Weird Guys: Stalked by an Anonymous Chain Letter

 After I posted my unpublished essay about not bailing a guy out, I started thinking about other strange happenings in my life that had to do with one or more weird guys. One of the weirdest may be the anonymous chain letter that dogged me for years and I never fully understood why. I never obtained any "smoking gun" evidence tying it to a particular person, but circumstantial evidence makes me 99.99% certain it was a particular guy.

I wasn't a person who regularly got cards or letters from friends in high school. I didn't give my address out to anybody. I didn't have much contact even with those of my classmates that lived in the same neighborhood as me, the ones who would obviously know where I lived.

One day I got a letter, stuffed into a small envelope of the size that's roughly six-and-one-half inches by three-and-three-quarter inches, the size that's often used for mailing checks. No return address, and a Santa Ana postmark that didn't mean much, just that it was postmarked in Santa Ana, not necessarily that the sender lived in Santa Ana.

Inside was a poor-quality photocopied chain letter, poorly composed, poorly typed, incorrectly laid out, no signature block, unsigned. It's not like I memorized the thing, but the gist of it was: this chain letter was blessed by the holy somebody-or-other, in the Phillipines, I think it was, and it had been around the world some number of times, and a person who didn't break the chain won a million-dollar lottery and a person who broke the chain got stung by a scorpion and died.

So I guess it was telling me to do what the holy whatever blessed, or get stung by a scorpion and die. That's nice. Looking back, I think of it the same way I think of that magazine article in the 1980's that warned college-educated unmarried women that they were more likely to be killed by a terrorist. So all you nice intelligent girls better not go to college and you'd better get married, because you don't want to get killed by some terrorist, do you?

I threw the letter and envelope away, but my mother saw and insisted I show it to her. She read it and proclaimed, "That's a joke!" Whatever that meant. Then she mercilessly pestered me, giving me the third degree, about how I must know who sent it and who did I give my address to?

No, really, Mother, I don't know and I didn't give my address to anybody. Maybe somebody got my address from school records or the phone book or something. She finally accepted reality. She acted like getting such a letter was proof her daughter was popular, instead of the weird-stalker stunt that it was.

I thought that was the end but--anonymous letters exactly like the first one, in envelopes exactly like the first one, kept showing up. Sometimes years would go by and then one would show up again, sometimes two or more arrived fairly close together.

Eleven or twelve years after the first letter showed up, I moved out of the family home. Some time at my new residence had passed, when, to my horror, a letter identical to all the rest showed up at my new address. I could only think of two people who may have known where I lived back in high school and who also had my new address. Both were talented young men from my drama class, who I'd kept up with because I wanted to keep up with what they might be doing in music and theater. I didn't think either one of them was the type to send a letter like that, but the circumstantial evidence made them persons of interest.

I figured there would be no use to ask either guy outright if he sent the letters. Someone who sends letters anonymously for years isn't going to admit it.

So I guessed it was the guy I'd had the most contact with. I decided to play his game. I put the letter in the same size of small envelope, put no return address on it, and mailed it to him. I figured when he received the letter, he'd keep the chain going and send another letter to me. I'd just sit back and wait for the chain to come my way again.

After two or three weeks, no letter had shown up. So I called him. Without admitting I sent such a letter, I questioned him closely enough that I was satisfied he honestly didn't know anything about it.

That left the other guy. I hadn't actually spoken to him in perhaps ten years. Very occasionally I would try and phone him, get his mother, she'd take a message, and he'd never return the call. The last time I called, though, I'd told his mother what my new address was. Circumstantial evidence said he couldn't be bothered to return my phone calls, or drop me an actual note, but he could be bothered to mail me bizarre anonymous chain letters, like some creepy stalker, for years upon years. 

I hoped I'd never receive another such letter but I did. Previously I'd always assumed why bother complaining to the post office, it's an anonymous letter, what good is that going to do. This time, I took the letter and its envelope over to my local post office and told the postmaster I wanted to report an anonymous chain letter. Without a word he took the letter and went back into his office.

I don't know if that complaint made the difference, but I never received another such letter. I was free at last.

Links to "Life After Mother" in Senior Reporter, March 2025-August 2025

 Below please find links and PDF downloads of my monthly "Life After Mother" column, examining estate and probate issues from personal experience, featured in Senior Reporter, for the six months from March 2025 to August 2025.

March 2025:  "Costly Continuing Care Concerns" (p. 38), https://www.seniorreporterofoc.com/mar-2025-vol-51-no-3/

PDF download:  https://www.seniorreporterofoc.com/issues/senior-reporter-bshields-mar-2025.pdf

April 2025:  "It's "Just" Dementia" (p. 30-38), https://www.seniorreporterofoc.com/apr-2025-vol-51-no-4/

PDF download:  https://www.seniorreporterofoc.com/issues/senior-reporter-asandler-apr-2025.pdf

May 2025:  "Spring Cleaning" (p. 30), https://www.seniorreporterofoc.com/may-2025-vol-51-no-5/

PDF download:  https://www.seniorreporterofoc.com/issues/senior-reporter-ldern-may-2025.pdf

June 2025:  "Get Familiar With Online Resources" (p. 30-38), https://www.seniorreporterofoc.com/jun-2025-vol-51-no-6/

PDF download:  https://www.seniorreporterofoc.com/issues/senior-reporter-hwinkler-jun-2025.pdf

July 2025:  "It's Going to be a Rich Cat" (p. 32-38), https://www.seniorreporterofoc.com/jul-2025-vol-51-no-7/

PDF download:  https://www.seniorreporterofoc.com/issues/senior-reporter-jmargulies-jul-2025.pdf

August 2025:  "Go to the Gym with your Girlfriends" (p. 32-37), https://www.seniorreporterofoc.com/aug-2025-vol-51-no-8/

PDF download:  https://www.seniorreporterofoc.com/issues/senior-reporter-rstewart-aug-2025.pdf

I Didn't Bail Him Out

I wrote this submission for the column "LA Affairs" in the Los Angeles Times. It never ran, so I'm running it here. I may post more stories about weird guys in subsequent posts.

I DIDN'T BAIL HIM OUT

“He has a heart condition and we can’t keep him here,” explained the police officer who called me, to ask if I’d bail a certain prisoner out. I had cut off contact with the locked-up guy for longer than I cared to think about. I’d been assuming he was gone for good, at long last, for the last time. I’d broken up with him for the absolute last time perhaps a year or more earlier, but now the police were requesting that I bail the guy out.

Because he had a heart condition, I was told, that I knew nothing about—and the police didn’t have "the equipment to keep him" in the San Pedro facility.

If the guy himself had called to ask, I would have flatly told him, “No,” perhaps sprinkled with some choice words about where he could go and what he could do.

I’d bailed the guy out a couple of years earlier and told him, that was the one and only and last chance he would ever get. I wasn’t spending my hard-earned salary to get his lazy you-know-what out of jail ever again.

Except I couldn’t very well just tell the police that. I had to be courteous to the police, at least. Even though, knowing the guy the way I did, I suspected the mysterious “heart condition” may have conveniently developed just at the very moment when he wanted to get out of the slammer. 

Because I lived in Anaheim at the time, getting to the police station in San Pedro involved literally driving into the next county, in an unreliable old beat-up car, into a scruffy industrial area I didn’t know anything about. This was long before GPS so I had to read a street map, follow scribbled directions, and find my way down an unfamiliar freeway and through the dreary streets to the police station that's near the Port of Los Angeles.

Once I got to the police station, I was told the bail was $500, cash only. My checking account had about $1000 in it—of my money, earned and saved from my employment, and once I paid that bail, I could kiss that $500 good-bye, all for a guy that couldn’t be bothered to get a job and couldn’t even be bothered to stay out of jail.

Those were the days when you could write a check at a local grocery, provided you had a check-cashing card issued by the grocery. I drove around more unfamiliar streets and asked directions until I  found a grocery I had a check-cashing card for. The grocery had a limit of $300 for cashing a check. I needed $500 in cash.

I drove around some more and found a branch of my bank but the bank was closed. The ATM had a limit of $300. To get $500, I'd have to get $300 one way and the remaining $200 another way. Two places, two checks, my money, for a guy I had given up caring about anything that happened to him a long time ago.

I didn’t get the $500 and instead went back to the police station. I don’t remember what I first said to the desk sergeant when I returned, but he somehow appeared to mistake me for someone who was desperate for the welfare of a dear loved one. (As in, “Honey, are you alright?”) Actually the only reason I was going through all this was to be nice to the police, not the guy.

The desk sergeant picked up the desk phone and, in a sympathetic tone of voice, said, “Here, you want to talk to him?”

I picked up the receiver. (This was in the 1980’s, kids, when phones had those receivers you see in old movies and TV shows.) The guy I once did love, fat lot of good that did, on the other end, started in with the same pack of lies I’d heard before and I hadn’t believed the first time. I told him he was the only person who could solve his own problems, nobody else was going to do it for him. I'd told him that before, and a lot of good that did.

He demanded, “Are you going to bail me out?” He said it like a master demanding obedience from a servant.

I couldn’t say he was treating me like an object, because an object, at least, implies some degree of independent existence. I was a mere convenience whose existence began and ended with my usefulness to him. To him, my reason for existing was to be his “Get Out of Jail Free” card, free for him, anyway.

“That’s all you care about, isn’t it?” I asked, returning his demanding coldness with my own.

“Yeah,” he was forced to admit.

I remember I hung up the phone and started to walk out. I remember the desk sergeant protesting, “But we don’t have the equipment to take care of him.”

I turned, smiled, shrugged, and politely answered, “I don’t have the equipment to take care of him either.” Then I added, with as much politeness as I could, “So take him someplace you’ve got the equipment to take care of him, then.”

As I walked out the door I heard the desk sergeant saying something about a prisoner transfer. That was all they had to do. They didn’t have to involve me in any of it.

That was the last I heard from or about the guy. He’d come into my life when I wanted a man who stayed and that was all. Along came a guy whose one lonely virtue was, he stayed. My mother had an expression about such men, “a bad penny that keeps turning up.” Another comparison I’ve heard, is to a bad cold that won’t go away. He was my lesson in, some people, even some you love, you just have to walk away.

Occasionally I Google the guy’s name, not out of any desire or nostalgia, simply to see if the Internet contains any evidence that he ever existed. It doesn’t. Whatever happened to him is beyond the reach of even the Internet, and I’m at peace with that.

  

Strange Exclusions: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Part VI

There's one book called 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die and there's another called 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. I'm not an advocate of the "must . . . before you die" school of thought--there are no "musts" before you die--but I can understand the desire to see what a list of the top 1001 books on your lifetime reading list would look like. What would mine look like? It wouldn't look very much like the bibliography found in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, that's for sure.

For the book's title being 1001 Books it's strange how the introduction appears oriented towards novels--and then, in the actual list, the term "novel" appears to be used rather loosely, and if the goal was to recommend 1001 novels then that should've been the title. I thought I'd find much more of these kind of books:

Classics of World Literature

The Illiad and The Odyssey

The Dialogues of Plato

The Prince by Machiavelli

The Communist Manifesto by Marx

Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau (Walden is listed in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die but Civil Disobedience isn't)

The Federalist Papers

Women's Literature

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

The Second Sex by Simone Beauvoir

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

Twentieth Century Classics

The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence

Churchill's four-vol. History of the English-speaking Peoples

Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl

Born Free by Joy Adamson

The Diary of Anne Frank

From Here to Eternity by James Jones

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Gray

Strange Omissions Considering Various Authors

Mark Twain is represented by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn but not The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (which is almost a pre-requisite for Huckleberry Finn)

Poe is represented by The Fall of the House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum (which is usually classified as short fiction) but not by Masque of the Red Death or The Murders in the Rue Morgue 

Theodore Dreiser is represented by Sister Carrie but not An American Tragedy

Steinbeck is represented by The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men but not East of Eden or Cannery Row or The Pearl or Travels With Charley or Tortilla Flat

Dickens is represented by Bleak House and David Copperfield and Great Expectations and Oliver Twist but not A Tale of Two Cities or A Christmas Carol

Sinclair Lewis is represented by Babbitt and Main Street but not Arrowsmith or It Can't Happen Here or Kingsblood Royal 

Annie Proulx is represented by The Shipping News but not Brokeback Mountain (which is one of those works that sometimes is treated as short fiction and sometimes as a novel)

Robert Louis Stevenson is represented by Treasure Island and Jeckyll and Hyde but not Kidnapped

Joyce's Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Finnegan's Wake are included, but not Dubliners

Emphasis on the "novel" may explain--but not excuse--classic book-length poetic works, not just The Illiad and The Odessey, but also such works as Kahil Gibran's The Prophet and Longfellow's Hiawatha and Evangeline and The Courtship of Miles Standish. 

Children's and YA Classics:  The Little Prince, Pippi Longstocking, Carroll's Alice books, Twain's Huckleberry Finn, those are mixed in with adult--sometimes very adult--reading, but nobody thought to include the following:

Heidi by Johanna Spyri

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Bambi by Felix Salten

Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson

Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little by E. B. White

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl

Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie

Hans Binker

The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

YA classics such at The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton and Are You There, God, It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

A few more strange exclusions, before I close:

Generation X by Douglas Coupland

Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor

The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron

The Autobiography of Malcom X and Roots by Alex Haley

Maybe someday when I have "nothing better to do" (like read a classic book), I'll undertake my own list of 1001 Books that should be on everyone's lifetime reading list. I'll probably have to break it up into five or ten installments.

Strange Inclusions: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Part V

 While browsing the book 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die I often thought, of all the books in the world, why are these 1001 books the ones that you "must read" to have the richest fullest life possible (if that's what "before you die" means)? The introduction says much about "the novel" but the compilation lists 1001 books, not 1001 novels. Emphasising the novel may explain the absence of much of the world's non-fiction and poetry, but, in that case, several of the listings don't appear to fit the common definition of "novel," either. 

Some examples of non-fiction included:

Walden by Henry David Thoreau (which the compliation admits is, "not exactly a novel")

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

An account of the conquest of "New Spain" written by one of Cortez' soldiers

A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, which is a short satirical essay

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

One Thousand and One Nights is an ancient collection of ancient folklore tied together by a framing device

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (his famous "non-fiction novel")

Some examples of short fiction included:

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which is a collection of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's short stories

The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe

The Kreutzer Sonata and The Death of Ivan Illyich by Leo Tolstoy

Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Contributors to 1001 Books are largely from British institutions and the book was originally published in Great Britain, so that may explain why there is so much emphasis on British and European authors, along with works from the former British empire. (Republicans could lose their minds over how "woke" this compilation is, containing so many works from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.) An American compilation would probably come up with a very different list of books. 

Further, I expected more emphasis on the world's great works of scholarship and not so much emphasis on pop-culture entertainment, including what appears to be an over-representation of sci-fi, horror, and detective literature. 

Some of the more dubious examples of pop-culture entertainment include: H. G. Wells being represented three times, by The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Island of Dr. Moreau, or that Nabokov is represented by Lolita--and three other books.

The Long Goodbye and The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson (which brushes up against non-fiction)

Religous works: Considering that books of the world's great religions--like the Bible and the Koran--are absent, it's strange that the list includes such religous-themed works as The Last Temptation of Christ and The Satanic Verses.

Lastly, several works normally considered children's literature are haphazardly thrown into the general list, when you think they'd be more likely considered a side category, if included at all--making for something like 1001 Books You Must Read, Including 100 You Should've Read in Grade School.

 Perhaps we may accept as explanation, the entry for Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which states, "Like many of the titles found in the "Children's Classics" section of bookstores, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not a children's book as we understand the term these days, and it is not surprising that adaptations of Twain's work aimed at children are usually quite heavily edited." I question the wisdom, though, of throwing Pippi Longstocking into the same catch-all net as the Marquis De Sade.