7 June 2004
Bruce Jackson
The Real O.J. Story
(This article first appeared in the spring 2004 Antioch Review)
Family Feud
A few evenings after O.J. Simpson was arrested for the murders of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, a waiter at the Mezzaluna Restaurant in Brentwood, California, my wife Diane and I had dinner with our friends Bruno Freschi and Vaune Ainsworth at Just Pasta, a restaurant on Buffalo's West Side. Like nearly everyone else around here that summer, we talked about the murders and the preliminary hearing on probable cause, which was just beginning. O.J. had played for the Buffalo Bills in the seventies and he was still a local hero. A lot of people here partied with O.J. in those glory years, or know people who partied with him.
Bruno is an architect, so he spends a good deal of time moving pieces of information around, trying them out in different juxtapositions and combinations, making them big, making them small, seeing what seems to work and what doesn’t. The two of us got to spinning scenarios that seemed consistent with what we then knew about the murders and O.J.'s movements. We came up with what we thought were three or four plausible narratives. Not narratives we thought were true or even likely; just plausible.
The first was the most obvious: the movie actor ex-husband finds the sexy ex-wife with a Hollywood hunk and in a jealous rage slaughters everything in sight, then rushes home, cleans up, and catches his plane to Chicago where, in his hotel room the next morning, he receives a phone call from the Los Angeles police and feigns shock.
That was what nearly everyone we knew was already saying, so Bruno and I concentrated our imaginative plot-making energies on alternative narratives. We were playing, as when you see how many different things you can make out of a fixed number of Erector Set or Lego pieces.
We were so deep in play that neither of us realized until it was far too late that Diane and Vaune were seething with anger. They were saying things like, "But you know he's guilty! We all know he's guilty! Why don't you admit that you know he's guilty?"
"All we're saying is there are other ways the same evidence might be explained," Bruno said. I said that we weren't talking about ultimate truth or anything like that; we were just playing with the very small number of ostensible facts that were at that time available. "We're being hypothetical," I said.
Diane and Vaune had no interest whatsoever in play or hypotheses. Diane said, "What happened can't be explained like a game. It isn't a game. You two are just making stories. You know he's guilty!" Vaune concurred. It got rough, there on the Just Pasta patio on that warm evening in June 1994.
Later, I realized that the four of us at that table were having two totally different – and mutually exclusive – conversations. Diane and Vaune were behaving as if we were talking about real life, so they were talking about what they believed had happened; Bruno and I were behaving as if we were filmmakers or novelists or lawyers in court, so we were talking about what we thought might have happened. We were all using the same words and the same apparent facts, but we weren't talking the same languages or imagining the same kinds of stories.
Kinds of talk
The two kinds of talk, might-have-happened talk and real-life talk aren't the least bit compatible. Sometimes they coincide but when they do it’s just luck.
In point of fact, neither Diane nor Vaune nor Bruno nor I, nor any of the television stars commenting on the murders or reporters reporting on them knew what actually happened in front of Nicole’s condo at 875 S. Bundy Drive in Brentwood the night of June 12, 1994. We didn’t know it then; we don’t know it now. The only living person who knows for sure is the person who murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. No one has ever come forward to say, "I did it." No one has ever been able to say, "I saw that person do it." Every living person but one who has touched or been touched by this story has been operating on assumption, hypothesis and speculation.
Everyone I knew had an opinion about the case and it seemed that everyone's PC was in harm's way: Whom should you have sided with if you wanted to be a good person? If you opted for the defense, you had to ignore O.J.’s history of stalking, jealousy, and verbal and physical abuse. If you opted for the prosecution, you had to send to prison Mister Nice Guy, Mister 2003 NFL Rushing Yards in one season, the famous black man who pulled himself up and out of the ghetto and sufficiently decolorized himself to have become poster boy for Hertz, an auto rental company that caters primarily to middle-aged white businessmen. You had to lock up the sweet and long-suffering Norberg from the hilarious Naked Gun films.
The emotions erupting at our table in June 1994 were nothing to the emotions that erupted when the trial ended fifteen months later. A caller to Geraldo Rivera's television show a few days after the October 3 verdict said, "As a black man, I felt like I was on trial."
Geraldo asked if he felt vindicated by the verdict.
"Yes," the man said, and then he spoke of Emmitt Till, the 14-year-old boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955. For that caller, the verdict went to outrages forty years in the past.
That same week, in a voice I can only describe as full of significance and suspicion, a white Buffalo surgeon said to me, "She had candles all around her bathtub lit that night."
I said, "So what?"
He said, "That means she had something going with Ron Goldman."
I said, "No, it doesn’t, but so what if she did?"
He said, "It means we don't know everything."
As far as he was concerned, there was a complex plot percolating here and "they" were keeping things from us.
Real life
In real life, as we all know, there is always a more complex plot percolating, and we are always keeping things from one another. Think of a half-dozen people you know well: What terrifies those people the most? How much money do they have and where is it? What sexual and political proclivities do or don't you share? Do they bunch or fold the toilet paper and how many sheets do they use at a time? In real life, we know everything about hardly anything or anyone.
The only place we know everything about anything is fiction, which is one reason we like novels and movies so much. With the novel, we've got the whole world in our hands, between those two covers; with movies, it all happens between fade in and fade out. If we're willing to sit there and read or watch all the way through, we can know everything there is to know about those people, everything.
Professors and critics speculate all the time about what this or that thing present in or absent from the novel or film means. I'm talking about what we can know. There are no more facts to a novel than there are facts in the novel, and there are no more scenes to a film than there are scenes in the film. All the rest is criticism.
New release versions of films or DVDs with cut scenes restored by the director years later change nothing about our experience of the original; each is one other version of a story that has to be experienced and evaluated on its own terms. Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now Redux (2001, 202 minutes) is not just 55 minutes longer than Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979, 153 minutes). It is a different film. The new scenes of Willard's grinning theft of Kilgore's surfboard and Kilgore's absurd begging on a helicopter loudspeaker for its return don't just add narrative elements; they significantly alter the characters themselves. The killer Kilgore who says "I love the smell of napalm in the morning...smells like...victory" is turned into a surfer buffoon. The long romantic episode at the French plantation further changes not only our sense of Willard, but the film’s entire dramatic structure.
Likewise outtakes and stories from filmmakers that appear on a DVD: they may be interesting or not, they may help us understand what is in a film, but they cannot place in a film what is not there, they cannot remove from it what is there. If those supplementary elements are part of the story then the story they are part of is one that consists of several parts, only one of which is the original. In terms of the original they are, as filmmaker T. Minh-ha Trinh says of all discussion about her own films, "Outside." Works of art, whatever information is stacked up "outside," are perfectly self-contained.
Real life is just the opposite: in real life we don't know most things that really happened, and most of the time that is just fine with us: how many of us want to know what the prime minister whose speech we are told about in the evening news had for lunch or which pair of shoes he or she wore today? When we hear about real life we just want to hear what matters. To know what matters, just like the writer of fiction, we have to know what story we're telling.
Movies
Another important difference between real life and fiction is this: in real life what seems to have happened nearly always is what happened. We're guided by probability, you and I, because on the whole probability works very well. But in movies and popular novels, what seems to have happened is often just obscuring what "really" happened, and the task of the hero is getting beyond the deception of the obvious.
In real life, things that seem peripheral usually are peripheral. The dark Mercedes sedan with smoked windows and its high-beam headlights on at noon three cars back from you on the thruway that keeps changing lanes has, in all likelihood, absolutely nothing to do with your life. But if the protagonist in a movie looks into his rear view mirror and twice sees those high beams, that car changing lanes, we know some interaction is pending. In movies, in dramas, everything matters, and the things that seem out of place matter more rather than less because they are the clues to what comes next or to the invisible. If that weapon on the wall in act one isn’t fired by the end of act three, to put a slight twist on Chekhov’s famous dictum, they better give us a very good reason why.
In real life some, perhaps most, things happen randomly. People are hit or missed by falling objects knocked off a window ledge by someone with whom they have no connection other than being or not being where the knocked objects end up. People win the lottery or they don’t. They slip in the bathtub and catch themselves in time or crack their skulls and die, they fall in love with the right or wrong person, they cross with the light after looking both ways but a drunk driver runs the light, crosses the white line, and runs them down anyway. There is, most of the time, no meaning to such events; they're just luck, good or bad.
Luck hardly exists in popular media. Popular media is a lot like what anthropologists call "primitive thought." In primitive thought, if something happened, it's because someone or some thing made it happen. There is no random event, no random violence, no mere accident. In primitive thought, every fact matters. Our inability to figure out the meaning of a fact means only that we haven’t yet figured out its meaning, not that it doesn’t have any meaning.
Trials
I tell you all this because I think criminal trials are far more like the world of popular fiction and primitive thought than the world of everyday life. Prosecuting attorneys try to bring the jury to a place where everything, every apparent fact, must make sense, must have been deliberate, must be connected to something else. Defense attorneys do the opposite: they try to convince juries that the prosecutors’ narratives don’t really hold together after all.
Claims by judges and attorneys notwithstanding, a trial is neither a search for truth nor a search for justice. A trial is a search for victory, and all the participants know it. What goes on in the trial is the development of a narrative internal to the courtroom. The judge doesn’t tell the jury to decide what actually happened out there, but rather to answer this question: "Has the prosecution proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt?" The jury is asked to evaluate a narrative. In a trial the truth of the narrative matters far less than the plausibility of it.
Why O.J. wasn’t convicted
O.J. Simpson’s lawyer Johnnie Cochran offered a counter-narrative to the prosecution’s narrative that went something like this: If the labs handing the evidence in the Simpson-Goldman murders was sloppy and L.A. Detective Fuhrman was a racist and Fuhrman said he found the blood on O.J.’s Ford Bronco and some blood matching O.J.'s wasn't discovered until weeks after the murder, then the lab and Fuhrman were in cahoots with the guy who planted the blood, right? It's a plot hatched on the street at five in the morning by Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles Medical Examiner, the FBI, the state crime lab in Sacramento, and who knows who and what else. Otherwise, how could all those things make sense? If you don’t think collusion is the right explanation for all those separate facts, then you come up with a better theory and it better not be called Coincidence.
You don’t have to understand or even believe all that, he told them. You just have to believe that it’s possible. If it’s possible, then you’ve got reasonable doubt about the prosecution’s case.
Cochran didn’t keep saying all that. Instead, he reduced it to a one-line mantra: "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit." He said it again and again and again. Cochran was referring to the disastrous moment in the trial when prosecutor Chris Darden allowed O.J. to try on before the jury a pair of gloves. O.J. was made to wear protective rubber gloves so he wouldn’t contaminate the evidence, even though the gloves he was trying on weren’t the actual gloves from the crime scene. No one made sure that the two pair of gloves were the same size. O.J. Simpson is a professional actor: he seemed to struggle with the glove and couldn’t quite get his fingers all the way in. He made a face for the jury as if to say, "See what the white establishment is telling you is evidence against me?" In interviews after the trial, several jurors repeated Cochran’s mantra to help explain their votes: "It didn’t fit so we had to acquit." They had reasonable doubt.
Or they had a phrase that let them claim reasonable doubt for a decision they wanted to make anyway. "To go by the post-trial interviews," a criminal defense attorney said to me, "the jury in the O.J. Simpson case didn’t like prosecutor Marcia Clark and they didn’t much like Nicole Simpson either. They were angry because one of the prosecution’s chief witnesses had lied on the stand about having made racist remarks. They were charmed by Johnnie Cochran and to several of them O.J. Simpson was still a hero." It may be that in the confines of the jury room the jury members were moved to a state of reasonable doubt by Cochran’s mantra of "If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit." It may also be they wanted to acquit long before summations began and they just used that mantra as their justification.
In retrospect, the verdict in the O.J. case seems inevitable. The police were clumsy with the evidence. Los Angeles county D.A. Gil Garacetti shifted the trial from Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles for reasons that seem to have had more to do with his convenient access to the press than anything connected with the trial. Prosecutor Marcia Clark ignored her own jury experts’ sound and considered advice, and she made a poster boy key witness of—and never adequately distanced herself from—an L.A. cop who not only lied on the stand but left an audiotape trail proving it. Her colleague Chris Darden let Simpson put on his glove performance before the jury. Judge Lance Ito was bedazzled by being on national television and buffaloed by Johnnie Cochran.
But maybe that's only because all history is inevitable when we're looking back. That’s what history is—what actually happened, not the alternatives that didn’t. In the moment, when the end is still in the future, when the bits and pieces have not yet coalesced into narrative, things are far less certain. That's what makes the stock market work and what lets hope spring eternal in the human breast. It’s also why no trial attorney predicts the outcome of a jury trial until the judge says some local variant of "And is that your verdict, each and all?" and every one of them says "Yes, your honor, it is."
The enormous rage that manifested itself among many whites after the trial perhaps occurred because they thought the world inside the trial and the world outside the trial were the same. The enormous satisfaction that manifested itself among many blacks after the trial occurred in part because they knew the world outside the trial and the world inside the trial weren't the least bit the same.
"The nigger gets it."
The "trial of the century," some of O.J.'s defense attorneys were fond of calling it— a grandiose claim, given that the 20th century’s trials already included those John Scopes in 1925, Bruno Hauptmann in 1935, the Nazis at Nuremberg in 1945, and the Rosenbergs in 1951.
But it was great television and it was a great celebrity event. I knew we were out of real time and into show time long before the trial started, on June 17, 1994, the day of what came to be called the "slow speed car chase."
Nobody was chasing anybody: it was a parade, not a pursuit. A squadron of police cars delicately followed O.J. and his friend Al Cowlings around the L.A. freeway system, past the airport, and finally to O.J.'s Brentwood house, where everyone sat still for hours, except some of us tv watchers who occasionally went to the kitchen or the toilet. During the vehicular parade, the cameras occasionally cut to the people bunched up along the freeways and at exits cheering O.J. on. Some had signs that said, "Go Juice."
"Juice" was O.J.’s football player nickname. The initials stand for Orenthal James. How can you say "Go Orenthal James?" "Juice" it was—when he was a Heisman Trophy-winning football star running back at USC, "Juice" when he helped pull the Buffalo Bills out of the cellar and onto "Monday Night Football," and "Juice" when he did those lucrative Hertz commercials.
On the football field "Go Juice" maybe meant something, but heading north on I-405? Where was Juice to go now? What was he to go to? After a while, O.J. drove back to his house, got out of the car, and allowed the L.A. police to arrest him and cart him off to jail.
It reminded me of one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite Westerns: Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles. The good folks of the small western town of Rock Creek are about to lynch the black sheriff just sent to them by the governor. The sheriff draws his pistol and points it at his own head. He says in a gravelly voice, "The next man makes a move, the nigger gets it." The lynch mob freezes in its tracks.
The white mayor says, "Hold it, men, he's not bluffing."
The black sheriff says, in his gravelly voice, "Drop it, or I swear I'll blow this nigger's head all over this town." Then he says, a quavery octave higher and with coon-show eye-rolling, "Oh lawdy lawd, he's desperate! Do what he say! Do what he say!"
Pistols drops to the ground. A woman says, "Isn't anybody gonna help that poor man?"
Someone says, "Hush, Harriet. That's a sure way to get him killed."
The sheriff drags himself toward the jail. He says, in his quavering darky voice, "Oh, oh, help me, help me, somebody help me! Help me! Help me!" The els are all elided so it comes out, "hep me, hep me...." Then in his gravely voice he says to himself, "Shut up." He obeys his command, pulls himself inside the jail, shuts the door, holsters his pistol, and says in his real voice, "Oh, baby, you are so talented. And they are so dumb."
My wife the addict
I didn't watch the O.J. trial as a matter of course. My wife did. She has a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, her thesis was on Blake’s composite art, she is a Distinguished Teaching Professor at SUNY Buffalo, she has serious concerns. Nonetheless, every day, when she had the time, and many days when she did not, she would be planted in the kitchen watching the O.J. trial. Sometimes when I'd come in she'd be embarrassed and would pretend she was really doing something else, like reading books or newspapers or grading papers. Other times she'd ignore me entirely because something particularly wonderful was going on and she felt it trumped the need for excuse or explanation. Sometimes, during a break, she would regale me with descriptions and analyses of courtroom minutiae, much as if she were doing a deep analysis of a poem by Blake or Milton.
I teased her about this mercilessly until I noticed that when I did it in front of friends, many of them academics or professionals, I was getting far less reinforcement than I thought I deserved. That was when I learned that an extraordinary number of people I liked and respected either watched the trial or watched the Court TV replays at night and followed it in as much detail as possible in newspapers and news magazines. One elderly society woman told me she had been forced to abandon her decades-old weekly luncheons with three other elderly society women because lunchtime in Buffalo was court time in California. "One must choose," she said.
Moreover, I came to realize that I was riding a horse higher than was perhaps appropriate, for I did not remain pure. I was fairly incapable of passing through the kitchen, where Diane was feeding her addiction, without sitting down next to her, and like the victims in Homer's Lotusland, being transfixed until I was rescued by the midmorning break or noon recess (three p.m. our time). Only then would I remember that I had come into the kitchen only to refill my coffee cup and, let's see, how long ago was that?
Addicts and writers
When the trial ended, my friend Ronald Gottesman, who at the time taught at USC, suggested, I presume in jest, an "O.J. Withdrawal Kit" which would be advertised on TV for $49.95 ($44.95 if you order in the next hour). The kit would contain a leather glove, a pair of black socks, a knit cap, a stiletto, a map of Brentwood and grounds plans of the Bundy house where the murder occurred and O.J.’s Rockingham Road estate. People going into withdrawal from the lack of O.J. action on the screen could open the box and touch whichever object offered the most solace, just as young children are given comfort by certain stuffed animals or remnants of certain specific blankets.
The only thing wrong with Ron's idea was there was no need for it. The O.J. action continued, night and day. Instead of the continual and nearly open-ended form of the courtroom, it metastasized, exploded into the world of books and talk shows. Marcia Clark's agents got her a $4.2 million advance, the third largest advance in American publishing history, lagging only Generals Colin Powell and Norman Schwartzkopf, who had received $6 million and $5 million advances respectively for their memoirs. Then Johnny Cochran's agents announced that he had received an even larger advance, so Ms. Clark was pushed back to number four, whipped by Johnnie C one more time.
Nearly everyone with a major role in the case published a book about it. First out of the gate was Alan Dershowitz with Reasonable Doubts, a Jack Hornerish explanation of how and why the case had really been won by Dershowitz’s pre-trial work. The book was published on February 1, 1996, two days short of four months from the verdict. Within weeks of the 1998 verdict in the civil case, Dershowitz had a revised version of Reasonable Doubts on the stands, this one with a commentary on the civil verdict. Most of the attorneys on both sides wrote about how the other attorneys were inferior to themselves. Jurors published books explaining their verdict. Cable talk show hosts like Geraldo Rivera and Charles Grodin were still feeding regularly off the O.J. table two years after the criminal trial ended. Johnny Cochran got a talk show on Court TV. The supermarket tabloids continued to report O.J. sightings into the new century.
One night, late, I had a vision of a Hollywood creative team hard at work on a black version of the old Fugitive series in which a celebrity whose life has been ruined by an ambiguous acquittal devotes his life to ferreting out evildoers, always in the hope of finding the evildoer who did in his ex-wife and her waiter friend. The real killer has one arm, see, and the cops don’t believe our guy so he keeps looking, on golf courses hither and yon....
It was O.J. who gave me that idea. Once the trial was out of the way he said he was going to devote himself to finding the real murderer of his wife and her friend to deliver the justice that hadn’t been delivered and to clear his good name. So far as I know, he hasn't started his detecting yet. Every so often there’s a brief tv story about something that happened to him when he was playing golf. Usually the story is about people who got assigned him as a fourth who refused to play with him or people who did play with him and told the reporter that he was really just like anyone else you got assigned as a fourth, not at all like a superstar or a multiple-murderer. Golf, I assume, is the great leveler. Sometimes we see O.J. smiling, sometimes not. He usually seems to be working very hard to look like he’s having a good time. He also seems to know we’re looking at him and thinking bad thoughts, like someone with an enormous scar on his cheek who knows we're thinking about the scar even when we're trying very hard to maintain eye contact or look at his necktie or the wall over his shoulder.
Nobody Gets Off
It is part of the nature of our criminal justice system that nobody once charged gets off free. Even if you are innocent and you are acquitted, the costs are phenomenal. Once charged, you will pay. Do you know any physicians who've been charged with malpractice? Guilty or not, the insurance rates go up and the reputation is smeared. If nothing else, you are changed by the experience. I once heard someone say that after Jesus resurrected him, Lazarus was ostracized because he'd been someplace no one else had ever been and no ordinary person ever would. Lazarus wasn't dead any more, but neither was he like anybody else, either.
Likewise anyone tried for a felony.
Likewise O.J. Simpson.
O.J. Simpson, after all these years, remains a prisoner in a very narrow world. He can't go out or travel as he once did; he can't go to the places he used to go or see most of the people he used to see. He can't work.
One of William Faulkner's great novels, Light in August, is about a man named Joe Christmas who does not know if he is white or black, nor can he ever know. Faulkner said that Joe Christmas was the most tragic figure he could think of because that must been the saddest condition to inhabit: to not know what you are or who you are.
In early November 1995 O.J. called Associated Press reporter Linda Deutch to report that "everywhere I go...people are totally positive." He said this after he was dumped by his talent agency of 20 years, kicked out of his country club, had his second book proposal rejected by his publisher, watched his girlfriend Paula Barbieri bail out of their relationship on "PrimeTime Live" with Diane Sawyer, seen the sign someone planted near his house that read "Home of the Brentwood Butcher," and been told of the cancellation of the Atlantic City event at which he was to have been paid for signing things ($135 for flat objects, like books, $185 for nonflat objects, and $124.95 and $159.95, for photos of the slow-speed chase, depending on the size). In 1998 he lost an $8.5 million civil suit in Santa Monica for having caused the deaths of his wife and Ron Goldman. There was a rumor that he might be hired by Fox News as a commentator for the trial of actor Robert Blake, accused of having murdered his wife outside a Studio City restaurant. Thus far, nothing has come of it.
Relevant fictions
During the trial, Othello was often cited as a literary parallel because in a jealous rage the black Othello stabs to death his white wife. But the parallels goes no further. As soon as Othello killed Desdemona he took responsibility for it. After the Rockingham murders O.J. took a plane to Chicago. Different story.
But there are literary resonances. I think in particular of Albert Camus's L'Etranger, John Milton's Paradise Lost, and Jorge Luis Borges's "The Aleph."
L'Etranger takes place in Oran, Algeria. The protagonist, Meursault, is charged with the murder of an Arab on a beach. In prewar Algeria, a Frenchman killing an Arab was not unlike a white man killing a black in prewar Mississippi: you shouldn’t do it, but if you do, it’s no big deal.
But there is a problem with this particular killing: Meursault shot the Arab five times rather than just once or twice. The examining magistrate asks him why so many bullets. Meursault doesn't know how to tell the magistrate that it was because the sun was burning into his skull, so he says nothing. Meursault could have said, "I thought he was about to get up and come at me again with the knife" or "I was petrified and lost control." Any such explanation would have gotten him off. But he says nothing, he offers no story at all. The magistrate decides he's guilty because he lacks a story. Later, in court, he explains that he fired the second, third, fourth, and fifth bullets because of the sun. That is worse than no story: it is a story that makes no sense. Senselessness, as I suggested earlier, is a common aspect of ordinary life, but it is intolerable in the courtroom. Everyone connected with the trial decides Meursault is a monster. The novel ends moments before Meursault's execution by guillotine. He's executed not because he killed the Arab, but because he didn't come up with a plausible story to contextualize it. In the world of the court, you must present a story that makes sense, else you lose.
The prosecutors in the O.J. case blundered in introducing things that didn't make sense, that hung loose. Simpson's attorneys were brilliant in finding, and pointing out again and again, things the prosecution had dismissed as mere loose ends. The prosecutors complained that the defense made far too much of those minor irrelevant details but they missed the point: a case is won and lost not in the bulk of facts but in the coherence of facts. In real life, if everything fits but one thing, then that one thing is what is aberrant and what is tossed out; in court, if everything fits but one thing (and if you've got a good lawyer), then it is the other side's story that is tossed out. "If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit."
The court, like the world of drama and an IRS audit, requires perfection in narrative. There can be no loose ends. In drama and in court, and in crime, the loose ends kill you.
Would it have made any difference if Marcia Clark had told the jury what I'm telling you, if she had explained to the jury that what they were doing there was about real life, not drama? I don't think so. I don't think the judge would have let her do it. She couldn't say, "This is theater from which this fact and that fact and that fact have been excluded." Had she, Judge Ito would have immediately found her in contempt. Saying the inappropriate truth in court can get you locked up in jail.
A second literary aspect of the O.J. case is how particular stories incorporate extraordinary ranges of human concerns, how what may seem like a simple or sensational or unique narrative turns out to have resonances in major aspects of our lives. Milton's Paradise Lost is about the Eden myth. In his essay "On Christian Doctrine" ("De Doctrina Christiana"), Milton wrote about why he thought that myth important. The myth, he said, includes:
at once distrust of the divine veracity, and a proportionate credulity in the assurances of Satan; unbelief; ingratitude; disobedience; gluttony; in the man excessive uxoriousness, in the woman a want of proper regard for her husband, in both an insensibility to the welfare of their offspring, and that offspring the whole human race; parricide, theft, invasion of the rights of others, sacrilege, deceit, presumption in aspiring to divine attributes, fraud in the means employed to attain the object, pride, and arrogance.
A wonderful accumulation. It's as if that story is a crystal which, if turned this way or that, casts a striking spectrum of light on that wall.
Which brings us Borges' story, "The Aleph." The Aleph is a crystal in which may be seen everything: all knowledge, all time, all stories. What you see at any instant just depends on how you look at it, and who is looking.
The O.J. Case is an American Aleph. In it, there is a story, a structure, an ethic, an ethos for everyone. And that may be what is most important about the O.J. Case, the extraordinary range of issues and conditions it helps or forces us to think about and look at.
Not that this specific famous deracinated athlete/personality was on trial for the horrific murders of his wife and her acquaintance. But rather that in that trial we each found some other narrative or narrative element of primary importance. The O.J. case and trial force us to consider anew those forever unresolved questions about appearance and reality, about chronology and history, about how we convince ourselves we're right when we're talking about the past.
What really happened that night in Santa Monica
The Mezzaluna – the restaurant on San Vicente where Nicole Simpson had her last dinner and forgot her eyeglasses, the place Ron Goldman worked and found the glasses and fatefully brought them over to Nicole’s house a few blocks away on Bundy when his shift was over – has gone belly-up. In Hollywood there is publicity that nourishes and publicity that kills. Maybe Mezzaluna would have gone belly-up anyway, but I don’t think so. It became déclassé for the locals, and places like that don’t get enough tourist business to fill the tables on tourist trade alone. Nicole’s Simpson’s Bundy Avenue house has a new owner, its number has been changed from 875 to 879, and the street entrance has a new facade. If the new design and number were meant to confuse tourists they have mostly succeeded. But some still figure out the place and the correction appears on some Star Maps, those sheets you buy from street vendors that purport to tell you where everybody who is anybody lives. When I last drove by 875/879 Bundy there were two groups on the sidewalk across the street, one Asian the other Anglo, each of them in heavy conversation, pointing, looking at maps, looking up, pointing, nodding.
A few months after the civil trial ended I was walking my dog Penelope in the park and I met Ralph, a guy I know from around town. We know one another well enough to say hello when we cross paths, but we’ve never hung out and I don’t know what Ralph does for a living.
He told me he’d talked to ________, a good friend of O.J.’s in the old days and one of the few local people who still maintained regular phone contact with him. Ralph said that ______ said O.J. was depressed about all the old friends who didn’t want to be friends any more, both here and in L.A. I said I could see how that might be depressing.
Ralph looked around to make sure no one else was nearby. It was just us and the dogs. Then he said, "I don’t want to be quoted on this, but _______ told me what really happened on Bundy. You know him don’t you?" I said I didn’t. "But you know who he is, right?" I said of course I did, everyone knew who ______ was. "All right, then," Ralph said.
His dog went into the lake. Penelope doesn’t swim. She yapped at me to continue the walk. Ralph and I stood there, watching our dogs. After a while I said, "So what happened on Bundy?"
"You can’t quote me by name on this."
"I wouldn’t."
"It’s only me telling you what a friend of O.J.’s told me."
"I got it."
"_______ said O.J. went there that night to slash Nicole’s tires. He was really pissed off at something that happened earlier in the day at the kid’s recital. Maybe because he wasn’t invited to dinner with the family. That’s why he had that knife, the one with the serrated blade. No one would use a blade like that to kill a person."
I didn’t say: Someone did.
He went on: "So O.J. was about to slash the tires on Nicole’s car when Goldman showed up. O.J. freaked. Goldman confronted him. O.J. stuck Goldman. Then Nicole came out and saw what was going on. So O.J. killed her because he was afraid she’d tell people about him killing Goldman. Then after O.J. was done with her, he went back and finished Goldman off. It was all just panic. All he wanted to do was her tires."
"Do you think it’s true?" I asked.
"True? Who knows what’s true?" he said. "It’s the story I got, is all."
Copyright 2004 by Bruce Jackson