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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