Paranoia Is Now Part of the Package

The package arrived on my desk several weeks after the Unabomber struck New Jersey last December, killing an advertising executive at home.

It was an odd shape, this package, slightly longer than a shoe box and wrapped in plain brown paper. It made me nervous. Very nervous.

Was I being paranoid?

How does one gauge paranoia? After all, the package that exploded in the hands of the ad man--about the size of a videocassette--was innocuous enough that his children had handled it before he opened it.

I get plenty of hate mail, and while no one has ever threatened my safety, the vitriol can get a little intimidating.

I picked up the package. The return address was Monterey Park. I just looked at it.

This is crazy. Just open it.

I put it down.

The advertising executive, Thomas Mosser, was widely regarded as a nice guy, with no known enemies. Who would want to hurt someone like that, someone who started out as a reporter, went into public relations and ended up on top in the ad business?

Someone did. Because he is dead, the chosen target of an assassin operating by mail.

Weird times. Worried times.

I picked up the package and walked over to our security office.

*

Always, the best part of my day is mail time. No deadlines, no hard thinking, just the pleasure of reacting to what someone else has written. Mail, oddly, provides an unparalleled intimacy with readers.

Lately, though, along with the anticipation I feel when I return to my desk with a stack of letters and packages, is a tingle of worry as I open up the ones that seem a little bigger than usual or a little heftier.

The mail is always full of surprises, and they are almost always pleasant.

A few weeks ago, an overnight package from the artist Walter Keane (of the huge-eyed waifs) arrived. He sent a copy of his autobiography with a sweet letter that began “Hello Princess Robin.” (I have requested--with zero success--that my family adopt this mode of address.)

There was a kind note in response to a column about country music from songwriter Ray Evans, who, with Jay Livingston, is responsible for the standards “Mona Lisa” and “Que Sera Sera,” among many others.

And just this week, I received a likeness of myself, drawn in pencil on a big Manila envelope, from a denizen of a local, taxpayer-funded residential facility.

“I am not a stalker or a lonely love starved fan vying for attention,” began the letter that accompanied the drawing. “Neither do I need to compensate for any inadequacies by reaching out for affections by fantasies. . . .”

Would I accept the drawing, he wondered, in exchange for helping him with a little problem?

“I desperately need someone who would assist me,” he wrote. “You see, I like many others, are facing a 25-year-to-life sentence. . . . There is no evidence against me except a security guard who doesn’t know what I look like or what I was wearing. . . .”

The return address included his prisoner ID number.

*

Hate mail comes at fairly predictable times. It follows columns on abortion rights, and contains gory pictures of aborted fetuses and solemn promises of prayer for my eternal soul.

It comes after columns about the plight of the poor, particularly single mothers, and consists of angry screeds on the evils of the welfare state in general and the evils of the fecund sluts about whom I have written in particular.

And so on--gay rights, immigration, etc.

Sometimes, though, hate mail comes when you least expect it.

Last summer, I deeply offended a reader by writing about my daughter’s fondness for the children’s classic “Charlotte’s Web.”

“Why do you think anyone cares about you and your kid?” the reader asked.

Believe me, it’s a question I’ve often pondered.

*

The Times security guard looked up from some paperwork when I walked into the office.

“I got this package in the mail,” I said sheepishly, “and it made me kind of nervous.”

“Let’s see.”

He took the package, bounced it a time or two in his hands, and ripped off the brown paper wrapping.

“Not heavy enough to be a bomb,” he said. “They would have had to be real professionals to make one that light.”

Inside the long, narrow box was an acrylic rectangle, with some moving parts and rubber bands.

It was a “humane mousetrap” sent by a generous reader in response to a column about my mouse infestation.

It never did get any mice.

But it sure got me.

* Robin Abcarian’s column is published Wednesdays and Sundays.