Today I’m sharing a very personal and dark story with you. I haven’t spoken much about this since the day it happened -- only a handful of close friends know about it, and mostly without much detail. It is a day I will never forget, the day of my rebirth. I guess it fits in my “composer's blog” because I can't separate my art from my personal stories; furthermore, it is relevant because it describes the day music literally saved my life. Today is the right time to write about it.
A BIT OF CONTEXT
First, let me give you some context. In the year 2004, I was a 28-year old musician in Rio de Janeiro with a Bachelor Degree in Music and considerable experience as a teacher and performer. I was teaching at a couple of government sponsored music schools, teaching private piano lessons in my house, as well as performing and recording with popular artists and with my own Brazilian jazz group (the photo you see below is from a performance with my group Dialeto Brasileiro, a few months before the events described here). A few years earlier, I had left my position as Director of Music at the First Baptist Church in São Gonçalo, in my hometown, a church that in its heyday had about 4,000 members. The seven years working at that church taught me important lessons about life, faith, personal relationships, and character. That job also helped me grow as a musician: composing, arranging, recording, managing a thriving musical environment, while also learning to tiptoe around some sensitive egos. But as I became more and more interested in writing and performing professionally, freeing my mind from prejudices related to musical styles, venues, and audiences, that all-consuming, full time job became a limiting factor to my musical progress. For that and many other reasons, I left that job in 2002. That decision would bring financial challenges to my life, and it would put me at a crossroads: now what do I do to pursue my dreams?
In 2004, I was going through an undiagnosed – hence untreated -- depression. I couldn’t see a path for me in music; I just remember being a miserable and frustrated young man. Professionally speaking, all the self-employed work that I was now doing, didn’t seem to take me anywhere. All I wanted was better resources to develop my knowledge, to produce meaningful work, to teach music in a more professional environment, to feel like I was doing what I was meant to do. My closest friends – some of whom were musicians – would often tell me “you shouldn’t be here; this is not the place for you, you need to leave this country and find a place where they will value your work.” I know they said these things to encourage me, but it often had the opposite effect. Those were difficult days and, in my depression, I had pretty much given up.
THE KIDNAPPING
On a sunny Tuesday afternoon, July 13, 2004, I was driving my car from Niterói to São Gonçalo (typically, a 30-min drive) when my car was aggressively intercepted by another vehicle on the highway. The vehicle turned abruptly in front of me and the driver slammed the brakes; we both came to a full stop off-road. I was still trying to understand what had just happened when five men got out of the vehicle and walked toward me, pointing their revolvers my direction. One of the men had a hammer in his hand, with which he hit my right ear after pulling me from the driver’s seat and pushing me to seat in the back. The five men got in my little FIAT, three in the back with me (yeah, four of us!), two in the front, abandoning their car right there, on the side of the road. Within seconds, we were on the road again, as I was being kidnapped in my own car.
I don’t know how long we drove. It could’ve been 15 minutes, maybe 20. If you're familiar with that region, we were getting close to a city called Tribobó, in the outskirts of Rio. In an extreme situation like this, you never know how you will act. I was absolutely calm the whole time. I wasn’t afraid nor scared. I felt resigned to whatever fate came my way. But I was confused about the reason; I wanted to know what was happening. My first thought was that those men were robbers and wanted some money. They shouted questions at me: “What do you do?” “Where were you coming from?” “Where were you going to?” These questions seemed strange. Why would robbers want this type of information? I answered everything calmly: “I am a musician; I was coming from a meeting (maybe a rehearsal, I can’t remember now), and I was heading home.” Since I couldn’t figure out what was going on, I suggested: “do you guys need money? I have my debit card here and a little money in the bank, we can stop at an ATM and I can give you my password…” The driver laughed at me and said: “money?! I’ve got plenty,” while taking a pack of money out of his pocket to show me. This left me even more puzzled. They kept on driving.
THINGS GET TENSE
Things got really scary when the car suddenly left the highway to an unpaved road in the middle of nowhere. After a few minutes driving on this unpaved road, we turned into a non-existent road, driving over the grass and between trees for a few more minutes. At that point, there was no sign of life nearby. We finally came to a full stop. There were no roads around. We all got out of my car. They told me to sit on the ground. One of the men – who seemed to be the youngest – stood next to me, pointing his gun at me while the other four men stripped my car: they emptied the glove box, took out all the tools and the spare tire from the trunk, took out the carpets, the fire extinguisher (required in Brazil). They even searched through the engine.
In the meantime, they kept asking me questions: “what do you do for a living?” “I’m a musician,” I replied. “What do you play?” “I play the piano.” “Where do you play?” “At the First Baptist Church in São Gonçalo,” which I figured was a better answer than the more honest “I’m self-employed, I play wherever there’s a gig.” In any case, I was telling a lie because at that point I hadn’t played at that church in a couple of years.
I don’t know how long this lasted. I just wanted to be back home, but this ordeal was taking a long time. Things were very tense; they certainly didn’t seem to be ordinary robbers. Why would they be wasting so much of their time with me if they didn’t even want money? They were stressed out, and shouted a few times. I sat there feeling strangely calm. A famous Brazilian comedian, Jô Soares, once described this feeling as “the calm that only despair can bring” (maybe he was just paraphrasing Bram Stocker: “Despair has its own calms”). Whatever their deal was, they wouldn’t tell me. And they didn’t seem to find what they were looking for in my car.
THE LAST THOUGHT
They were visibly frustrated, and the time to finish the job finally came. I’ll be very careful to tell you exactly what happened and how. One of the guys who had asked me most of the questions, finally nodded at the one who was watching me, as if to say “go.” My watcher, who was standing next to me, looked at me and said “ok, man, put your head between your legs,” and took a few steps to position himself behind me with his gun directed at the back of my head.
Let me take a little pause here to mention a more intimate detail. In those brief seconds, I was able to take a quick look at the landscape around me, before putting my head down. Have you ever thought what your last thought would be before you died? I never shared with anyone what mine was, but since this has become a full cathartic text, I’ll share it with you: in my last look at the landscape, not seeing roads or people around, my only thought was “how will my mom find me here, in the middle of nowhere?” I didn’t say this out loud, of course, it was just my last thought. I should point out that I didn’t live with my mom at the time; in fact, I had already left her home in the mid-1990s, but I couldn’t bear the thought of my mom looking for me on a “missing person” list. I never told her about this; I was very careful not to give her too many details about this story back then.
So, I silently put my head between my legs. No crying, no fussing. Whatever…
MUSICIANS’ UNION
I promise you that I’m not embellishing this story. What happens next – and the timing of it – feels like something we’d see in a movie, and probably laugh at how unlikely this would be “in real life.” It was exactly at that moment that one the men yelled to everyone: ”hey, he is really a musician.” Everyone stopped what they were doing. I looked up at him. “He is a musician?” replied the guy who was about to kill me. I responded loudly and somewhat annoyed: “I told you I was a musician.”
In their search for something in my car, one of the men found my Musicians’ Union card, hidden somewhere in my wallet. Now, the story behind my membership in the musician’s union is another interesting one (definitely not as dramatic) and I’ll write about it someday. I had been performing at theaters and nightclubs, and a bandmate had advised me to join the union to avoid some sort of trouble at certain venues; so, I joined the union sometime in my teens. I don’t think that union card had ever had much use for me, aside from saving my life that day.
WHAT WAS GOING ON?
Immediately after the “revelation,” the men put everything back in the car and told me to get in, this time on the driver’s seat. With everyone in the car again, they directed me to drive from the grassy area to the unpaved road, then, about one block before reaching the highway, they told me to stop. One of them said to the others “there’s our car,” which was parked along the street waiting for them. It didn’t look like the car they had abandoned on the highway – and we were far from that original place -- but at that point, that detail didn’t matter to me, I just wanted to get out of that place.
They got out of my car and began walking toward their waiting vehicle. The guy who had the hammer said to me “sorry about your ear, pal;” my ear at this point was swollen and had turned black. The “boss” – the one who had driven my car and seemed to be leading the whole operation – was the last one to go. He shook my hand (I kid you not) and said “I’m sorry, pal. We thought you were a cop who killed one of our friends. Make sure you don’t file a police report about this.” My response to him was “sure, I won’t. Thank you very much; thank you; thank you,” while shaking his hand tightly.
I drove back home feeling very numb inside. It’s hard to describe the feeling. I cancelled my debit and credit cards, just to realize later that the cards were all still in my wallet. They really didn’t intend to rob me. I was scheduled to play a gig that evening with a friend, singer and trumpeter Eliezer Leite, coincidentally, at the First Baptist Church in São Gonçalo. I showed up for the gig, though I can’t remember almost anything about it.
A few days later, I talked to a good friend of mine who was a cop in Niterói – not to file a report, but just to vent and to hear an expert opinion. He was quite shocked about my final dialogue with my kidnapper. “Did he say that they confused you with a cop?! Dude, you should be dead!” Well, tell me about it.
20 YEARS
I’m writing about this because today is the 20th anniversary of that event. Many of us experience life-changing situations: a serious illness, an unbearable loss, a traumatic experience; these certainly leave a mark in how we live our lives after the fact. As I grow older, I feel immense gratitude for the extra time given to me and for the blessed life I‘ve lived ever since. It’s hard to overstate how much everything I do today is informed by my constant sense of awe and gratitude. That event led to big changes in my life: I had to make very difficult decisions, I left my old life behind, moved to another city, left my old friends, isolated myself, worked on new skills and set new goals, went through a lot of painful self-examination. There were some very dark days and very few people around to help (my good friend Wagner was at times my only listener, for which I’m grateful).
If you met me in the past 20 years (probably the vast majority of those of you reading this): friends, colleagues, students, collaborators, family (even my wife and children!), I want you all to know how grateful I am for the chance to have met you. I’m also glad to have this and many other stories to remind me of what really matters in our beautiful and fragile lives. It’s great to be alive; it’s great to be here and now.
Cheers!
-Cassio