly excited to go to Poly because it meant I would be reunited with all of the friends I’d left behind at Stephens Junior High when I got kicked out. Finally, I would be able to hang with all the homeys, the Mexicans, Samoans, Filipinos, Guamanians, blacks—all of those people who were just like me: a minority. We would kick it together at lunch, or in the middle of periods, and after school, since during the day I didn’t have any classes with my friends. I was in the “nerd classes,” as they put it. The only class I shared with a few of them was band. I played clarinet and reached first-clarinet status for the Long Beach Unified School District. I was getting straight A’s in all of my “nerd classes” and looking forward to everything that high school had to offer.

But in November everything came to a stop.

The story begins on a warm September night. Trino and I, and our chaperone, my younger brother Pupi, went to a drive-in movie to watch Prince’s
Purple Rain
. Halfway through the movie, Trino sent Pupi to the snack bar to get popcorn and candy. It happened right there in the back of his 1979 Monte Carlo. I can’t say he forced me because, obviously, I enjoyed feeling his touch, but I got scared and asked him to pull out before he had completely penetrated me. I figured since I didn’t feel anything, nothing had happened. In reality, everything had happened. November came around and I still hadn’t gotten my period. I wondered if I could have gotten pregnant by the Holy Spirit. Was that still possible? I was so naive and stupid. Or maybe I was just in denial. Yes, I had learned about sex and pregnancy in health class, but I did not want to face the truth. It couldn’t be. Wasn’t it supposed to feel good and be an unforgettable experience like what I’d heard all the girls talk about at school? Not in my
case. Not a chance in my crazy life. I had become pregnant from the precum.

I was in a folkloric dancing class with Patty, my brother Gus’s girlfriend and now wife. One afternoon I didn’t show up and Patty asked Gus where I had been. I had gone to a clinic to get a pregnancy test. When I came home that afternoon, Gus wanted to know where I had been during dance class. I had no choice. I had to tell him. He broke down in tears when he heard the news. “How can it be? How can you do this to our family? This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, Janney.” He told me I had to tell Pete. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t face him. I left the house before he came home from work that night.

Soon after, I sat with my mother and gave her the horrible news. It was a great disappointment to her and an extremely sad moment for a fifteen-year-old girl such as me. I didn’t know then that Lupe, who was twelve at the time, had been sitting in my bedroom, listening to the whole conversation. As was customary in Mexican culture in those days, I wasn’t going to be able to live at home anymore. I would have to move in with Trino and we would have to get married. My mother was scared of what my father might do, so she had me leave before he got home. I had to pick up my clothes and whatever belongings I was going to take with me to my new home while my little brother and sister Juan and Rosie were watching. They were too young and innocent to know what was going on, but Lupe knew exactly what was about to happen. After I gathered my things in a black plastic trash bag, I gave my angry mother a kiss and hug good-bye, and I headed out the door and toward the driveway where the father of the child I was carrying awaited.

I took one step out of the front door of my childhood home, and then Lupe stormed out of my bedroom crying, screaming, pleading with my mother not to let me go. “No, Mom!” he sobbed. “Please don’t make her go. I don’t want to be here without my sister. She can stay in
her room and the baby can stay with us in the garage. It will be okay.” He was inconsolable. My mother looked at him and began to cry as she brought her hands to her face. She couldn’t say a word. Lupe wouldn’t give up. He grabbed me tightly by the arm, looked me in the eye, and begged, “Please stay with me, Janney! Please don’t go!” I’ll never forget the look on his face, the fear in his voice, his words, and the rivers of tears that rolled down his cheeks. As I type these words, I am crying remembering how badly he tried to hold me back on the night that changed my life forever. Did he, at the age of twelve, sense the kind of situation in which I would soon be living? Did he have a premonition about how my life would be with this man? I didn’t know, but sometimes I think my brother sensed that this man would be at the root of the Rivera family’s most tragic and painful experience.

I dropped my bag on the ground to hug him. I continued crying as I kissed him good-bye. I picked up my belongings and walked over to Trino. I left Lupe crying at the front door of our house in Long Beach. I left my baby sister and brother with no clue as to what was going on. I left Pete and Gus so disappointed and heartbroken. And I left my mother, who was so angry and hurt that she could barely speak. I got into the beige Monte Carlo that would drive me to his family’s home in Wilmington, the city I once lived in as a little girl, and I began a life nobody would have hoped for “the Reina de Long Beach.” Years later I found out that when my father came home from work that day and asked where I was, my mom told him I had run away with Trino. Dad was so upset, and for the next three days he continually asked Mom if I had called. On the third day she told him the truth. He went into his bedroom to turn on the radio, and for the first time in a long time it was tuned to his Spanish station. I hadn’t been there to change it. He cried that night as the music played, for he knew that I was gone forever. Life would never be the same for our entire family. It certainly wouldn’t be the same for me.

Trino and I were living in the garage in the back of his family’s house on Blinn Avenue in Wilmington. He was the only man in a house full of women. The thing was, his mother and all his sisters hated me. They all thought I wasn’t good enough for him because I was an American girl. In their eyes all American girls were whores, and Trino should have married a Mexican girl from their ranch. They treated me badly, but that was nothing compared to the shit Trino put me through.

Our garage apartment became the boxing ring for the many verbal and physical fights we would have during our eight-year relationship. Those walls would witness the first tears I shed as a married woman and the tears that would continue to flow for years to come. He had only brought me to live with him because he wanted to show everyone he was a responsible man and he didn’t want to publicly disgrace me and my family. But Trino insisted that the baby was not his. He didn’t believe the story the doctors gave us. In his mind, I couldn’t possibly be pregnant without our fully “doing it.” Not only that, he said no woman of his was going to continue to attend school. Trino wanted me to drop out and stay home and be a full-blown housewife. “What about my grades and my education?” I asked. “What about my future and how important it is to accomplish something and be my family’s pride and joy?”

“That’s done and over with,” he responded. “I’m already doing enough by having you here after you slept with someone else and got yourself pregnant. I won’t put up with my woman going to school as if she were still a normal teenager. That’s not the way it happens in my family, and that’s not the way it’s going to be with me.”

I couldn’t believe it. What the hell had I gotten myself into? As the days went on, I kept insisting, thinking I could convince him to change his mind. I couldn’t. Instead, I learned what it felt to be slapped in the face by a man. “Oh no, you didn’t, motherfucker!” I yelled at him as
soon as he did it. I was fucking pissed. I immediately fell back into my tomboy ways and did what I had been trained to do: I fought back.