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The exquisite torture of paying for your own customized kidnap experience
Be careful what you wish for – the future may have teeth. I was sitting in my living room with Brock Enright, a twenty-six-year-old New York artist who plans, executes and videotapes kidnappings for hire. We were strategizing my abduction. “I’m sort of a control freak,”I found myself confessing to the handsome but boyishly creepy Enright. “So I’m looking to confront my fear of chaos. I’m thinking maybe the kidnappers’ indecision and lack of organization are what imperil me.”
“I like that,”Enright said. He gave me a questionnaire that asked me to list my greatest fears: I listed “suffocation,” “drowning,” “slipping in vomit.”He asked if there were any other specific elements I wanted to include. I said it might be “very dramatic” if I were initially approached on the street at an unspecified time and, while held at gunpoint, forced to mask my terror while led through crowded streets. Enright asked if I wanted the pressure of the gun on my back to be theatrical or realistic. I said, “realistic.” And how did I want my ordeal to end, Enright asked. “Well, I don’t need my ear to be mailed to a major metropolitan daily,” I thought aloud. “But it might be cool to have Aaron, this guy I’ve been dating for two months, find me in a duffel bag and rescue me.”
Our scenario now had a beginning and an end; but what about the middle? Many of Enright’s kidnappings have a sexual component; Enright claims that none of the twenty-nine people he’s abducted in the past ten years has ever asked for sex with a stranger, preferring it to be with someone they already know. He asked me, “Do you want to specify anything sexually, or do you want to leave it vague?” I admitted, “I don’t want to work too – as they say in show business – blue. But, that said, I’m generally made very uncomfortable by the presence of an enormous black dildo.”
“I think it could lend a note of interest.”
Among the ways to tell the world “I’m really, really special,” planning your own kidnapping is one of the more elaborate; it makes slashing your wrists and bleeding all over your parents’ bathroom sink look improvisatory and blithe. Six hours after our first meeting. Enright called me to schedule a second meeting and to ask the question that plagues pornographers everywhere (“The black dildo: Is it still a green light?”). Enright and two of his crew members – some of the people who work for Enright are buddies he grew up with in Virginia Beach, Virginia; as early as age fifteen, they used to playfully “kidnap” other schoolmates – came to my apartment with a video camera the night before the abduction. They had me sign a liability waiver and then read it aloud on camera. They also had me designate a code word (“Hibernia”) and a physical gesture (foot shaking), which, during the kidnapping, I could invoke in order to stop all action.
The day of the kidnapping, I tried to go about my daily activities without anxiety. But I was walking amid 8 million potential captors. When I saw a piece of torn newspaper in a recycling bin, I thought, “Ransom note.” I saw a chicken bone on the sidewalk and thought, “Lindbergh baby.”
My first detection of Enright’s presence occurred at 2 p.m., when I saw, a pool of “vomit” at the bottom of the steps; I neatly dodged this lurid calling card, my inner theater critic making a mental note that the vomit’s day-glo fuchsia hue seemed rather vaudevillian. Two hours later, as I left the New York University gym, a man put his left arm around my neck tightly; his right hand, obscured by a jacket, pressed a gun into my back. “Put your arm around me like we’re lovers!” he hissed. Suddenly I was scared. My throat constricted. I was unable to look the gunman in the face. It dawned on me: Not only have I given a group of strangers permission to kidnap me, but I have encouraged them to do it ineptly, and to use a gun while doing it. What wouldn’t Enright do? As a teen, the aspiring cinéaste snuck up on his aunt one day and filmed her while she was sitting on the toilet. Suddenly I was Enright’s aunt, and New York was my toilet.
The gunman guided me into the back of a van, where five masked individuals threw icy-cold water at me, pushed me onto the van’s floor and wrapped my mouth and eyes in duct tape. While binding my feet, one of the kidnappers positioned his posterior directly onto my face; a little voice inside my head said, “I can’t believe I’m paying $1,500 for this.” They stuffed me into a duffel bag. We drove for about thirty minutes, whence I was decanted from the duffel bag and deposited onto a mattress on the floor of a dark, dusty, fifteen-by-twenty-foot basement chamber whose location, per my request, was unknown to me.
The next six hours were very possibly the most frightening six hours of my life. That I could shut down this production at any moment merely by employing my code word didn’t matter. I had suspended my disbelief, I was in the game. After being repeatedly blindfolded and re-bound and gagged by the masked men, I was stripped to my underwear and sub-jected to surprise showers of a variety of liquids – water, beer and maple syrup. A man whom I would come to think of as the Depilator pulled hairs out of my chest. Footage of CNN fashion com-mentator Elsa Klensch vaporting on about Princess Di was played on a loop. ‘A malodorous skinhead licked me. I had to pee into Dixie cups. I was slapped once and manhandled frequently. Some of my bruises would last for a week.
I, like my captors, was oddly silent throughout much of the proceedings, mostly expressing myself through grunting and screaming; however, I did see fit to write two notes (the seminal “Blood circulation. Untie hands,” and the more lyrical “Headache. Head circulation”) and to scream. “Do not put any more fucking duct tape in my hair!” By the end of the evening. I had cried three times. My one ally was a captor – I was quite certain that it was Enright beneath the mask – who spoke in a high-pitched Teletubby-type voice; in a strange reversal of Stock-holm syndrome, this fellow had eyes for me . At one point he lay his body on top of mine, hump-style. At another, he told me, “I’ll do anything you ask me to.”He told me he had fallen in love with me. (“If you really loved me,” I finally told him, “you’d get a washcloth and wipe the maple syrup off my body.”) That Enright, who’d seemed nervous and slightly formal in my apartment, could transform himself into this character did not wholly surprise me; as with most actors you meet, you sense that there are two parts to Enright’s being: a large, warm pool of sentient, moral humanity; and a billboard on a highway reading, simply, WILLING. At one point, an aggressive captor, for reasons unclear to me, screamed at me, “A secret got out tonight!” and then pushed on the swivel chair I’d just been taped to; the chair and I tipped over backward, and my head hit the floor with a thud. Shortly thereafter, I wrote a note to Teletubby/Enright, saying. “This is too intense for me,” and he wrote back, “What part?” I answered, “The violence.”
The next morning, two masked kidnappers and a maskless Enright appeared in my chamber. Enright claimed that he usually “isn’t around” for the kidnappings – clearly a lie – but that something had “gone wrong” (the chair tipping over) the night before. Enright said, “You’re kind of a different client for us because you’re such a bitch: “‘No more tape in the hair!'” I countered that I thought I was going to be kidnapped, not tortured. “You guys are like kidnappers with way too much time on their hands,” “I wheezed. “It’s like being kidnapped by Martha Stewart.” Strangely, even thought I had just passed the most harrowing night of my life, I didn’t like criticizing Enright in front of his crew; he’s formed a kind of family with these sociopaths – a situation seemingly underlined by the fact that Enright wears the Movado watch that his largely absent father was wearing when he jumped to his death last year – and I didn’t want to undermine his authority. But, that said, the repeated tearing of duct tape from my hair the evening before had made me pig-biting mad.
When Enright departed, he left behind a shopping bag; inside was a heavy seventeen-inch-long black dildo called the Rambone. Frantic at the thought of what my captors might do with it, I unraveled the three kinds of tape that bound my now-fifthy pants to my ankles, dragged a cinder block across the room, stood on it and hid the Rambone in the ventilating duct.
That day, the theme of the proceedings seemed to shift from terror to humilition. A highly strained kidnapper wearing a truss of electrical tape hurled the swivel chair against the wall and badgered me into dancing with him. Another cut my underwear off me with scissors while seven other captors applauded and videotaped me. Post-trauma as I was, I mindlessly obliged these gentlemen. Like a senior citizen, I was simply keeping busy.
Earlier that week, the newspapers had been full of stories about a heroic seven-year-old kidnapee who’d chewed through her duct tape and escaped. The idea of trying to escape, and possibly further enraging my captors, struck me as preposterous. That evening, the Teletubby character passed me a note under the door telling me that “the guys” were soon approaching and that I should give him the dildo “ fast ,” so he could hide it. I immediately ran to the other side of the room, stood on the cinder block and reached up three feet or so to-ward the ventilating duct. But I’d slid the Rambone too far back to reach it. So, finding a pencil, I dragged the Rambone forward; first one half appeared, then part of the second half and then wham! , the entire four pounds of it cascaded, snakelike, and whapped me on the face. Startled, I handed it to the Teletubby.
That evening, the kidnappers put a Batman mask on me, blindfolded me, bound my wrists and ankles, taped the Rambone to my right thigh, put me in a duffel bag and deposited me on a bed in Room 81 of a hotel in lower Manhattan. I was awakened seven hours later by my friend Aaron. Aghast, he walked me back to my apartment.
It took me two days to emotionally right myself. Enright called on Sunday, saying he wanted me to tape a statement for the end of the video. I said I was slightly scared of him but willing. He showed up at my place the next day in a black T-shirt bearing a cutesy illustration of a sheepdog. A crew member filmed me talking about the experience. There were two main post-kidnapping sensations, I said. First, what a monstrously selfish act, it is to order your own kidnapping – the look on Aaron’s face when he unzipped the duffel bag was truly Edvard Munch-like. Second, you’d think the aftereffect of simulated kidnapping would be increased vulnerability, or sensitivity to other kidnapees and unfortunates, or an appreciation of the joys of life. No; the noticeable change in me was increased bitchiness. I was uncharacteristically demanding and unpleasant with a cashier at a local bakery; I snapped at a neighbor over a trifling incident in my lobby. The movie Ruthless People , in which Bette Midler plays a harridan who waxes increasingly obnoxious when she’s kidnapped? It’s a documentary.
Enright also wanted feedback about the level of service provided. I praised it highly for its terror but told him that the narrative elements might have been more sustained – the character of the gunman had disappeared after the abduction it would have been richer dramatically had the Teletubby character’s solicitousness toward me created further problems for him. I of course, wanted to know what Enright’s crew had thought of me . He responded, “Everyone thought you were attractive and very fussy.”
I asked him, too, about responsibility. Enright, who has an M.F.A. from Columbia, sees himself as an artist, not a therapist. But given the nature of his work, doesn’t he carry a burden of responsibility vis-à-vis his clients’ psyches? The artist was fairly detached on this topic. He claimed he’s just trying to make a movie and to make sure no one gets hurt, downplaying the responsibility by saying that it’s “the same responsibility that I feel toward another person on the subway, or someone at a bar.” I proffered my theory that ordering your own abduction is a very selfish act. “I can see that,” he said. “But I think about it like sky diving. Sky diving is scary for people around you, too – unless you know a lot about skydiving.”
Having been kidnapped, I felt like I now knew a lot about this other kind of leap of faith. But that doesn’t make it any less scary.

In This Article:
Coverwall , kidnapping

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