A lot of people have been asking me for ages now, "Why don't you answer your fan mail anymore?"
It's true that I used to do my best to answer all my fan mail I'd receive way back in the day, around 1992 or so... unfortunately, I've learned that, for strong reasons involving my own safety, I simply cannot do it anymore.
I was so naive back then. I was never one for writing fan mail to favorites, myself (save for one time, but that's another subject for another day). But I did always used to wonder when I was younger, "Why don't celebrities answer their email more often and on a more personal level?" I mean, it seems so rude when I heard that they wouldn't.
Then I found out myself the hard way.
It is true that I got a lot of nice mail back then, and that I enjoyed answering it. But then, none of the letters I had even received had even actually been negative -- until 1992.
I want to start this off by giving credit where it's due: to this day, whenever I receive mail, I still do get a lot of nice letters, polite and well-meaning notes from people who have seen my work one way or another and want to share with me how much they enjoy it and how much it means to them. Although I no longer answer them personally, it feels genuinely thrilling to get such letters and I am always deeply and genuinely appreciative. It always makes me feel so privileged to know that something I do can somehow do so much to make so many wonderful people like these so happy. I cherish those letters and always save them, as to me they are a beautiful treasure beyond price.
On the other hand... well, they do not always turn out so polite, and certainly nowhere near as well-meaning. I've got an obsessive individual who has been haunting me for something going on two decades now. His name is... well, let's just call him Chip Douglas. You know, after the Jim Carrey character in The Cable Guy. Chip Douglas, the guy with an entire alternate reality floating around in that head of his. This guy, I swear, lives in his own little parallel universe. Claims that I supposedly have a homosexual interest in him; alternately claims that I have shared a homosexual interest with him. I've never met this person before in my life in any social setting.
The only way I knew him at all was when he started writing me fan mail, just as many other readers of my material have done. And I did my best to answer him in warm, encouraging replies, just as I did with everyone who contacted me through my work as I saw it as part of doing my portion of helping people and greening the world. And when he got my phone number from someone else (more on that later) and started calling me, I did the same thing. Eventually he got around to asking if he could drop by. Since my parents and I were in the business of running a food/clothing bank and had folks from all walks of life drop by for encouragement and assistance, we saw no harm in saying sure, drop on by for a spell.
Next thing I know, there's a creepy individual who has suddenly shown up on our doorstep, grimy and with joints falling out of his pockets.
He followed me all over the house in a weirdly leering and bossy manner, and he seriously unnerved both me and my mother, and as soon as we could get him out of earshot we quickly made plans to get rid of him. He had taken a greyhound to get to us, so we immediately drove him right to the bus station since he said he had a ticket back home. Upon arriving there though, he suddely made a huge show of supposedly having lost his ticket and saying that it supposedly meant that he would have to come back home with us, but my mother immediately saw right through it and simply bought him a ticket home herself, telling him that she expected him to pay her back since he had our address. And he looked furious.
I'm sure I don't have to tell you that he never did, of course. But he kept sending letters through the mail, which were getting weirder and weirder by the moment. I have never seen anyone send so many letters through the postal system so fast. I replied once, telling him politely but firmly that I was not interested in having him contact me anymore, and in the meantime (by coincidence) we had moved out of that particular area we had happened to be living in at the time to another state in hopes of finding better job situations for all of us.
Soon after getting to said other state, I had found work, got an apartment, and did all I could to make sure that neither phone numbers nor my address had been forwarded.
But he somehow had managed to locate where I was anyway, and now he was sending packages. You couldn't call them letters, they were way too large; at least an inch thick and contained in humongous mailing envelopes that were colored solid blood red. Don't ask me where
one can supposedly get their hands on package envelopes that are hued solid blood red: your guess is as good as mine. And they were always filled with cartoon illustrations either hand drawn or printed out from only God knows where, and many of them were extremely graphic and sexually explicit. Enclosed within each of these packages was always a letter that was either typed out at the college computer room which he always admitted to always sleeping overnight in on its couch or hand written in printing that was so stringy and spidery that you had to squint just to make out what the heck he was trying to say at all. His letters always went off on these weirdly bizarre and rambling tyrades; he would spend package after package whining and begging and pleading for me to contact him, and then after a couple of weeks or so after he'd realize yet again that I still wasn't responding to him, that I still had absolutely no intention whatsoever of having anything to do with him, then he would change his tune and threaten to either sue me or put a restraining order against me. Yeah, right.
At first I thought all I had to do was simple ignore him and he would eventually go away and leave me alone. And I ended up relocating to new apartments as well, each time not leaving any forwarding information. And each time I would think for a month or two that I was finally rid of him. But then suddenly a fresh new typhoon of packages would arrive in the mail. Worse, family members from all sides were suddenly informing me that he was going berserk calling anyone and everyone who might be related to me and pestering them, often on the phone at odd hours of the night and morning, trying to get them to give him information on me.
Meanwhile, he was somehow also managing to find out who was socializing with me, even if they had only done so once or twice, pulling the precise same stunt on them that he had pulled on my relatives. Many of these were very mature, polite adults whom I was just getting to know, and they had no idea what to do as they were suddenly being called at 2 A.M. in the morning by Chip Douglas. They would quickly think in alarm, "Well, if Craig's the reason he's pestering us, then if we stop talking to Craig maybe this other character will leave us alone." So they would immediately cut me off with only the briefest of explanations and I would lose yet another opportunity to make yet another friend. Precisely as Chip Douglas hoped.
One individual whom I had know at the time (again, more details later) was quite cheerfully listening to Chip Douglas and began repeating what Chip was saying to me. At first I politely said, "I really don't want to hear about it" and "I don't want you to feel like you're getting involved," only to have said individual shock me by saying, "No no, Craig, you don't understand, I don't mind repeating what he's saying at all. Here's what he's saying now." It goes without saying that I ended up cutting said individual out of my life for good, but before I did he did tell me that Chip Douglas was ranting and raving about me and that "he says he's never establishing contact with you again" --- I should be so lucky --- only to have Chip Douglas take the initiative of "re-establishing contact" with a phone call attempt approximately two or three hours later. It goes without saying I'm sure that he somehow always managed to get a hold of my latest phone number despite all my relocations and I eventually made arrangements to get Caller I.D. for my line.
Meanwhile, as all this was happening, Chip Douglas's packages and accompanying letters were steadily growing more and more psychotic. He was now using such terms as, "If I can't talk to you then no one else can talk to you either" and "Are you ready to pay the price for hurting people?" And as the days had stretched out into weeks and grown into three long, unnerving years, the situation was only growing more and more ominous. By 1996 I was deadpan terror when I realized that I couldn't shake the creep who had managed to attach himself to my life so firmly and effectively. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before, and I was completely unprepared. I finally called in the big guns after receiving yet another package in which Chip Douglas repeated for the umpteenth time that "a lot of people say they don't have time for me so I always have to trick them into spending more time with me," and by finally saying what was for me the most horrifying thing of all: he brought up in the same letter the subject of the then-current Michael Jackson scandal and he personally expressed hope that Michael would be found guilty because it would "personally comfort" him and make him "feel better" because he himself had a "fascination with children."
"Please, you've GOT to get rid of this guy!" I begged with tears in my eyes to the local authorities.
Without going into detail, let me just say that part of the solution has been to gather up every last little thing I could that Chip Douglas had sent or said as he has been mailing them and give them to the cops. Back in 1996 there was only so much that could be done, but things are very different now. There are now new laws which have been passed since then to protect people in situations like mine.
God only knows what's going through Chip Douglas's warped head by now, but I know for a fact that he hasn't stopped obsessing about me. Over the years, he has expressed that he "fascinates" over me on an alarmingly frequent basis. He had admitted to wanting to antisocialize me. He has talked of supposedly suing me. He has said several times how much he wants to "track" me down. I'm no expert on psychotic behavior, but at this rate in the mental direction that his communications have been taking I suspect that, if he hasn't done so already, he will start entertaining fantasies of killing me. One of the side effects of being forced to deal with a situation like this is the reoccuring nightmares of such an event.
As of this writing, it's been a little while since I last heard from Chip Douglas. It's been about the usual time period of silence that passes between his "waves of attack," for lack of a better term. But he'll be back. He always does come back. I've come to expect it by now. And when he does, this time the police and I will be ready for him no matter what he tries. And then, hopefully, the nightmare will finally be over.
Friends attempt to comfort me by saying that this comes part and parcel with being a public artist and that it simply means I'm reaching a wider audience. One told me about how she had seen on television an interview with some actor or other, and when this actor was asked, "When did you first realize you were become a star?" he had answered, "When all the weirdos and nut jobs started crawling out of the woodwork, because that's part of it, unfortunately." I had never once believed even once that I would ever have to deal with situations like that. Never once. But, as you will soon see from future entries on this blog as I continue to write regarding what has happened to me during these past two decades, this would hardly be the last time.
I'm shy enough as it is, and being forced to deal with stuff like this makes me even more uncomfortable than ever, lots of times to the point of making me ill. But I'm trying to deal with it the best I can, partly by writing about all of this on here regarding everything I've been having to deal with, as it at least allows my voice to be heard. But somehow, life has changed. I no longer feel at peace with what I do or with my life anymore. This has all been too much. I've been doing my best to take a breather, not easy with my schedule, but I need some kind of change of pace. And there's always the chance that I might one day feel a bit more like my old self and more relaxed.
You just never know.
