The Chris Sartinsky Memoirs: Chapter Nine: Kidnapped

The transition to high school was easier than I had expected it to be. Although in middle school I was never as low on the social ladder as I had feared, there was always an anxiety and deep feelings of insecurity and inferiority. As ninth graders among hallways of older kids who towered over us all, any feelings of social hierarchy melted away. We were all in it together now.

Much of this camaraderie should be credited to my high school, who tried to match the four grades against each other as often as possible. Pep rallies, hallway decorations contests, costume days, battle royales and the like were held every three weeks or so to bring the grades together, pit them against one another and then pit the participants against the slackers who brought the rest of the grade down. I was as enthusiastic an ‘03 supporter as you could find, often spearheading the efforts to topple the rest of the school and shaming freshmen who did not share my rabid obsession with victory.

I initially became something of a cult hero among my class for my ceaseless efforts, but my enthusiasm did not translate into results. We perennially came in last place but for one time when we came in third because the sophomore class hadn’t really tried (they never really tried, but somehow they always ended up beating us anyway). By late September, I was already on the outs. There was a kind of quiet coup and suddenly I found a new leader had taken my place—a girl whose name I forget. She was outwardly cheery, but she always seemed strained, like on the inside she was always taking things just a little too seriously. When our homecoming float, a robotic Spartan beheading a papier-mâché Knight (historically inaccurate, but meant to represent our triumph over our hated rivals at Bristol Eastern) came in fourth despite days of single-minded effort, she slit her wrists in the bathroom outside the library. She had done a pretty crummy job of it, but being ignorant of such matters, she thought suicide must be a longer process than she had originally thought and was found waiting patiently for death, absent-mindedly picking at the scabs that had already hardened along her veins. All competitions planned for the rest of the year were promptly cancelled.

I suddenly found that all the energy I had been expending on our intra-school competitions was directed nowhere. I had more free time than I knew what to do with, so I began wandering around town sketching foliage. I was terrible at it. I couldn’t draw even the simplest thing to save my life, so I don’t know why I started with something as impossible to recreate as leaves. It was kind of a peaceful hobby, but it made me more angry than anything.

It was the first of November and it felt exactly as the first of November should. After the warm September and mild October, there was a bite of cold to the air. I still love this day, the first day when the temperature is uncomfortable enough that you have to think about it every second you’re outside, when you can’t forget you’re away from some kind of comfortable climate-controlled bubble, when you can really feel the weather for the first time after months of forgetting about it. I was sketching along Route 69 a few miles from my house when a U-Haul truck pulled over alongside me. A man jumped out of the passenger seat and punched me in the ribs, which hurt a lot. He grabbed me and threw me in the back of the truck and jumped back into the passenger seat, I assume, and we drove off. They couldn’t see me back there, and in retrospect, I probably could have escaped or I could have at least given it a shot, but I had kind of always wanted to ride in the back of a U-Haul truck so I just sat there.

They brought me to a small one-room cabin somewhere and it was only then that I really realized that I had been kidnapped. They told me to write my name, address and phone number on an index card. I kept the pen they gave me and I still have it today, as a kind of memento. It’s just a Bic ballpoint, so I have to keep it apart from my other pens so I don’t accidentally use it.

They came in and out a lot at strange times. At the time, I liked to think that they were trying to throw me off psychologically so I couldn’t outsmart them or fight back or anything, but they were probably just busy. They didn’t speak to me and they always looked at me with suspicion at best, and often as a kind of burden, but I can’t really complain about their treatment of me. They fed me, gave me anything I asked for, made sure I was comfortable. They mostly fed me TV dinners, which I quite liked. Even after I had been freed, that’s all I wanted to eat for months and I can still put away quite a few of them. I especially liked the chicken parmigiana they gave me with the little piece of buttery garlic bread. Once every few days, they even cooked me a real meal with the small kitchenette in the corner of the kitchen, with bread and salad and dessert and everything. They weren’t great cooks, but they were good.

I was there for two days before I had any idea what they had planned to do with me. I was sitting alone in the cabin doing some homework (they had retrieved my textbooks and a week’s worth of assignments from my teachers at my request, presumably through some intermediary) when I heard the two of them talking about it outside. From their conversation, I picked up that they had just gotten into contact with my parents and were formulating their ransom request. One of them pointed out that my father was mayor so they should be able to milk him for a huge cash-in, a couple hundred thousand dollars even. The other said that they two of them should not get greedy and insisted they ask for no more than five hundred dollars.

I was a little bit insulted by this second suggestion. I thought surely I was worth more to someone than five hundred dollars, but the first kidnapper started to come around that they shouldn’t ask for any more. They phoned in their request and I was a little stunned. I would later learn that they were not career criminals but only a couple of guys who had a small debt to pay off, and apparently I was part of their scheme to get back in the black. But I didn’t know this part of the story and I was, as you may remember, a teenager at the time, so naturally I thought that I was just a horrible hostage that no one could ever love who was worth no more than five hundred dollars and would probably be given away for free eventually if no one came to claim me right away.

The other rationale for this low ransom, which I didn’t piece together until later, was the kidnappers figured that if they kept the ransom low enough, my parents would just pay it and take me back rather than go through some anguished process of trying to track them down and rescue me the hard way. The cost to the taxpayers would probably be greater than the five hundred dollars anyway, and my father being the mayor, he was probably in a good position to raise the money for himself. This would be no trouble at all, they convinced themselves. Unfortunately, they didn’t know my father, who was almost as principled as he was cheap. The idea of paying two despicable kidnappers for his kid back was unfathomable to him, and I’m still not sure which part of the equation was the most objectionable. He has never hesitated in telling me it was the five hundred dollars and that he probably would have paid if they had asked for fifty or even seventy-five, but I think that’s just the kind of thing he always told me to make sure my head never grew too large.

So the kidnapping became a kind of sensation in Burlington and, although I wouldn’t know this until later, my story was being told across Connecticut. I was even mentioned in the New York Times. Hoping to drum up support, my father told everyone that the kidnappers had asked for five hundred millions dollars, which no one really believed but everyone pretended to believe for his sake. The consensus was of course he couldn’t pay these villains that much money, not just because there wasn’t that much to be had, but because who could think of giving in to the demands of criminals! The kidnappers wrote a scathing letter to the editor of the Hartford Courant insisting that the ransom had been five hundred dollars all along and saying some pretty terrible things about my father, but it was never published because at the time it was believed to be a fraud. But I heard them writing it and even contributed a line or two.

The whole thing went on much longer than anyone had imagined. The kidnappers were panicking because their debt was starting to accrue interest. They briefly thought of asking for three hundred or, alternately, seven hundred dollars, but figured no one would go for that. They also thought they should just cut their losses and drop me off somewhere but they never agreed to that either. One morning when I was alone, I was pretty bored and walked up to the front door and found it was locked from the inside, but not from the outside, so I was free to leave. So I did. I walked back home to find my father conducting another press conference on the front lawn. I walked in the door behind him and no one seemed to notice until I met my mother in the kitchen and she brought me outside and announced with great joy that I had escaped. I was asked who my kidnappers were and I gave them the names of two teachers at school I didn’t like. They were arrested that afternoon in the middle of teaching classes. They were acquitted after a few weeks, of course, because there was no evidence, so there was no lasting harm done. I was in hot water for a little bit, but I got myself off the hook by claiming that I hadn’t really gotten a good look at them and I had gone through a stressful time and had been kidnapped, after all, so how are you going to blame me? For the most part, I was forgiven and the whole thing was forgotten, though one of the teachers held a grudge and gave me a D+.