When Iowa college
students began receiving anonymous letters referring to
them as “duclods” and darkly alluding to their
bisexuality, one recipient became obsessed with
finding the sender’s identity.
As early as 1992,
students at Grinnell College, a small liberal arts
school in Iowa, began receiving strange, anonymous letters
in the mail. The letters contained homemade greeting
cards with crudely drawn pictures—men crawling
on the ground, toilets and trash cans, twin closet
doors—and jokes that didn’t make any sense.
Q: What would a duclod like about the land of
the giants? A: Standing in two closets without
touching either knob.
In one mysterious
letter the sender defined the made-up word
duclod as the fusion of two words, dual and
closeted, meaning a person who hides his or her
sexuality from both gay and straight people. Another
letter described the duclod as “bisexual,
homophobic, heterophobic, confused.”
The letters were
always sent in groups, from four to seven cards reported
at a time. They were always postmarked from different,
seemingly random parts of the country and always sent
during school breaks. Mostly, the letters targeted gay
and bisexual seniors. Sometimes they were sent to the
student’s school address; sometimes home, possibly in
an effort to out the student to his or her parents.
That’s all
anyone knew for 14 years.
Spring 2004
I receive my own
duclod letter during spring break of my senior year at
Grinnell. There’s no return address, but it’s
postmarked Hartford, Conn.* My address is scribbled on
the front in big, rough block letters, a style that
might be called “serial killer.” Inside the
envelope is a piece of paper folded like a greeting
card. Inside the greeting card are sheets of paper
with photocopied text running crooked off the page. On one
side, a strange message: “if you like shaving
cats, try shaving crayons.” On the facing side:
“it takes two hands to handle a duclod.”
I’m alone
in my small studio apartment; my friends are all out of town
on break. Reading the letter, I feel a tightness in my
muscles and heat on my face, like when I have a close
call on the highway or when a man brushes by me the
wrong way. How does he know me? I live off campus, and
my address isn’t listed in the student directory.
I turn on the TV
and all the lights.
I’m
somewhat familiar with the duclod mystery; it’s
Grinnell’s rural legend. A friend and a few
acquaintances of mine have received letters, and I
think they’re harmless, probably nothing more than an
elaborate, albeit malicious, joke.
The next morning
I walk to the student affairs office. The director
shakes her head and shows me the letters they have on file,
from the crisp white letters of recent vintage to the
aging, creased pages from the early ’90s.
“These are
just the ones reported,” she tells me. “We
have no idea how many kids are too scared to
tell.”
She fills me in
on everything they know, which isn’t much. The head
of campus security has been investigating the case
with no luck. The Grinnell police have been informed.
She tries to take my letter for the file, to put it
with the others, but I hold on to it. It was sent to me,
it’s mine.
I call an old
friend, Fred, who I know received a letter a few years ago
(even though he’s straight). He wrote an article
about it for the school newspaper in February 2001. He
tells me what he knows. The letters were often sent
from Boston and Worcester, Mass., and Memphis, Tenn. For
years there has been duclod graffiti in the
men’s bathrooms around campus. "Duclods die
twice" was scrawled on a wall in the library basement.
Fred talked to the head of student affairs, the
resident-life coordinator, and the security chief.
They all had their own pet theories. He had to be a
student—how else could he know who the bisexual
students were? He had to be a Grinnell staff
member—he had been sending letters for over a
decade. “He” had to be a group of students, a
sort of sick club, that passed down the tradition as
older members graduated.
Fred also tells
me I can find duclod jokes on the Internet, that someone
named Chamo Howards posts them in random online forums and
on message boards. I look online and find more jokes
and pictures: Find a duclod with a dingdong that
goes ticktock and tell them they’re
closets!!! I’m infuriated that someone
accusing others of being closeted uses the anonymity
of the Internet and the postal system to harass. I click
from page to page, from joke to joke, without
discovering any new information about Chamo.
It takes me two
years to find him.
“Chamo
Howards” isn’t his real name, of course.
Neither is “Red Kuller,” “Gordon
Craft,” “Pilldown Man,” “Chillee
Ugum,” “The Quarft,” “Professor
Xlhoip,” or “D. Trapper.” I track him
through dozens of fake names and Web sites created
over the last decade. Each name leads me to a new batch
of sites, a new set of data containing more leads. Each new
page reveals something darker about the man I am
looking for. He is obsessed with bodily functions; his
favorite drawing is a crude toilet seat with beans
balanced on top. Each discovery makes me more obsessed with
finding him.
I slowly begin to
recognize patterns—the way he constructs sentences,
his diction, the types of sites he visits, his calling
cards. A picture of a jack-o’-lantern. Puns
that don’t quite work. Posts at 4 or 5 in the
morning.
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