Rodney King. The ’92 riots. The repellent and radically race-ratified O.J. Simpson verdict.
The twisting twirl of time.
Back to 1954.
And me.
I never resurrected my career. I banged my box and made maintenance money and raised three kids. My draft-dodger drama dogged me and diverted my audience. My wife died in ’82.
Cancer.
I’m 67 now. I’m healthy. I live in Las Vegas and work lounge gigs. I chase women. Women chase me. I chase the twisting twirl back to THEN.
My fear flared and flowed THEN to NOW My Patented PostPassive Rages popped once in a billion blue moons. I mainlined my way into madness and meandered out with more mini-myths.
I’ve mentioned this aforetold myth to a million myth-hungry people. They don’t accept my secret history. They tell me the players are dead and unable to confirm or refute. They point to my genetic link to Alzheimer’s disease.
They tell me I’m lying. They say I’m wrong. They say it’s a fever dream. They get frenetically frustrated and say no no no.
I get righteously righteous and smilingly smug. I point to L.A. and claim credit for the nightmare.
November, December 1997
SEX, GLITZ, AND GREED
THE SEDUCTION OF O. J. SIMPSON
[This piece was written before the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial.]
The Simpson-Goldman snuffs are recognizably prosaic. Subtract the accused killer’s celebrity and showbiz milieu and you’ve got a spur-of-the-moment whack-out equally indigenous to Watts, Pacoima and Dogdick, Delaware. The intersection’ of fame, extreme good looks, and pervasive media coverage has blasted a common double slash-job to the top of the pantheonic police blotter of our minds. The Leopold-Loeb, Wylie-Hoffert, and Manson Family cases–replete with complex investigations and psychological underpinnings emblematic of their time–cannot compete with the Simpson Trinity. A botched hack-and-run caper has become the Crime of the Century.
On Sunday, June 12, 1994, Oj. Simpson did or did not drive to his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson’s pad and slaughter her and a young man named Ronald Goldman. He did or did not wear gloves and a ski mask; he did or did not butcher his victims with a bone-handled knife, a bayonet, or an entrenching tool. He did or did not split the scene and drive to his own home, a few minutes away.
Nicole Brown Simpson was or was not a devoted mother, a cocaine addict, and an airheaded party girl. She was or was not an anorexic, a bulimic, or a nymphomaniac given to picking up men at a Brentwood espresso pit. The minutiae of her life can be compiled and collated to conform to almost any sleazy thesis. She is most unambiguously defined by this heavily documented fact: Oj. Simpson beat the shit out of her over the last five years of her life.
Ron Goldman was either a waiter who wanted to be an actor or an actor working as a waiter–a very common L.A. job euphemism. He was or was not Nicole Simpson’s lover. He did or did not borrow Nicole’s Ferrari on occasion–which did or did not piss off Oj. no end. Forensic evidence indicates that Goldman fought very hard for his life.
Forensic evidence is utilized to supersede interpretation and conjecture through the application of impartial, empirically valid scientific methods. Forensic evidence is used to place suspected felons at crime scenes. Forensic evidence is a counterweight to gooey pleas for mitigation.
The gathering of forensic evidence is a conscious search for the truth. So are legitimate attempts to debunk scientific fallacies and sloppy applications of long-established forensic procedures. The analysis of forensic evidence may prove to be the adjudicating bottom line in the Oj. Simpson case. The flip side might be logical chaos–a verdict or the absence of a verdict spawned by the numbingly protracted cross-media extravaganza that has deluged all would-be jurors and indeed the entire American public with an accretion of contradictory details both densely pertinent and superfluous–a huge shitstorm of information, misinformation, innuendo, and disingenuously reported rebop that backs you into a corner like a date rapist you can never escape until you shut down your electronic and printed-page access to the world, move to the South Pole, and start flicking penguins.