Crime Wave

Oj. brought Nicole into a world where he was a second-class citizen. He got small roles in doofus comedies–but the toughguy wanna-bes had no serious use for him. He would never be a movie star because he possessed the expressive range of a turtle. He’d transformed himself into a confirmed ass-kisser who could never appear truly heroic or dangerous onscreen.

Nicole witnessed O.J.’s long downward slide. She saw the essential bifurcation of his fame: He was a big cheese to the outside world and small potatoes to the world he sucked up to. She came of age in lavish surroundings and reveled in insider perks. She had a front-row view of her husband cracking under the weight of his emptiness.

Oj. got his racial-identity wires crossed up a long time ago. He must have figured his choices narrowed down to White man’s shill or glowering rape-o. He never figured out that the vast majority of Black men do not fall into either camp. His appeal transcended race because he was an equal-opportunity con artist capable of snow-jobbing Blacks and Whites alike. He fit into Hollywood because he had looks and name value, fawned and joked to the correct degree, and zinged some pseudo-egalitarian heartstrings. If his trial becomes a referendum on African-American rage and its inevitable consequences, a minute cause-and-effect examination of his life will reveal no overt instances of personalityforming trauma directly attributable to specific acts of White racism. To offer the historic oppression of Blacks as a salient factor of mitigation in an adrenaline-fueled double lust homicide is preposterous. Oj. Simpson will have truly transcended race at that moment when Blacks and Whites get together and recognize him as a cowardly piece of shit who may or may not have murdered two innocent people and left two Black and White children devastated for the rest of their lives.

Of course, it won’t go down that simply. This is one gigantic L.A.set Russian novel that exceeds the most extreme visions of Los Angeles as a bottomless black hole of depravity. This is a bottomless meditation on celebrity that will not eclipse until someone more famous than Oj. Simpson is accused of murdering two people sexier than Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in a considerably more outré manner. This is a story told in a thousand voices–one of those microcosmic, kaleidoscopic, multiviewpoint jobs that sum up a time and place with interlocking subplots that go on forever.

This novel teems with grotesque characters and roils with unhinged incidents. The multimedia creators of this novel are grateful for the opportunity to regroup in the wake of a major disappointment: The Michael Jackson scandal diminuendoed before they got the chance to exploit its full sleaze potential and work up a hypocritical load of bile over the plight of butt-flicked children. They’ve got their teeth in the Oj. case now–they’re pit bulls with a standing order for more, more, more–and verisimilitude and dramatic viability outgun outright veracity as the criteria for determining the thrust of their reportage. Thus a longtime informant who says he heard two White men do the snuffs gets screaming national coverage before being dismissed with footnotelike shrugs; thus A.C. Cowlings cavorting at a porno-industry wingding militates against Oj. with an inference of “check this lowlife jungle bunny out”; thus Valley-girl model Tiffany Starr pitching a boo-hoo number about her two-date relationship with Ron Goldman implies that any man who’d pour the pork to this bimbo deserved to get whacked.

Thus freedom of speech has given us a hybrid extravaganza that rests somewhere between haphazardly proffered obfuscation and willfully evolved fiction. The exploitability of the case intersected with the ascendance of tabloid television and created a phenomenon of great magnitude, and to censor it or attempt to curtail it in any manner would be unconscionable. The Oj. Simpson case is a collective work of performance art that has to play itself out before it can be assessed, structured, deconstructed, and dissected for moral meaning.

It may boil down to issues of public disclosure and legal ethics. It may boil down to an outcry for journalistic circumspection and objectivity at all costs.

The art of fiction hinges on subjective thinking. Novelists must assume the perspectives of many different characters. Some months ago, the Simpson defense team assumed Oj.’s perspective and realized that their client was flubbing his performance as an innocent man unjustly accused. Oj. never screamed, “Let’s nail the shitbird who killed my wife!”