Kidnapped (Just Kidding!)

There was a moment when it felt real. I wish I could tell you the exact time, but I was stuck in a frigid basement and they had taken my watch, along with everything else I was carrying when they grabbed me. I think it was around 3 a.m., but I’m only guessing. It felt like someone had torn open the minutes between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. and stuffed ten more hours inside. I was not on regular time. I was on Being Kidnapped time, which lasts far longer. Call it 3 (b)a.m.

I was duct-taped to a chair in three separate places: at my ankles, my thighs, and my chest. There were two henchmen flanking me. Romeo, on my right, was a black guy in a ski mask and no shirt. His torso was larded with tattoos and tiny pockets of baby fat, as if he’d never picked up anything heavier than five pounds. To my left was a white dude named Cody, who sounded like every grown man named Cody.

In front of me was a table piled with assorted instruments of torture—a blowtorch, a drill, a stun gun—plus two glaring floodlights. Romeo had removed my blindfold temporarily so that I might have the privilege of staring directly into those floodlights. Behind the floodlights was nothing but darkness, and a voice.

“So, Drew,” I heard a man say, “I think it’s time that we stopped bothering to make you comfortable.”

Would You Like Fries with Your Abduction? Extreme Kidnapping’s Adam Thick e-mailed me a series of questions to tailor my experience, and I wrote back with answers filled in. Here is an excerpt of that exchange.—D.M.

Could you be slapped if it came to that?

Oh sure. Count me in on slapping.

Verbal abuse?

You bet.

Waterboarding? Stress positions? Stun gun? Fire?

I’ve never been waterboarded, but it sounds horrible. I guess we could maybe explore it. I dunno about a stun gun. Probably not.

Beaten with a trout? Battered with a summer sausage? I’m not kidding.

Oh sure. Can I eat the summer sausage when you’re done?

Piranha?

HOLY SHIT. I guess so. Just don’t have them actually bite me.

Duct-taped to a wall off the ground?

Probably not.

Suspended from the ceiling? Are you flexible enough that you could be stuffed into a closet or a confined space for a while?

Please don’t stuff me into small spaces.

Any phobias? Allergies?

No allergies that I know of. I ain’t telling you my phobias, because I’m a pussy.

Romeo slapped me hard across the face, much harder than I had been slapped all night. Then he shocked me with a stun gun. Then Cody doused me with cold water, which was the worst part by far. When you get hit with a stun gun, it lasts a second. When someone throws cold water on you, it makes you miserable for hours. I hadn’t thought about cold water before this. I had thought about guns and billy clubs and knives. It never occurred to me how desperately I would want to stay dry. Now I would have gladly taken another jolt from the stun gun in exchange for a fresh T-shirt.

“I know this was originally meant to be a fake kidnapping,” the voice said.

That’s right.

“And I know that you guys did your homework on me, and that you know I went to prison for a while.”

I do know that.

“But there are other things about me that you don’t know, Drew. And the reason you don’t know them is because you never asked.”

Oh shit.

That was the moment it felt real. That was the moment I was paying for.

I. Planning

I had to fly all the way to Detroit to get kidnapped. Extreme Kidnapping is a company operated by Adam Thick, an entrepreneur and convicted counterfeiter from Oakland County, Michigan. Thick founded Extreme Kidnapping in 2002 after being inspired by the old David Fincher movie The Game. (SPOILER: It was all a game!) For $500, Adam and his crew will abduct you at gunpoint and hold you hostage for four hours. A thousand bucks gets you ten hours, along with a bit of customized sadism. GQ was curious to see what $1,500 would buy me.

If it strikes you as obscene that people would pay to be kidnapped at a time when it happens routinely to other people for real, the fact is that we live in an age when a normal life simply isn’t enough for many Americans. If you watch enough movies and TV (as I do), you end up yearning for a life that is more cinematic than blissful. Experiences are the newest, hottest luxury items. I looked at it like I was paying for a memory implant, Total Recall-style. But the one thing that didn’t make sense to me was how Adam could pull off the trick of making a kidnapping feel real when his client knows it’s not.

As with any pricey upscale service, you have many choices for your Extreme Kidnapping. You can even select your kidnapper. Adam offered me the standard goons, or I could choose a team of Elite Girls—sexy girl kidnappers who wear stripper platforms and microskirts. I declined the Elite Girl squad because (a) I’m married, (b) getting kidnapped by sexy ladies isn’t exactly realistic, and (c) I’m not an idiot. Clients probably hire the Elite Girls thinking it would be awesome, only to find out that the girl kidnappers are ten times more sadistic.

I was also offered a torture menu (see right), from which I made my selections with little rhyme or reason. I should have had a torture sommelier there to guide me. I told Adam it was okay to “explore” waterboarding, but I said no to being hit with a stun gun. I have no idea why I found one more acceptable than the other.

We also discussed the use of a safe word. Adam noted that some clients forgo a safe word so that they won’t be tempted to use it. I gave him a safe word anyway, because—as the old saying goes—it’s better to have one and not need it than to need one and not have it while a hungry barracuda feasts upon your exposed scrotum. Also, choosing a safe word is even more fun than choosing a name for your fantasy football team. I went with fidelio.

Finally, we needed a proper backstory—an explanation as to why I was being pretend-kidnapped, and what exactly my pretend kidnappers wanted from me. Extreme Kidnapping suggests a few time-tested story lines. You can be a secret agent. You can be a scion to a massive corn-oil fortune. I chose “mistaken identity,” in which I am mistaken for another, far richer Drew Magary, my own personal Big Magarybowski.

As Adam and I went over the particulars of my kidnapping, I found my Stockholm syndrome kicking in ahead of time. Adam was a candid, gregarious fellow over e-mail. He even forwarded me an article he wrote for Sex Appeal Magazine about the particulars of his counterfeiting scheme. (Along with a partner, Adam printed over $360,000 in phony $20 bills and was convicted in 2006.) I was ready for them to come and get me.

II. Abduction

I checked into a $55-a-night dump located right off of Dixie Highway in the northern Detroit suburbs. It’s the kind of place a car salesman moves into after his wife has kicked him out of the house. The bedspread looked like it was covered with generations of old cum. They couldn’t kidnap me fast enough.

The only commonality between this photo and GQ’_s fake

kidnapping: the blindfold._

I texted Adam my room number and the color and make of my car (red Ford Fusion) and told him I was going to go take a walk to get something to eat. All I got back in response was an ominous k. After dinner, I texted Adam again, this time to tell him I was going to a bar nearby called the Lion’s Den. Again: k. I eased the Fusion into the back of the lot—away from prying eyes—and when I turned around, I saw a grubby red SUV idling beside a row of parked cars. But then it peeled away. I walked next door to Pearle Vision and texted Adam.

I’m standing behind the Pearle Vision now! I thought the red SUV might be you!

No answer. I texted again.

I guess I’ll go into the Lion’s Den?

This is too much talking, he texted back. Do what you want.

I got my drink. The moment I got back to my car, the red SUV returned, and two men jumped out carrying what were obviously, even to a rube like me, fake Smith Wessons. This was it! I couldn’t have been more excited. I felt like someone was driving up to tell me I won a sweepstakes. That good vibe went away in a matter of seconds.

“Get in the fucking car,” one of them shouted. This was Romeo.

They pushed me into the car and slapped a pair of cuffs on me. Then they blindfolded me with something that looked like one of those sleepy masks you wear on a flight overseas. I felt a fake Smith Wesson dig into my side.

“Don’t you fucking move.”

But I did move. They hadn’t put on my seat belt, which I found irresponsible. So I reached for it and got a smack in the head.

The Five Worst Songs to Have a Kidnapper Play for You on Repeat __

1. “Blow Me (One Last Kiss),” Pink

I know this to be true because I have a daughter who has held me captive with it for six months.

2. “Rock On,” David Essex

Not only horrible, but you’ll spend hours in your cell saying to yourself, “Wait a second, this song doesn’t rock at all! The fuck?”

3. “Wild Honey Pie,” the Beatles

The greatest band of all time also wrote some of the most annoying songs in the history of the universe, including this fifty-two-second wrist-cutter.

4. “Wonderful Christmastime,” Paul McCartney

That’s right. Two McCartney songs on this list. Strip him of his knighthood.

5. “Cotton Eye Joe,” Rednex

Ask any visiting fan at Yankee Stadium.—D.M.

“The fuck are you doing?” Romeo asked.

Putting on my seat belt.

“I said don’t fucking move.”

But I really should wear a seat belt.

“Man, get your fucking head down.”

He took my head and jammed it into his lap, presumably so that the cops wouldn’t see a blindfolded, handcuffed man in the back of an SUV. I picked up my feet and rested them on the backseat, so now I looked like a toddler sleeping in his mommy’s lap on the way home from the airport. I could feel my head dripping sweat into Romeo’s crotch. I wanted to apologize, but I was actually kind of comfortable.

We drove for thirty minutes and then pulled into EK’s hideaway. Romeo dragged me out the door and hurried me down a flight of stairs and into a dank, filthy, unfinished basement. Romeo jammed his forearm into my throat to keep me from moving while Cody duct-taped me to a chair. “We’ll be back,” Adam said. Then I heard footsteps going back up. This was my home for the next thirteen hours.

III. Captivity

The Eurythmics were the worst part. Extreme Kidnapping employed many psychological tactics on me, the most effective of which was being forced to listen to music all night, in particular a stretch during which “Sweet Dreams” played at least twenty times in a row. After the first ten times, I began to hear through the song, until it became more like a drone, like a yogi chanting a mantra—a really, really annoying mantra.

Between songs, I could hear all kinds of alarming sounds upstairs: a barking dog, huge amounts of liquid sloshing around. They were preparing me for things. Very bad things. A good kidnapper, apparently, must also be a good Foley artist.

Time became elastic. The kidnappers had duct-taped my thighs together, and my testicles were mashed between them, unable to breathe for what felt like hours, so I opened my fly and gingerly pulled out my cock and balls for a little while.

Oh, sweet freedom.

I had three bottles to piss in, but only my Gatorade bottle had a wide mouth, so I spent a great deal of the evening pouring piss from one bottle into another to make sure my master bathroom had enough space. I failed to accomplish this perfectly, so I ended up with piss on my shorts. And on the floor. Lots of piss everywhere.

Eventually, I heard footsteps growing louder. Then I could feel a person near me. Then I could hear breathing. Then I could see someone through the bottom slit on my blindfold. Romeo. He said nothing. Just stood there. Waiting for torture is its own form of torture.

I heard the hiss of the blowtorch. Someone else in the room—Cody—grabbed my cuffed hands and began prying loose one of my fingers. I could feel the heat from the torch and became momentarily alarmed. Even though this all still felt fake, I tend to recoil from blowtorches.

“Gimme your finger.”

Nonononononononono…

He let go and I yanked my hands back. They ripped the tape off my bare skin and led me to a filthy, half-inflated air mattress. They gave me a sip of water, duct-taped my mouth shut, and chained my right leg to a weight bench. Then they left.

More hours passed, and I found myself missing my kidnappers. At least when they were around, things happened. The story advanced. I desperately wished I had brought a friend along, someone I could turn to and say “This sucks” every few minutes.

Finally my kidnappers came back down and led me back to the chair. Romeo ripped off my eye mask and I got hit with the floodlights. Adam sat behind them. This is when my fake kidnapping turned into the world’s lamest improv class.

“Do you know why you’re here, Drew?”

No.

“We know you have money, Drew. You have bearer bonds. You have gold Krugerrands.”

You must have me confused with, like, another Drew Magary with lots of money.

“So what you’re saying is that there’s another Drew Magary with lots of money?”

YES! Totally.

“And we kidnapped the wrong guy?”

Mmm-hmm.

“Well, look, Drew,” Adam said. “We gotta do something with you. So here’s an idea: My friend Percy runs a kind of…I guess you could call it a sex-slave operation. Like a glory hole. You ever heard of a glory hole?”

That one was enough to make me break character. I began laughing out loud.

Oh, you bastard.

“Would you be all right if we took you to Percy?” he asked.

I guess.

“That’s not very convincing.”

Dude, no one agrees to work a glory hole enthusiastically.

_Always stuff a body in a trunk headfirst. It’s much easier

on the back._

“That’s true.”

Everything was unfolding along a clear pattern, until Adam decided to break the pattern.

IV. Twist

“There are other things about me that you don’t know, Drew. And the reason you don’t know them is because you never asked. See, last week I was pulled over with a firearm in my car. That violated my probation, and I gotta report back to prison next week to serve four and a half years of a five-year sentence.”

At some point, in order for the illusion to work, the script has to break down. The kidnapper has to acknowledge that the kidnapping is fake and then create the impression that the fake kidnapping has somehow gone awry. All it takes is a tiny seed of doubt. I had asked to not be stun-gunned—a small break in the rules. And I was suddenly not fully confident that I knew Adam’s entire criminal history. It also dawned on me that, outside of my captors, no one on earth knew where I was. I quietly began to freak out. Control was slipping from me, just a bit, and the doubt began to creep in with surprising ease. I considered blurting out the safe word, but I didn’t, because I was terrified that nothing would happen.

“So you’re gonna call your boss at GQ,” Adam said. He handed me a slip of paper with an account number and a routing number on it. “And you’re gonna tell him to drop $100,000 into that account with that routing number. Are we clear?”

Mmm-hmm.

I looked down at the account number. It was nine digits long.

Aren’t bank-account numbers eight digits long? I think they’re eight digits long. Yes, they definitely are.

And just like that, the moment was over. I was safe, back in the Land of Make-Believe. I was also crazy impressed with my own detective work. [Editor’s note: Uh, actually, Sherlock, account numbers are often nine or even ten digits. But carry on.] All I had to do was get through the rest of the night and put up with any remaining bullshit they had in mind. Adam forced me to leave a message for my editor asking for the money, but I was so tired and cranky that I had to record it three times to make it intelligible.

Later on, after I got back to the airport, my editor told me I did a poor job “selling” my ransom message. Well, excuse me, Lee fucking Strasberg.

V. Release

Early the next morning, my three kidnappers put me, still cuffed and blindfolded, back in the red SUV. We drove to a nearby bank, where Romeo got out to “withdraw” the ransom money. When he came back to the SUV, he screamed out, “We got the money!” and everyone made a nice pretend show of pulling off the kidnapping. They even lifted my blindfold to show me the cash: a stack of hundreds that were clearly fake. There was something oddly innocent about the whole thing. I felt like a little kid playing with his friends. But fourteen hours of playtime was plenty. They drove me back to the motel and kicked me out of the SUV. Cody pulled off my blindfold.

“Get the fuck out of here.”

Inside my room, there was a white envelope on the table by the window. I tore it open and found a note inside:

Dear Drew,

Congratulations, you survived an Extreme Kidnapping! Enjoy your life!

Sincerely,

The Kidnappers

On my way back to the airport, I thought about my night in captivity. And then I thought about an old friend of mine, a high school classmate named Jeff Schilling, who was held hostage in the Philippines by an Islamist separatist group named Abu Sayyaf. Jeff was rescued in April 2001, after seven months in their camp. When I got home, I sent him an e-mail. This is part of what he wrote back:

My gut reactions are: (1) it’s a callous waste of money; and (2) you’ll never have anything close to the “authentic” experience. While I was extremely fortunate to escape, far too many people are not so lucky. After I escaped, another group of individuals, including three Americans, was kidnapped in the Philippines by the same group of terrorists. The FBI called me up and asked if I would be willing to speak with one of the families. The terrorist had claimed they beheaded one of the American hostages. I told the family that until there was confirmation their loved one had in fact been killed, they should presume he was alive. [But] of the three Americans, only one returned home alive….

At the end of my kidnapping, I got a customer-satisfaction survey. Jeff Schilling had seven months of genuine terror. I had one moment of vague fear. One moment was enough. One moment was plenty.

Drew Magary is a GQ correspondent and a staff writer for Deadspin.