Growing up in the Weiss house, one of the favorite family games was called Kidnapper.
My father worked off and on during my pre-teen years at a wire factory called Suttle Apparatus. These were very traditional times for the Weiss family. Dad would be up before the sun. He would leave for work in jeans and a button-up shirt with a thermos full of coffee and a classic blue-collar lunch pail.
My mom would get my middle sister and me ready for the bus, which most days of the school year also came before the sun came up, and we would head out as well.
She would stay home with my youngest sister and play the role of traditional housewife.
One of the things that was not traditional about my dad’s working life is that many days he would bring home little prizes that he would get at work. My father has always believed that he was worth way more than what any place was paying him. Therefore, it was perfectly fine of him to compensate his low pay with anything that he found lying around the workplace. This is a belief that I have struggled with my whole life. My family is not known for thievery. That is because we never got caught. My father never stole anything that could be traced back to him, and he never stole anything of such value that the place he worked would even start looking.
From Suttle Apparatus, it was mostly tools and wire. The basic things that one needs around the house and would rarely be missed at the factory.
However, the greatest thing my father ever stole from any workplace was the center point for the game Kidnapper. One day he came home from work with the biggest role of Scotch tape that any of us had ever seen. This industrial tape was bigger around than a basketball and thicker than War and Peace.
We used this tape for everything. It held plastic on our windows in the winter and our fan to its stand in the summertime. I once won a huge Huey Lewis & the News poster at the local carnival. I came home, wrapped the scotch tape into a circle, and stuck the poster above my bed. It stayed there for years.
This tape was a part of my family for most of my life. My father brought it home when my youngest sister was a baby. On the day of her wedding at 22, I saw her crying and walked over to where she was putting up decorations.
She held up a large cardboard cylinder. “The tape,” she said. “It’s gone.”
I held her and felt tears come to my eyes as well.
All of this is what the tape meant to my family, but its main purpose, the thing that we always remembered every time we saw the dwindling role in a cabinet or out in the garage, was Kidnapper.
My sisters and I would beg to play it when we were kids. Any rainy day we were stuck in the house, and even on days when my parents could shove us outside, we would take the tape to my dad and ask him to play the game.
“Now,” he would say as he pulled out his pocket knife and took the large spool from my hands, “this is not just a game.”
We would all lay down on the orange shag of the living room carpet, and he would stand over us.
“There are people in the world who would fucking love to get their hands on cute kids like you guys.” He made sure we were all lying next to each other, and then he would grab my youngest sister’s legs to pull her down so our feet lined up.
“I have to know which one of you can get away the fastest.”
He took the end of the tape and placed it on my white socks. Then, he lifted my feet and started to wrap the tape around my legs at the ankles. He would do this nine or ten times. Then, he would ask, “Is that too tight?”
“No!” I would always shout. A huge smile on my face.
“Damn!” he would say as he grabbed my middle sister’s feet. “I’ll have to wrap Rachael’s tighter.”
We would laugh like he told the greatest joke in the world, and I would secretly wish that he would tape her up tight. She was always my greatest competition in Kidnapper.
“This is practice,” my father continued. “You don’t think some asshole who grabs you off the street is going to go easy on you.”
After taping all of our legs, he had us roll onto our sides and place our hands behind our backs. Coming back to me, he would place the sticky tape on the bare flesh of my wrist and start to wrap.
He did this with all of us and then stood up. We would struggle a bit, but he would always stop us. “Hold on!” he’d say. “The game hasn’t started yet.”
Sometimes he would call my mom in from the kitchen, and they would discuss the merits of taping our mouths closed as well. We would laugh and plead for them not to.
Just about the time I would start to get uncomfortable, my dad would say, “Alright, the first one out of their tape and to me is the winner.”
We all tensed up then, ready to be the first to give my dad a congratulatory hug.
“Ready… go!”
Getting out of the tape was not something that could be done quickly. Usually, the escape part of Kidnapper could last anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours.
There would be a lot of trash talk between Rachael and me. Boasts about how close we were or how far away the other was.
Most of the time, Dad would sit down in his easy chair and smoke a joint. The distinct musk of marijuana permeated the room, and the smoke gathered above us as we writhed across the floor.
Inevitably, one of us would get our hands free from all the squirming and jerking. Most of the time, this would be Rachael.
As soon as I would see her get her arm free, I would go wild. The only way to beat someone ahead of you in a game of kidnapper is to go crazy. I would yank up and down, sliding my hands together, and then pull them apart to stretch the tape.
It rarely caught me up. The first person to get a hand out is almost always the winner. The best I could hope for was that the tape on her legs was stronger than mine and slowed her back down.
Nine times out of ten, Rachael would be the first to my dad for his hug, and he would say, “If any of us ever gets kidnapped, I hope to hell it’s you, sister. Good job!”
I always hated her at that moment. I wanted to be the one who my dad hugged. I wanted to be kidnapped, and my dad would tell the cops, “I expect he’s already escaped by now. Look for him walking back to us.”
At least I wasn’t Dottie. We always had to help her out of her tape. Sometimes she would cry, and Dad would take her into his arms. He would hug her and say, “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Sweetheart. You just make sure that if you ever get kidnapped, Buck or Rachael is with you.”
“Okay,” she would say through her tears.
“That won’t ever be a problem, right kids,” He would pull us all into a hug. “Cause you two are always going to keep your eyes on her, no matter where you are.”
When I tell people about the game, Kidnapper, they are almost always appalled. They look at me like it was borderline child abuse that my father would tape us up and leave us to break out on our own.
“How do you think you will fair if you are ever kidnapped?” I ask them. I know that I have the training and the practice to fair pretty well.
The third of some memoir about my dad as we move closer to Father’s Day. Check out the first two by clicking the images below.
Photo by Karolina Grabowska: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-tied-up-with-tape-on-parquet-4506230/