Sadly I was never kidnapped
while lost in the aisles at K-Mart or while looking under rocks in the stream behind the Esso or while waiting in line at McCrory's 5 & 10 to buy a baby turtle. I've waited for decades to be kidnapped and it's never seemed so distant a dream. Sometimes I stand by the ATM an extra few minutes, flipping through a thick stack of twenties. Nothing. What has kept you so long? There were a few times when I thought I had been kidnapped, after I had fallen asleep in a car and awakened somewhere else. But then I always came to my senses and realized that I hadn't been kidnapped at all but had been dragged to some godforsaken tractor pull or greased pig chasing contest or the Joie Chitwood Thrill Show starring some death-defying dipshit in a Dodge Charger soaring through a ring of fire on two wheels. Real kidnappings seldom progressed to this degree of torture.Sometimes I go to the airport with an empty suitcase and tell the chauffeurs holding the little name signs that "Yes, I'm Smith" or "Over here, I'm Malapropodov." And when we're stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway I inform the driver that I am not Malapropodov and that he has kidnapped me. "What are your demands?" I ask. "You'll never get away with this." But then again, the demands for my ransom would probably something far too embarassing. "Put me on the cover of next month's Tiger Beat or I'll slit this jerk's throat," the scraggly voice would snarl over the phone to whichever loved ones the police could muster on such short notice. Or else: "Fuck money. All we want are dental dams. Send a crate of them or we give this guy a Happy Ending. And you wouldn't want that." Click.
And of course you're never kidnapped by the people you'd most want to be kidnapped by--women with few morals and even less resistance--so perhaps it's all for the best. Most of all, I had hoped to get kidnapped by visitors from other worlds who--in their lack of famiarity with the species--would mistakenly think me an adequate representative. They'd transport me to some intergalactic wildlife habitat that would, in their eight eyes, be the perfect replication of a typical earth environment. Twice a day I would be thrown a bucket of Halls Mentholyptus, the "food" they pried from my mouth after I was kidnapped. Later they would return with a mate for me, although I'm not sure Linda Lavin was such a sound choice. But as you might well imagine I wasn't kidnapped at all but left sitting on my back porch on a lawn chair, staring up into the starry black clusterfuck of the universe.
Thirty years later I still hope to be kidnapped from whatever this is that my life has become. So if you happen to see me being pushed headlong into the side door on an idling van by strippers, or aliens, or alien strippers, just turn your head, whistle, and walk the other way.
Copyright 2006 max jukes and Brian Edward Hack. No reproduction or other use of this material without the expressed written permission of the author.
Labels: Happy Endings, Kidnapping, Loneliness, Pathetic Cries for Help
posted by max jukes @ 8:10 AM
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