“Good things to say about me”

Within days of his arrest in 1996, Kaczynski was writing letters, musing on everything from his public relations strategy to developing a secret code system to communicate with his legal team.

Good things that you can say about me

1. Some of the merchents around Lincoln probably will confirm my honesty. At D and D Foodtown I twice corrected pricing errors when, by simply keeping my mouth shut, I could have saved myself 10 or 20 dollars. In one case the checkout clerk charged me nine-something dollars for a box of powdered milk when the correct price was nineteen-something, and I pointed out her error. In the second case the wrong price was marked on two boxes of powdered milk.

If I remember correctly, the marked price was ten dollars too low on each box. I pointed out the error and, as a reward for my honesty, they “split the difference” and gave me one box at the incorrectly marked price and the other box at the full price. Unfortunately I don’t know the names of the checkout derks involved, though I remember their faces.

At the True-Value Hardware Store in Lincoln I once was given too much change (I think it was a dollar too much, though I don’t remember clearly) by a clerk named Anna. I pointed out the error and she thanked me for my honesty.

At the bank in Lincoln I once was undercharged for something — probably a money order — and I pointed out the error. — don’t remember who the teller was.

Within the last few months I stayed overnight at the Riverside Motel in Missaula. Ihe clerk gave me a five-dollar bill in change when he should have given me a single. I made a slight gesture with the bill and started to say “Is this right?”, but I had no more than begun to say the first word. when the clerk realized his ervor and interrupted me, taking back the five-dollar bill and saying, “Thanks for being honest. Most people wouldn’t have said nothing.” I don’t know the clerk’s name, though I remember his face.

2. Several years ago Juan Sánchez Arreda was severely injured in an accident, and my brother wrote to me about it. I had read about a millionaire named Percy Ross who had helped many people with gifts of money. I send Ross’s address to Dave and I composed a letter in which I explained Juan’s situation and asked Ross to help him. Dave typed the letter and mailed it, but unfortunately Ross did not do anything for Juan.

Sometime (1 to 1 1/2 years?) later, I wrote to Juan and offered to send him some books (in Spanish) for his kids. These were books that I’d already read; mostly books of anthropology or history related in one way or another to México. I doubted that his kids would be interested enough to read them, but I wanted to make a friendly gesture to Juan and show him that I hadn’t forgotten about him. Juan sent me a very gracious letter of thanks and invited me to keep writing to him. That is how I came to correspond with him.

A few years ago, I think 1992 or 1993,as a Christmas present for his kids, I sent Juan a sort of toy on which I had carved, in bas-relief, figures of animals and plants. I had done most of the carving many years carlier; at this time I just finished up the carving and painted the figures betore sending the gift to Juan. (I wish now that I’d left the figures unpainted. I was pleased with the carving, but I think I did a poor job of the painting.)

Within the last couple of years Juan told me That the Immigration Service had forced his wife and kids to go back to Mexico. I wrote to the Immigration Service for information pertinent to his situation, and I made one or two long-distance phone calls and wrote two or three letters to organizations dedicated to helping immigrants. In this way I got the names and addresses of organizations located near Juan’s home that could help him with legal advice. Juan seemed very grateful for the fact that I’d taken the trouble to get these names and addresses for him, but, unfortunately, they don’t seem to have done him any good.

My relations with Juan are pretty well documented by letters that were in my cabin at the time of my arrest, since I saved all the letters that I got from Juan and kept copies of almost all the letters that I sent to him.

3. My Aunt Freda will have good things to say about me. In particular, I sent her two letters of condolence, one when her elder daughter was crippled in an accident and the other when her husband died, and she said she was”deeply moved” by those letters.

4. You’ll remember the Linda Erickson whom I mentioned in my sketch of my brother’s life. On three or four occasions I spent some time with her three kids; I made crude toys for them and played with them, and they liked me very much indeed.

5. I’ve mentioned John Skelton, who drives the mail route up Stemple Pass Road and with whom I sometimes ride to Helena. On two occasions his daughter (7 or 8 years old) was riding with him at the same time I did. I was attentive to her and played word games with her, and she seemed to like me very much.

6. Several years ago (middle or late eighties?), on a trip that I made to Missoula, as I was settling myself in a seat after boarding the bus at Lincoln, a scruffy-looking man came up to me from the back of the bus and said he needed someone to talk to. I would rather have spent the trip absorbed in my own meditations, but he seemed so beseeching that I went to the back of the bus and sat with him. It turned out that he was a wino (that was the word he used himself) and had just learned that one of his two daughters had been killed in an automobile accident. Actually he didn’t talk much about his daughter; he talked mostly about things related to his life as a tramp, and I think he needed someone to talk to simply in order to distract his thoughts so that he could forget his pain for awhile. He pointed out a couple of fellows who looked like respectable citizens and said he had asked them to talk with him and they had refused, presumably because he was a tramp. But he said that when he saw my tattered back-pack he could see that I “knew what it was like” (I suppose he meant that I knew what it was like to be at the lower end of the social scale) and that was why he asked me to talk with him.

At his request I gave him a dollar and helped him get his bundle off the bus in Missoula — he needed help because he was half drunk. He seemed very grateful. He even said he would pay me back my dollar if I would come to a certain bar the next day. I didn’t bother to go, and I don’t know whether I would have gotten my dollar back if I had gone. No doubt it would be impossible to locate this tramp now, so the foregoing story rests only on my word. But I think I told my brother about it a year or two later, when he visited me in the late 80’s.

7. Once when I was riding my bicycle up Stemple Pass Road I came on a woman who had had a flat tire and didn’t know what to do about it. I helped her to put on the spare, for which she was very grateful. She even offered me payment, which I declined. But this anecdote too rests only on my word, since I have no idea where the woman was from or what her name was.

8. My softer side is shown by some of my letters to my brother — those in which I expressed affection for him, those in which I offered to help him if he ever needed it, and those in which I recounted to him those dreams I told you about. Relevant in this connection are his letters to me (still in my cabin at the [illegible] of my arrest) in which he expressed his gratitude for my affection. Particularly noteworthy was his response to the letter in which I told him about the “Lord Daddy Lomerosis” dream. If I remember correctly, he said that I “cared about him more than anyone else ever did”, which is probably true.

9. Here are some people who I hope will say good things about me, though they may not want to be quoted publicly as saying good things about me: Glen and Dolores Williams of Cascade or Ulm (I’m not sure which). They are the owners of the cabin next to mine. Sherry Wood (librarian at Lincoln Library) Napoleon Williams (a fellow student whom I knew when I was at Harvard) Possibly some of my former students at Berkeley. I recall for example a certain Kamitses who I know liked very much my course in modern algebra, and another student named I think George Miller who liked my course in point-set topology. Possibly also some of the students in my Math 213 (calculus) courses at the University of Michigan; among these I would mention a graduate student named Theah (or Thea?) Zelman, who I believe had a crush on me, in spite of which I never worked up the nerve to ask her for a date.

10. There are some good things to be said in connection with my employment at the Prince Castle company in (I think) Addison, Illinois in 1978–79, but there is also something bad. I’ll tell you both, and you can make of it what you will.

Prince Castle was a relatively small company that assembled restaurant equipment from parts manufactured elsewhere. They had several buildings, and I worked in a small building with perhaps 15 other people (the number varied). The majority of these were foreigners, mostly people from southern Asia — Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Laos. I was well liked by the foreman, Joe Cimmarusti[1], because I was a very good worker, and I was liked by the foreigners because (unlike some of the other Americans) I treated them with respect and consideration. Once, when Joe C. was out of the building and his second-in-command, Art, was temporarily in charge, a Pakistani who had finished his assigned task came to me for more work to do rather than going to Art, because, he said, “Art does not talk like gentleman,” the implication being that I did talk to the foreigners like a gentleman. In another case, when Joe C. (who was Catholic) was ridiculing the Moslems for the dietary restrictions they observed during Ramadan, I said, “How long has it been since the Catholics didn’t eat meat on Friday?” “Oh, we changed that now,” said Joe. But I think the Moslems appreciated the fact that I spoke up for them in that way.

Working at this plant were a Hindu named Ashok Patel and his sister, Shobna. One day Ashok cut his finger; the wound was not really serious, but it was deep enough so that he was taken to the doctor. There was a lunch-room in this building, but often there were few people in it during lunch hour, because many of the workers either went to a fast-food joint for lunch or ate their bag lunches in some other part of the building. Anyway, after Ashok had cut his finger, when lunch-time came I went to the lunch-room to get my bag lunch out of the refrigerator. Ashok’s sister, Shobna, was sitting at the lunch table, holding a handkerchief over her face with both hands and sobbing. At that time I didn’t know that she was Ashok’s sister, and moreover I didn’t think that Ashok had been seriously hurt, so it did not at first occur to me that Shobna was crying over his injury. Since she obviously wanted privacy I got my lunch from the refrigerator and took it out of the room to eat elsewhere. There was one other person in the room — an Ecuadorian named Manuel who was sitting there gawking at her. His callousness made me feel angry; he should have been decent enough to get out of the room and leave her alone.

By the time I finished eating my lunch it occurred to me that Ashok might have been hurt more seriously than I thought and that was why Shobna was crying. I went to a woman employee, named Shirley, with whom I was on friendly terms, and asked her, “How badly was Ashok hurt, anyway?” She said that the cut was deep, but not serious. I said, “You know, that Indian woman is crying in there.” With quick womanly sympathy, Shirley marched to the lunchroom to talk to Shobna. A little later she came out, thanked me, and said that Ashok’s cut was indeed what Shobna had been crying about. I assume that Shirley explained to her that the cut wasn’t serious. I don’t know whether Shirley told Shobna that I had said anything to her about the latter’s crying, but if she did, it might have something to do with the fact that Shobna became infatuated with me. I wish I could say that I was cool to her advances for the highly moral reason that she had a husband and two kids back in India, but the real reasons were (1) that I found her very unattractive physically, and (2) that I neither liked nor respected her personality. She soon perceived from my coolness that I wasn’t interested, and not long after that she went back to India. Her brother told me that she was under pressure from her husband to go back, and I wonder whether some relative of theirs might have written home that the kind of clothes she was wearing were such as to suggest that her attachment to the traditional morality of India was not very firm. However that may be, just before she left I wished her a good trip home, and she gave me a big smile and “Thank you,” evidently pleased at my expression of good will. (You will understand how important it is not to let Shobna’s name come out in connection with this.)

On a few occasions I did minor kindnesses to Shobna’s brother, Ashok. Once after Joe C., the foreman, lost his temper and called Ashok “stupid,” I said a few comforting words to him. Another time, after he had complained of his difficulties with the English language, I gave him the address of an organization that gave free English lessons to foreigners.

One day Ashok said to me, “I not forget you. When I go back to India I not forget you.” At first I didn’t know what he was talking about, but it soon became clear that he was exaggeratedly grateful for the trivial kindnesses I had done him. In subsequent conversations I learned that he had been suffering from social rejection, both in India and in America. The truth is that, although Ashok was very good at manual work, he was in other respects rather stupid, and that was probably why he had no friends. Stupid people are boring, and moreover Ashok tended to turn people off because he was unaware of the most elementary rules of tact. Apparently it was because of his hunger for friendship that, after the slight kindnesses I had done him, he tried to latch onto me as a friend. Over the next several months he developed a strong attachment to me, though I did nothing to encourage this beyond treating him with ordinary courtesy.

Now here is the bad part. When I left Prince Castle I should have invited Ashok to correspond with me. I think it would have meant a great deal to him if I had exchanged only two or three letters a year with him. But at the time I was under a great deal of stress for reasons that I needn’t explain here, and I didn’t want to be bothered with Ashok, so I just dropped him and took off. Of the very few things in my life about which I’ve ever had any serious sense of guilt, this is the one about which I feel most guilty. Ashok was a very unhappy man because of his loneliness, and I could have helped him by holding out to him the hand of friendship, but instead of doing so I inflicted on him another rejection. And I know from experience how that feels.

If this story becomes public, it may well reach India through relatives of Ashok or other Indians living in the U.S., so Ashok’s name should be kept strictly confidential, and, since he would recognize the story even with his name omitted, the statement that he is stupid should be deleted.

[1] Spelling may be wrong.