Oj. did or did not shed his own blood outside Nicole’s pad. He returned from an overnight trip to Chicago sporting a fresh cut– which might have been caused by his slamming down a glass upon hearing the news of his ex-wife’s death or might have been caused by his slashing at the woman a bit too close to his free hand. Blood trajectories are primarily matters of forensic and hard legal concern. They lack the mass-market appeal inherent to hearsay accounts of an attractive woman’s sex life and attempts to portray a career misogynist as a lost brother to the Scottsboro Boys, and until the blood-oozing interactive Oj. CD-ROM hits stores, we just might have to view where that blood was spilled as a literal indication of Mr. Simpson’s guilt or innocence–a niggling restriction to keep us tenuously open-minded as data rains down and inundates us.
The Oj. Simpson case is a gigantic Russian novel set in L.A. The extravaganza occurred in L.A. because the major characters wanted to suck the giant poison cock off the Entertainment Industry. It’s a novel of metamorphoses–because L.A. is where you go when you want to be somebody else. It happened in L.A. because it’s the best place on earth to get breast and penis enlargements. It happened in the Brentwood part of L.A. because homelessness, crack addiction, and other outward signs of despair appear at a minimum there.
O.J. Simpson wanted to be White. Ron Goldman wanted to be an actor–an equally ridiculous ambition. Nicole wanted a groovy fast lane and the secondhand celebrity that comes with flicking famous men.
Her second-tier status extended to her death. She became the blank page that pundits used to explicate her husband’s long journey of suppression.
Nicole bought a ticket to ride. The price was nakedly apparent long before she died. Her face was pinched and crimped at the edges–too-pert features held too taut and compressed by too many bouts with cocaine, too many compulsive gym workouts, and too much time given over to maintaining a cosmetic front. Her beauty was not the beach-bunny perfection revered by stupid young men and the man who may or may not have murdered her. The physical force of Nicole Brown Simpson is the glaze of desiccation writ large on her face. The lines starting to form might have been caused by inchoate inner struggles, or the simple process of aging, or a growingly articulate sense that she had boxed herself into an inescapable corner of obsessive male desire, random male desire, and a life of indebtedness to things meretricious and shallow.
Nicole’s relationship with Oj. was deceptive and collusive from the start. He bought the hot blonde that fifty years of pop culture told him he should groove on, and an unformed psyche that adapted to his policy of one-way monogamy. She bought a rich, handsome, famous man possessed of infantile characteristics, which led her to believe that she could control him.
He bought a trip through his unconscious and a preordained mandate for horror. She abdicated to an inner drama that would ultimately destroy her.
They both bought a trip to Hollywood. O.J.’s athletic career was phasing out at the time they met; he sensed that he could continue his nice-guy impersonation and ease himself into plum acting roles with his long-perfected chameleon aplomb. He had made a second career out of disarming people with smiles and self-effacing gestures, and if he failed to hit the level of transposition that quality acting required, he could always play his familiar old ingratiating self, lower his cloning-sights from Laurence Olivier to Sly Stallone, get a mojo going as an action-flick hero, make big bucks, and score beaucoup poontang in the process. He knew a shitload of wimps and tough-guy wanna-bes in the Biz–geeks who subscribed to the ruthlessness-as-strength-ofcharacter ethic that pervades Hollywood but had never been in a fistfight and loved to tell jokes about their wives leaving them for well-endowed shvartzes. He knew these guys; they knew him; he got a symbiotic groove going with guys like that. Guys like that could make him a biiiiiig movie star.
Oj. miscalculated. His powers of sociopathic seduction were best exposited in five-second sound bites and best received by callow young women. It should be noted that Oj. Simpson is not the smartest motherfucker ever to walk the earth. He is a man of great physical gifts, superficial charm, and limited cunning, who segued from football to Hollywood with an impressionable girl in tow. He nested in a place where marriage is a shuck and a smoke screen for hidden sexual agendas; he brought a woman into the Inside World that the Outside World has been brainwashed into believing is the World Most to Be Coveted. He got her hooked on celebrity the way pimps get whores hooked on dope.