In a statement published in Kerrang !, Max Cavalera – who is the guest on this Wednesday's Wikimetal Happy Hour – told the chilling story about when he went on vacation to Jamaica with his wife, Gloria , and the two experienced a true nightmare.
Between 2002 and 2003, the couple decided to relax at the home of a friend named Mark and asked an acquaintance of his to guide them on a tour. According to Max, an incident occurred on the day of their first meeting, and this guide was unable to meet them. Max and Gloria couldn't be notified because they were on a plane, and when they landed in Jamaica, they were met by two unknown men who, according to Max, introduced themselves as friends of the guide and had their names on a sign – misspelled.
According to Cavalera, the two men overheard his friend's conversation with the guide when the guide called Mark to say he couldn't meet the couple. The two strangers allegedly drove the Cavaleras around town in a white van and took them to buy marijuana at Gloria's request in "a horrible place in the ghetto."
Unaware that they were in danger, Max and Gloria allowed the two men to sleep in their hotel room, believing they were their tour guides who would take them on a tour the next day. According to Cavalera, both displayed suspicious behavior, such as asking the price of some of the musician's personal items and not knowing how to use the television remote control.
“We went to sleep and the phone rang at five in the morning and it was my friend. That's when all hell broke loose,” Cavalera recounts. He said, 'You guys are in great danger right now! These guys aren't my friends. My friend is in the hospital with his son and these guys are thieves! You need to get rid of them and you need to do it in a way that doesn't anger them because they could hurt you!'”
“I went to check on them and one of them was sleeping with a huge hunting knife near his head. I thought, 'Shit! This is bad!' and they were starting to wake up, so Gloria said, 'Go talk to them and don't act any differently.' I went into the room and asked, 'Hey, what's the knife for?' and he made up some nonsense about cutting sugarcane, but I was thinking, 'That's not it. I know perfectly well what that knife is for!' It was very scary.”
Max Cavalera recounts that Gloria managed to alert security via a silent alarm button in the room, and the guards began arguing with the two strangers in the official Jamaican dialect. Eventually, both were taken into custody and brought to the police station, but Max and Gloria had to travel in the same car as the two men to give their statements.
“They took us to the chair and it was a ghetto jail, not a place you wanted to be. Very disturbing,” Cavalera recalls. “I just kept thinking, ‘Why are we in a police station in Kingston on our first day of vacation?’ They never confessed they wanted to kill us, but they definitely wanted our things and they were very, very weird.”
“Despite everything, I identify with Jamaica because it’s similar to Brazil in many ways,” Max states. “There’s a lot of poverty, and people would do anything for a pittance. People try to sell you things from the moment you step outside the airport, saying things like, ‘I’m Bob Marley’s cousin, I’ll take you to his house!’”
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