Unbreakable: My Story, My Way (11 page)

“Mommy,” my eight-year-old, Jacqie, shouted. “You’re not listening, are you?”

“What? I am.”

“I just asked you why you don’t sing anymore. You can win a Gammy one day,” she said in her innocent little voice.

“Yeah, Mommy,” Chiquis seconded her. “Why don’t you sing again? You can win a Grammy, or at least be nominated for one.”

My poor babies, I thought. If they only knew how difficult and ugly the music industry was. How hard it was to be a female artist in my genre. More than that, if only they knew the real reason I had stopped singing was because my spirit had been so crushed the night I had been raped. I would never tell them the truth. They had more vision and belief in me than anyone else I had met during the time I was singing and recording. They had more vision than their own mother. My kids were dreamers. And that night their dreams lit a spark, a fire in my soul. A few days later, when my dad asked me to record another CD for him, I decided to give it another try. At the very least, as my father always said, I could just record the
corrido
album he so badly yearned for.

In June of 1998 my father called me into his office at La Musica del
Pueblo, one of our family record stores on Pacific Avenue in Huntington Park. But he didn’t want to talk music this time. He told me he had heard from someone that Juan was messing around with quite a few people at work. Gus knew, but he did not have the guts to tell me. But my father couldn’t bear his daughter being made a fool of and couldn’t hold it in any longer.

“I’m not telling you what to do,
mija
,” he said. “That’s totally up to you. You know I’ve never butted into your relationships, but I don’t think it’s right. Especially considering everything you’ve been through, especially in this past year, and everything you did for him when he was locked up. Everyone is talking about it where he works. You need to make a decision and fix this shit.”

I could feel my heart breaking, but I didn’t want to show that to my father. I told him, “I will handle it, Daddy. Don’t worry. I will take care of this motherfucker.” As soon as I uttered those words, I felt myself turn from sad to furious. I stomped out the back door of the record store. How could Juan do this to me? I asked myself. I loved him! I was there for him when he was in jail. I had even made his child-support payments during that time. I married him to save his ass from deportation. How could he do this to me after I had gone through so much pain?

As much as I wanted to, I decided not to kill him. It was what I always thought I would do if a man cheated on me. I knew that if I confronted him about it and screamed, fought, or cried, it wouldn’t do anything. I had to find a way to really get back at him. As I drove back to Compton, I thought and thought about what move I would make. Marisela’s CD was playing in the car stereo as I went over options in my head.

I decided not to say a word. Instead, I came up with a plan. First and foremost, I would make the fucker fall in love with me again. I just needed two months.

I hired a private investigator. He videotaped various days of Juan’s adventures with the
putas
at work. I found out which motels they would go to. I learned that he would throw away the lunches I’d prepared for him at 4:00 a.m. and go out to lunch with the hoes instead.
“Qué pendeja soy,”
I said to myself.

That summer was sad and emotionally draining for me. All the time my husband was cheating, Gus, my loving brother, the one who’d taught me to defend myself, the one who always called me beautiful, had been aware of what was going on and never told me. It had been going on for months and he said he couldn’t find a way to tell me. He too was from the hood and said that he had learned that a man should not rat on another man. He said he wasn’t and would never be a little ratting bitch. He loved and adored me and didn’t want to hurt me with the knowledge of Juan’s infidelity, so he opted to not mention it. I didn’t understand his point of view. I was hurt. Gus and I stopped speaking for eight months and ten days. It was painful and it killed me inside to be at family reunions, and we wouldn’t cross words with each other. We wouldn’t even look at each other. It was a horrible feeling. I was going through hell. In less than a year I had been raped, I had found out about the sexual abuse of my sister and daughters, my husband was cheating on me, and now I wasn’t speaking to my brother. My parents always taught us that family was first. With that in mind, and because I so terribly missed my brother’s hugs and kisses, I made the first move to mend our relationship. God works in mysterious ways. That experience taught us quite a bit. We haven’t fought, argued, or disagreed on anything since.

As much as I was hurting during that time, I enjoyed knowing that I was steps ahead of my husband and that soon he’d be in for a big surprise. For those two months I dressed in the skimpy outfits he liked, put on makeup, and did my hair every day. I gave him foot massages when he got home and sex every night. By September I had
transferred the registrations of both vehicles to my name and paid off all of our credit-card debt. Then I was prepared to let him have it. It was going to go down my way. It was going to end the way I wanted it to end.

After we started being intimate again, I felt angry and sad when we were in bed. But this was the first sign that he was falling back in love with me. The changes I was making physically combined with the extra attention I was giving him were all working. We made a trip, just the two of us, to Laughlin, Nevada, and had a beautiful time. He had no clue that the shit was about to hit the fan and splatter all over his face.

At five thirty in the morning on August 1, 1998, I handed Juan his lunch just as on every other morning. “Baby, I love you,” he told me. “I’m sorry if I was mean and not affectionate toward you in the past. I don’t know what was wrong with me. I love you so much and I never want to lose you. When I come home from work today, I want you to be ready to go out. We’ll go to dinner and then dancing. We’ll have a good time, okay?”

That was exactly what I was waiting to hear. “That’s sounds great, baby. I love you with all my heart too. I’ll be ready.”

Tenderly, I kissed my husband good-bye, knowing it was the last time I would do so. As he jumped into my Lexus ES300 (oh, yes, he always got to drive the Lexus I had bought with my real estate earnings and left me with the Ford Explorer), I decided this would be the last time he showed off
his
car to his girlfriends at work. My heart was devastated, but my mind was strong and firm. I put on the Nike sport suit he liked to see me wear and headed out the door without my wedding band. The ring that supposedly symbolized our love, our unity, our faithfulness to each other. So much for that.

My friend Cynthia was waiting outside in her truck. Juan would be furious to know that she was one of my accomplices, since he
hated her guts with a passion. She drove while I rode shotgun and our friend Nacho sat in the backseat. The drive to Torrance was horrible. I couldn’t wait to see the look on his face, but I was scared of how I was going to feel when he was no longer home with me. The fear didn’t stop me.

When we got to the parking-garage entrance, I told the security guards that I was there to see my brother and I would be out shortly. I had Cynthia park as close to the building door as possible. Since Fairchild Fasteners was technically on federal property and I would be trespassing, I needed to be able to enter and exit quickly.

I pushed the door open, making a loud noise, which got the attention I wanted from his fellow employees. As I stomped through the warehouse, I could feel everyone’s eyes on me. Some showed surprise, some showed confusion, some stared in disbelief, many seemed excited. Obviously, everyone knew what had been going on behind my back, and they knew exactly why I was there. I asked one of the employees where Juan was, and he pointed to an office door. Then I heard another coworker screaming at me, “You’re not supposed to be here!”

“No duh,
menso
! Tell me something I don’t know,” I said as I headed toward the door and pushed it open. Juan was sitting there with another employee. When he saw me, he looked as though he had been hit over the head with an iron pole.

“Where’s Maria’s husband?” I asked.

His face turned different colors—first pale, then red, then blue, then pale again. I thought he was going to faint. His eyes, wide open, began to water. I could see his Adam’s apple move as he swallowed hard. “What Maria?”

“The slut you’ve been fucking. The one with no ass. I noticed it in the video the private investigator took of you a few months ago.”

He remained silent.

“If not Maria, the other skank will do. You know, Lilly, the married one.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“The hell you don’t. You, this idiot sitting with you, and all the rest of the people in this joint know what’s been going on. You all just didn’t know that I knew. You all thought it was funny and cute, huh? Let me tell you what’s funny and cute. What’s cute is there is no reason for you to come home. What’s funny is that all your shit will be burning in the front yard. There will be nothing but ashes for you to pick up. Oh, and by the way, you’re going to need a ride after work.”

I turned around and headed back toward the doorway. Cynthia was waiting for me in the getaway car, while Nacho had already taken off in the Lexus. I had made an extra copy of the car key during the two-month “waiting period.” The drive back to Compton was quiet. I couldn’t believe I had gone through with it. I loved Juan so much, but I wasn’t about to let my guard down now. The pain of knowing that he had slept with someone else was too much for me to handle.

The job wasn’t finished yet. I had just seen
Waiting to Exhale
and I loved the scene where Angela Bassett lit all of her man’s clothes on fire and then smoked a cigarette as she watched them burn. You know what happened next.

I called my family and told them to come over and look through Juan’s closet and pick out anything that they wanted to take. Chiquis and I gathered the rest of his clothes and threw them in two trash cans. In went his underwear and T-shirts, his favorite Air Jordan sports outfits and shoes, his church dress suits. Juan knew how to dress, and he had a lot of nice, expensive clothes. I didn’t care. I went crazy showering his belongings with the lighter fluid. I enjoyed the feeling of vengeance and accomplishment when I threw a match in each garbage can. Then I lit a cigarette (though I didn’t smoke) and watched the flames as I did my best Angela Bassett impression.

Juan, who got a ride from a coworker, arrived just in time to save a few hundred dollars from the pocket of one of the burning jackets in the melting plastic trash cans. I admit it was an evil thing to do, and I regret having done it while my children were watching. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like for them to see their mother hurting, but also to know that they would now be missing their stepfather in their lives, less than a year after their biological father had become a fugitive from the law.

The days after the separation were devastating. Juan moved back to his mother’s home in Huntington Park, and I stayed at the home in Compton before moving to my parents’ home in North Long Beach temporarily. I was not doing well financially, since I couldn’t bring myself to concentrate on work. All I could think about was my on-and-off feelings for Juan. It didn’t help that he would call me almost daily to try to convince me to give our relationship another try. Like all men caught red-handed, at first he was defensive. He told me I was evil and that he couldn’t believe I had gone so far as to hire a private investigator to follow him around. He also couldn’t believe that I had kept quiet for so many months, knowing he had cheated and focusing on making him fall in love with me again.

After I threw him out of the house and burned his clothing that August, I didn’t see him again until November. We barely even spoke. He would insist that he wanted me back and that I was the only person he wanted to be with. He was remorseful about what he had done, but I still didn’t want him back.

Soon after the incident Juan became depressed and kept on saying that he would do anything to show how sorry he was to have let our love down. Sometimes he would call or meet with me and demand to know when we would finally be able to put the whole dramatic nightmare behind us. He constantly begged me to forgive him and move forward with our relationship in the interest of our daughter
and my three older kids. Although I sincerely wanted my children to experience stability at home and have a father figure, I didn’t know if I could handle living with him knowing that he had been unfaithful. It was extremely painful to think about, and I knew it would be difficult for me to trust him again.

Every time I spoke to Juan he’d ask, “Are we getting back together? Are we going to work this out?” My answer was always no. The holidays came and it was hard to be alone with the kids and without a partner. My baby girl, Jenicka, was so little, and I started to feel guilty. Maybe I should give him another chance? I always wanted to make my relationships work, and if people sincerely apologize for their mistakes, I eventually forgive. Friends and family have often told me that this is my greatest strength, but also my greatest weakness.

In February of 1999 Juan and I got back together. He moved back into the house on Valentine’s Day of that year. I told myself that if we could get through this, we could get through anything.

10

Where Are My Malandrinas At?

Nos dicen las malandrinas

porque hacemos mucho ruido

porque tomamos cerveza

y nos gusta el mejor vino.

(
They call us the bad girls

Because we make a lot of noise