Dan Caro doesn’t remember the accident that took his hands and left him scarred.
Still, he wanted to know, so he pieced it together from his parents, paramedics and the doctors who saved his life. They told him it happened in the garage of his Louisiana home, right near the water heater. Somehow, a can of gasoline tipped over, and the water heater’s pilot light ignited the fumes.
That was 1982, and flames engulfed Caro, who was 2 years old.
He died three times in the hospital, he said, and has glimpses in his memory of people standing over him while he was prepped for surgery. From that moment to the time he was 18, Caro underwent 80 reconstructive surgeries to rebuild his nose, his thumbs and the skin that suffered third- and fourth-degree burns over most of his body.
He survived the fire but lost his hands. But that never killed his desire to do something with his life.
Now a professional drummer in New Orleans, Caro will be the special guest as members of the Mizpah Shrine celebrate the group’s 100th anniversary today at Sweetwater Sound. The event is free and open to the public.
Caro was treated for his burns at the Shriners Burn Hospital in Boston. Now, he’s a member and ambassador for the Shrine, a nationwide organization that provides some children who’ve been badly burned with free care.
Today, Caro will talk about his life and play with the Homestead Jazz Ensemble as well as local musicians Jim Steele and Tim Beeler.
“Who would’ve thought there would’ve been a handless drum guy out there?” Caro said in a phone interview.
His parents said he was stubborn even before the accident, and that didn’t change as Caro grew into boyhood and adolescence. He refused to ask for help doing simple things and felt inferior to his peers if he couldn’t do what they could do. If he was forced to ask for help, he felt he was a failure, he said.
It wasn’t until he was 12 that he figured out how to tie his shoes on his own – a pretty insignificant event for most kids, but for Caro it was a monumental moment.
“I knew I was free to live my life,” Caro said.
Hailing from a musical family – his father and brothers played instruments – Caro wanted in on the action. He first tried the trumpet but couldn’t get enough air through the instrument for the right sound.
His father noticed that he liked banging on things, and suggested the drums.
With one reconstructed thumb and no fingers, though, this required some experimentation. For the next month, Caro and his father tried Super Glue, duct tape, cable ties and even bowling gloves in efforts to get him to hold the sticks tightly enough.
One day, they wedged a stick in his thumb and put the other stick in a sweat band on his other wrist.
“It was just phenomenal,” Caro says. “Explosions were going on. It was more than bliss. When I was able to hold the drumsticks, I knew this would be something I’d do for a long time. That was a gateway to a whole new world.”
By the time he was 14, Caro was playing professional gigs around New Orleans, mainly filling in for drummers who couldn’t make a show, he said. While that might seem like a young age to begin a professional music career, Caro noted it’s not unusual for the culture of New Orleans.
Still, at some gigs he would show up and encounter an angry manager asking why a kid with no hands was sent to play the drums.
“It still happens, but it’s happening a lot less,” he said of people’s reactions to his drumming.
Caro recently released a book about his life called “The Gift of Fire: How I Made Adversity Work for Me,” something he’d been wanting to write for a long time. He hopes the book inspires people, to let them know that no matter what afflicts them, there can be a way to live life on their own.
And he credits the Shriners with giving him the chance to do what he does today.
“Basically, it gave me a second chance at life,” he said.
