Me (9 page)

We met at a radio station, and from the moment we met it was like a meeting of souls—at least that’s the way I saw it. I was traveling outside L.A. at the time and came to the station to do an interview. As soon as I opened the door of the studio my eyes met one of the most beautiful gazes I have ever seen. He was a very handsome guy, of course, but I had already seen plenty of handsome guys in my life. This man had something special, very special; it was magnetic. It was as if we had known each other for a long time. He interviewed me for his program and I kept asking myself, “Am I getting a vibe from him, or am I imagining it? If what I am feeling is true, I am diving in without fear.” At one point when I was answering one of his questions (he later confessed that he thought his questions were really stupid because he was so nervous he didn’t know what else to ask me), I stared at him steadily, and when I saw that he did not turn his gaze away . . .
Boom!
He confirmed what I was thinking. We exchanged phone numbers. He began visiting me in my hotel. We both loved music, as well as art and literature, and we spent our time talking about so many different things. At one moment I would tell him something about music, while he said something about literature, and later perhaps the roles would reverse. We had a really intense physical connection, and intellectually we were just on the same frequency.

When I visited him, we were literally inseparable. At night, he would go to work at the radio station, and I would stay in bed listening to his voice, while he would send me subtle messages over the airwaves. It was especially meaningful to me because I had always been the one who did the pursuing. I don’t know if it is because of what I represent that the people I am with can sometimes be a bit intimidated by me, but when it comes to both women and men, I’m always the one who makes the first move. Honestly, no one had ever sent me coded messages over the radio before! It was very original and very romantic. During the days I would do whatever I could to be with him and court him, but at night he would counteract on the radio. Without anyone else noticing, he would play certain songs and say certain things that only I could understand. He would scream his love out to me over the airwaves, but the really incredible, powerful, magnificent, and devastating thing about it was that only I knew it.

After a few weeks I returned home, but we continued our relationship at long distance. It was not easy because on most weekends one of us would have to get on a plane and travel for several hours to see the other. But I loved him a lot. Once I even suggested we both run away and leave everything behind to go live together somewhere . . . Asia, Europe, anywhere. We were young and I truly felt that the best thing we could do was to leave our worlds behind and move in together. I didn’t care about my career or what would happen if I told the whole world I was gay. Nothing else mattered.

But he didn’t feel the same way.

“Ricky, you have a very clear mission in life,” he told me. “You move masses. You can truly impact people. You are at a point in your career where you are so much more developed than I am. I still have a lot of work ahead of me, and if something bad were to happen between us, you would inevitably blame it on this, on me, on the fact that I held you back. . . . And I can’t let that happen.”

At the time, his words deeply moved me, but I still tried to convince him, by all means possible, that we had to at least try. But he refused. In the end, I think he was right. I’ve come to believe that he simply wasn’t ready for the relationship I wanted us to have.

It might just be that I loved him more than he loved me, or maybe he still had to find himself in several other aspects of his life. Who knows. The fact is, we shook one another; while I was with him I stopped fearing my sexuality, and I was ready to confront it and announce it to anyone and everyone who was willing to listen. It was because of that relationship that I came out to my mother. When it was over, she noticed I was very sad and she asked: “Kiki, are you in love?”

“Yes, Mami,” I answered, “I am completely in love.”

“Aaaaah,” she said. “And is it a man that you are in love with?”

“Yes, Mami. It’s a man.”

When the relationship ended, I told myself that maybe this was not my path. My soul was in pain; I felt abandoned, alone, broken. So much pain didn’t seem natural, so my instinct was to convince myself that being with men was a mistake. I locked my feelings even deeper inside, and started to date women again, with the hope that with one of them I would finally find true love. Even though my instinct tells me to wonder what would have happened had I decided to accept my sexuality at that point in my life, in reality I see that it did not happen this way because it was not my moment, and there were still many things for me to live before I would get to that point.

THE RELATIONSHIP WITH that particular man taught me a lot about emotions, but in the years to come I learned even more. I learned that it is very easy to lose yourself in the pain. Pain comes, it seduces you, it plays with you, and you identify with it to the point that you start to believe this is how life is. When you feel that heaviness in your heart, most of the time the parameters of pain and relief become blurry, and it is very easy to stay stuck in what you already know, pain. We lose our memory and forget the peaceful moments when everything was light and gravity was an ally. It’s okay to feel hurt—it’s human. It’s important to feel, but you cannot cling to sadness, distress, or bitterness for too long, because they will inevitably destroy you.

Something a friend once said to me helped me a lot: “When you feel stuck and everything feels heavy, struggle!” It’s so true. You have to struggle. You have to feel. You have to move forward. When I am not feeling my best, emotionally speaking, the last thing I want is for people to know how I am feeling. My grandfather always told me, “Go through life with your hands in your pockets, making fists so everyone will think that they’re full of money.” What he meant was that you should never let people see you down. I think that lesson stayed with me, because to this day I would rather not be seen at all than to let anyone see me when I’m feeling down. I am a very private person, and I have always lived through my joys, pains, and struggles only with a few people who form my innermost circle. Of course I live, feel, and suffer, but it doesn’t make sense to carry my pain around everywhere I go.

But that said, today I feel I know how to be aware of my pain, and to work through it, spiritually, with strength and confidence. Throughout my life, I have little by little acquired the spiritual knowledge I need to do away with whatever hurts me, and move forward only with the things that nourish me.

Of course, I know there is always room for improvement, but at the very least I know I have stopped fearing pain. If I encounter it in my life—and I know there will always be pain and that there is no way to eradicate it—I know what I have to do to face it and overcome it with strength and confidence.

However, when I broke up with this man, I was feeling very lost, and all of the energy I had invested in loving him was now invested in thinking. I overanalyzed everything. I tried to make sense of what had happened to me. What I felt for him was very strong, very intense, but now that he was no longer by my side, I was left to face the terrifying abyss of my sexuality. I didn’t know what to do with all of those feelings; I was afraid of their intensity and I was scared that I had felt them toward a man. Just as I had built up the courage to come out of the closet in order to be with this man, his rejection solidified all my doubts and fears. I already felt it was hard to be a Latino in Hollywood; what could have been more difficult than being Latino and gay?

It was a very profound moment in my life, when I was trying to decide who I was. And the more I thought, the more I rejected myself, because I could not give in to my true nature; because my true nature was not compatible with my goals and vision. Even my career was going through an identity crisis: I didn’t know if I wanted to be a singer or an actor, and even though I was fortunate enough to be a working actor in Hollywood, the truth is that there was something inside me that was resisting the entire experience.

Inevitably the moment came when I felt I just couldn’t take it anymore. I needed a change. I needed to escape. I felt that Los Angeles had overwhelmed me. So I called Wendy Riche, the executive director of
General Hospital
at the time, and one of the most wonderful people I met during my time in Hollywood, and I told her, “You might say I’m crazy, and honestly, I am feeling a bit crazy. But I need a vacation and I need your permission to cut my hair.”

Back then I had long hair, and in my contract there was a clause that said I could not change my image in any major way without first obtaining permission from the show’s producers.

“What?”
she yelled. “Oh, my God! Continuity! If you cut your hair now, you’ll appear with short hair in one scene and long hair in another. . . . For the love of God, Ricky, don’t do it!”

The scene was even funnier because I was calling her from the hair salon.

“I’m going to do it!” I said to her.

“No!” she yelled back.

The hairdressers were cracking up. It was honestly very funny, if also a bit sad, because my hair wasn’t really the problem; it was my identity I was struggling with. I was like a little boy throwing a temper tantrum; I had gotten it into my head that I wanted to cut my hair, as if that was going to solve whatever angst I had and no one was going to tell me otherwise (or so I thought!). Fortunately, after debating it for a while, I saw things differently and decided to listen to Wendy.

Even though I had to leave my hair long—if only for a few more days—I did get two weeks of vacation out of it. And considering how hopeless I was feeling at that time, those two weeks of freedom meant a
lot
. I used them to go to the mountains, where I rented a cabin to disconnect from the world. It was February and very cold; on some days I would ski, and other days I would stay home and read, write, think. There was a telephone, but I’d use it only sporadically to call my family or friends to let them know I was okay.

One day, after several days of being alone, I had the urge to climb a tree. I think I climbed that tree because I remembered that when I was a little boy, I used to climb into a tree that was in front of my grandmother’s old house. I would take my
Star Wars
figures up there and spend hours creating great battle scenes in space. I don’t know if it just made me remember my childhood, or if it was because I had spent so many days in silence, but all of a sudden I began to cry uncontrollably. I cried and cried for a long time, and slowly released all of the angst that had been building up inside me. Finally, when I calmed down, I returned to the cabin, where, a little while later, the phone rang: It was my father, calling to tell me that my grandfather had just passed away.

While I was up in that tree, crying and remembering the tree of my youth, the tree that was such an innate part of my grandfather’s world, he had passed away! I realized that all things in life are connected and I could no longer go about life without looking within. That moment affected me profoundly, and it awakened something in me on a purely spiritual level. Even though I did not know how I was going to do it, in that moment I felt the need to connect deeply with a force or energy greater than me. It was a moment of great turmoil, but when I look back on it today, I see it as a very important moment, because it marked the beginning of a crucial spiritual journey I am still on to this day.

BEFORE I ARRIVED in Los Angeles, I had already released my second album, called
Me amarás
. Since the first album sold very well, some 500,000 copies, the record company decided that for
Me amarás
it would be important for me to work with one of the most respected producers in the industry, Juan Carlos Calderón. Juan Carlos is an exceptional person, whom I respect and admire profoundly. From the day we started working together, I felt very grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with him. For me it was a learning experience to work with someone of his stature, but if I am honest, I always felt that that record was more his than mine. I lent him my voice. I liked the album and it received positive reviews from the critics, but it was not the sound of Ricky Martin, and although the album was still really good, musically speaking, the audience was mostly responding to that.

When I listen to the record today, even though I think my voice back then sounded very different from how it sounds now, I still feel immensely proud of the production. It would have been perfectly normal to feel frustrated by the experience or disappointed that the album didn’t sound like my own, but I think even in that moment I had the perspective to understand that
Me amarás
was merely one more step in my career, and not what would define it. Sometimes the experience is worth more than the end result itself, and this was one of those cases. The experience of working with Juan Carlos was in itself amazing—I learned a lot from a musical and technical point of view—but it also helped me to realize that I would never again make an album that did not feel like my own. When you are surrounded by so many talented people, it is normal to start doubting your own artistic choices, but to be a truly original artist, it is crucial to stay true to yourself. And that was the lesson I learned. My third album would have to be completely my own.

I began working with K. C. Porter, an amazing producer, and Robi Draco Rosa, an ex-colleague of mine from Menudo. Draco was always a very talented musician, singer, and artist. He was someone whom I’d always admired and it was nice to see how destiny had played out—to reunite us after so many years. Draco has since produced various records for me. Just as he once said in an interview: “Ricky Martin and I are like Julio Iglesias and Sid Vicious.” What he does with me has absolutely nothing to do with what he does with his own music and his performances onstage, and this is a musical versatility not many artists possess. He knows exactly what I need and when I need it. From that first collaboration with Draco and K. C. Porter,
A medio vivir
was born. This was the album, released in 1995, that featured the famous “María,” a song I am extremely proud of—and which was, at the end of the day, the song that made me a star and changed my life forever.