O.J’S NIGHTMARE......
O.J. LYLE, ERIK AND ME
Robert Shapiro has a face that looks like the underbelly of a small, wet weasel.
He he has liar's eyes (make that lawyer's eyes). Worst of all, Shapiro always looks greasy, as if he's been dipped in some sort of oil. I don't like the guy. Every time I see the sucker on the tube, I have an urge to throw something at my television set.
I don't like Johnny Cochran much better. Despite his $2000 dollars suits and his gold, wire-rimmed glasses, he's basically just another high-priced pimp. If the sucker weren't black there's no way they'd have hired him. For that matter Cochran's not really even black. The term "Uncle Tom" must have been invented for this guy.
In case you're wondering who Johnny Cochran and Robert Shapiro are, they are O.J. Simpson's lawyers. As I write this (October, 1994) the Simpson case has virtually taken over the media. Perhaps by the time this comes out, it'll have been relegated to what it actually is -- another run of the mill murder case. Obsessed husband kills his wife. No big deal. Happens every day.
I'd promised myself when the Simpson case hit that I wasn't going to get involved in it. I'd spent the previous six months embroiled in the Menendez murder trial; admittedly I'd become totally obsessed with the damn thing. During those months, I literally ate, breathed and dreamt Menendez.
Once it became obvious that the obsession had me by the cajones, I figured I might as well try to do something useful with it, so I started making phone calls to assorted editors. By the time the trial was over I'd written pieces for National Review, Penthouse, Los Angeles Magazine, Paris Match, as well as provided information to dozens of tabloid TV shows. In this instance, the obsession paid off. Over the course of the trial, I'd made approximately $20,000 on various Menendez stories.
When Simpson thing hit, I'd decided from the getgo that I was going to steer clear of it. Let the rest of the journalistic community run after leads that went nowhere; let other schmucks have to brave the traffic so they could get down to the criminal courts building at 7.30 in the morning to see the lawyers getting out of their limos and hear their canned sound bytes. I wasn't interested; life was too bloody short.
Despite those thoughts, I'd noticed the Simpson case was occupying my mind far too much of the time. Well, it was no wonder. Every time you turned around they were hitting you over the head with the goddamn thing. Books, articles, tabloids, talk shows. There was no way to escape the thing.
Finally, I decided to go cold turkey. Whenever a Simpson story would appear on the air, I'd flip the channel. I skipped the Simpson pieces when I read my morning paper. I even quit picking up the Enquirer (a long term and highly pleasurable habit) when I bought my groceries. That's the end of that, I figured.
I figured wrong. On a recent morning, I found myself on the freeway driving in the opposite direction from my intended destination. It took me a moment to realize what I was doing. Schmuck! I'd promised myself I wasn't going to do this. But now I was doing it anyhow.
I was heading for O.J. Simpson's house.
This is stupid, I thought, as I wound up Sunset towards Brentwood. You have absolutely no reason to do this. But despite my thoughts, I kept driving, my heart quickening as I neared my location. Though I'd never been to Simpson's home, I basically knew where it was. My antennae, which were always fairly acute when it came to "locating" places, would do the rest.
I almost missed the Rockingham street sign because somebody had painted over it; perhaps it was a prank, or maybe it was a deliberate effort by the city in an effort to keep the gawkers from locating Simpson's house. I hung a
U-turn on Sunset, and turned right up Rockingham. The street, filled with perfectly manicured multi-million dollar homes, wound up into the hills. It took less than two minutes to reach the 300 block.
The house was immediately recognizable from the photos I'd seen of it on television. Surrounded by a green wrought iron fence, it took up the entire block. There were a few rubber-neckers hanging out around the front gate; frankly I'd expected more. I turned right on Ashford, so I could get a look at the side of the house. In order to separate myself from the other voyeurs, I took out my tape recorder and started babbling into it, trying to make out as if I were engaged in legitimate reportorial duties, even though I had no assignment to cover the Simpson case.
I thought about looking behind the wall -- I wanted to see if there was a place where Simpson might have been trying to hide the famous bloody glove that he'd allegedly dropped on the night of the murders. No way I was going to be able to get behind there,at least in daylight.
It wasn't as if I were really trying to get facts; like I said, I had no assignment. Rather, I was trying to sniff out something more elusive, though at the moment I couldn't say exactly what it was. But after driving past the house a couple of times, I felt nothing. This house has no story to tell, the little voice inside my head announced.
I drove back around the front of the house. A hairy-chested guy in a bright red Hawaiian shirt had gotten out of a station wagon and was videotaping his wife, a fat porker attired in a cheap lime green mumu. The woman was doing a little jig in front of Simpson's gate, hamming it up for the camera. A huge knot of anger welled up in my stomach. Jesus, did people have no shame?
"Go home, ya goddamn ghouls!" I yelled at them. But they paid no attention. They were having too good a time. I felt sick. Journalist or no, I knew I was just another bloodsucker. I quickly turned left on Rockingham and headed back down towards Sunset.
When I hit Bundy I turned South. The street winds down into a slightly less posh section of Brentwood. As I reached San Vicente, I saw the Westward Ho Market on my left (the only supermarket in town where they have valets park your car for you). I'd shopped there many times back when I'd lived here. Suddenly my stomach started feeling queasy. It was a good sign. It told me I was on the right trail.
A block past San Vicente, Bundy jags around past an elementary school, then veers into an area largely populated by condominiums. I slowed down so that I could read the numbers. 853... 857.....861... There. 875 South Bundy. Right next to the corner of Dorothy and Bundy was a white, mediterranean style condominium. Nicole Simpson's house; the murder site.
The walled in condo was so obscured by trees and shrubbery that you could barely see it. I pulled over and killed the engine. My stomach was churning a mile a minute.
There -- behind that wall, in those bushes. That's where he'd waited. They said he had hidden in the bushes on numerous occasions. One night he'd watched her give Keith Zlomsowich -- one of the many different guys she was "dating" -- a blowjob. Had he started thinking of killing her back then?
I could see him in those bushes. Crouching down, peering through the window slats. He'd be sweating profusely, trying not to breathe too loudly.
Suddenly, I had a flash of myself, skulking down in the bushes, peeping through the windows of a condo not two blocks from here. The next instant I thought I was going to puke. An onslaught of shame and humiliation washed over me like huge black tidal wave.
Now I knew what why I'd come here.
The police reports had said that there were bloody footprints which led directly from the bodies to the alley behind the house. When I'd driven by, I noticed a sign posted at the alley entranceway: Residents Only: Men Working. It was an obvious attempt to keep the gawkers away. I took out my press pass and stuck it in my shirt pocket, in case anybody decided to hassle me. Then I got out of my car and headed for the alley.
I walked the length of the alley several times. Yeah, this is where he parked allright. No doubt about it. It struck me that the Menendez brothers had also parked in an alleyway behind their house the night they slaughtered their parents. I'd scoured that alleyway dozens of times during the Menendez case.
I'd even had a friend of mine who lived in the house directly behind the Menendezes see if he could figure out a way to help me get inside so I could nose around the premises. Again, I didn't know what I was looking for in particular, but when you're as obsessed as I was you just want to be near your quarry.
Now as I walked the alley behind Nicole Simpson,s a curious thought struck me. Here I was, and at this very same moment, Lyle and Erik and OJ were all sitting in jail cells. I knew what that felt like. I 'd spent one night in jail in my lifetime. Not just the horror of the situation, coupled with my agoraphobia made that without a doubt the most horrible night of my life. I remember screaming at my lawyer the next day that if they didn't get me out I was going either go crazy or kill myself. I'd made such a stink about it that they even let me see the prison p psychiatrist.
As I walked the alleyway I kept thinking the same thing over and over again. They're in jail. I'm not. I said it over and over again, like a mantra. It seemed to have some effect on the nausea. On my third traversal up the alley, a couple of people began eyeing me suspiciously.
It was time to bail.
I wanted to time exactly how long it took someone to drive from this location back up to Simpson's Rockingham estate. There was also another route I wanted to drive -- the one from Rockingham to the McDonald's located on Sunset, where O.J. and Kato Kaelin had gone for hamburgers an hour before the murders. It made no sense that Simpson would drive all the way down to this particular McDonald's, when there were tons of other fast food joints closer to his home. The only reason, I had surmised, would be so he could drive by Nicole's place to see if she were home.
Then it struck me again. What the hell are you doing this for? I knew that everything I was doing the cops had already done, and that all this mapping and timing business was just jerking off. "You're obsessing again," my internal therapist suggested. "Shut the fuck up," my angry guy yelled back at the therapist. " If I feel like obsessing I'm damn well going to obsess!"
But before I traced the route from Nicole's to O.J's, there was something else I needed to do first. It was something I'd been trying to avoid. Now that wasn't possible any longer.
I got in my car and pulled out, driving once more past the front of Nicole's condo. A few workmen were out front now, scrubbing down the red brick walkway. Were they actually still washing blood off the sidewalk two months after the murders? A woman who'd written a piece for Esquire had said that when she'd visited the murder site, the area in front of the condo still smelled like blood. What did blood smell like anyhow? I knew I'd have to come back and check it out for myself.
When I got to San Vicente, I turned right. The next block over from Bundy is Barrington Ave. As soon as I turned onto the street my stomach really started going bananas. I started feeling dizzy, like I was going to faint. I knew what was coming. I'd been trying not to look at it for ten years, and now the goddamn Simpson case had brought it all back.
Just before reaching Sunset, on the left there is a small park. The sign out front reads Barrington Recreation Center.
I pulled into the lot and parked.
God, how many afternoons had I spent in this park? Playing with Karen's kids, watching them as they frolicked for hours in the playground. Back then my life seemed to consist of things previously foreign to me: slides, swings, merry go rounds, Toys 'R' Us, jelly-bellies, schoolyards, spilled milk, Cheerios on the floor, coloring books, plastic spacemen and dinosaurs, Barbie dolls....the accoutrements of childhood. Even when I didn't bring the kids, I'd often some to the park alone, especially after Karen and I had had one of our fights. The park never gave me much solace, though. Something about it always made me feel hollow. Worse, I felt like an intruder. The park was always chock full of families, walking hand in hand, carousing with their children. Back then, I'd had a family too -- a gal, three swell kids. But it wasn't really my family. I had
stolen them.
I looked across the street. There it was. 330 South Barrington. The Barrington Townhouse. I'd forgotten that was the name. Barrington Townhouse, my ass. Barrington Hell House was more like it.
The three story apartment building looked exactly the same as it had ten years ago. Except for the fact that it was located in a posh section of town, it was a shithole. The kind of place that you'd expect people to put tinfoil up to cover the windows. But because it was in Brentwood it -- like the other buildings on the street -- commanded ridiculously overpriced rents. I think we'd paid $2000 for a three bedroom place, and that was in 1981.
But it wasn't the price that came back as I stood there. It was the sense of utter, absolute blackness. The horrors that'd gone on inside that place -- inside and outside actually -- most of them I'd repressed. I still didn't have a lot of specific memories, but as I stood there, the overwhelming sense of the nightmare I'd lived through during that time hit me like a ton of bricks.
I crossed the street on shaky legs. There was an iron security gate out front now, that was the only difference. As I stood there, a couple of college guys exited the building carrying a set of drums and some electric guitars. I walked in past them. So much for security.
Once inside, a long ugly corridor stood before me. It seemed like it was humming. At the very end, under a dim yellow bulb, I could see the door to my old apartment, number 103.
Standing there, I broke into a sweat. There were little things clicking and popping inside my brain. It took all the strength I could muster to walk down that hallway, but I did it. I recalled how back then, whenever I'd make that walk, I always had the sense that I was en route to the gas chamber.
I stood outside the door to apartment 103. How odd. I wonder if whoever lives in there now has any inkling of what went on behind those doors? I had an urge to knock. I wanted to see it just one more time. I put my ear to the door and listened. Nothing. Maybe nobody lived there. Maybe they'd condemned the place. NO VACANCY. DEMON-POSSESSED APARTMENT.
I turned around and started back down the hall. I kept looking to see if there were somebody behind me. I felt like breaking into a run, but I forced myself to take slow, deliberate steps.
It's just a goddamn building. There's nothing here. It's all in your head.
As I neared the gate, the guys carrying the instruments passed by me on the way to their apartment. "Hey, man " one guy greeted me. I tried to smile but my mouth wouldn't do the right thing. My face was all frozen.
Once I got outside, I stood, sucking wind. My head swum. I really thought I was going to faint. Take deep breaths, that's what the doctor said you're supposed to do. That's it. Breathe....breathe.
Once my head cleared, I started walking up Barrington towards the Village. One of the reasons we'd picked the apartment in the first place was that we could walk to Brentwood Village, a cozy little circle of shops. Some of them, like the old hardware store (I'd liked that place) were gone. But many of them were still intact. There was Mario's, where we ate pizza and people-watched; the Brentwood Market, where we bought our overpriced groceries; Baskin Robbins, where the kids went for ice creams after dinner.
On the corner of Sunset and Barrington was one of my favorite places.
It was a Texaco gas station. But it wasn't just any gas station. This was absolutely, without a doubt, the cleanest gas station in the entire world (you could literally eat off the floor, I swear! ). The attendants who worked there were always nice and polite and they did your windshield for you, and there wasn't a Mexican or Iranian in the bunch! Back then I took great comfort that I lived within walking distance of such a civilized, sanctified establishment. Somehow it made me feel safe.
Across the street, on the corner of Chayote and Barrington Place sat the Wells Fargo Bank. That's where she would go use the versatel machine. I remember she was always paranoid that she was going to get mugged. "In Brentwood?" I would taunt her. "Nobody gets mugged in Brentwood."
But times had changed. Just the night before, someone had been shot to death at this very versatel machine. I'd seen it on the news. The victim had opted to use the drive-through versatel; while he was putting his money in his wallet, a young black dude had come up to the window and stuck a gun to his head. "Gimme all your bread, mutherfucker," the black guy hissed. The guy in the car had decided to buck the odds and drive away. For his little effort in stupidity he'd gotten his brains blown all over the dashboard.
I headed back through the closed courtyard, past people in mirrored shades sipping cappucinos. Yeah, times have changed allright. Ten years ago, you wouldn't have seen a black person within ten miles of Brentwood. Now they're killing people here, just like the rest of L.A.
For some reason, that idea pleased me.
On the corner of Barrington Place stood the Brent-Air Pharmacy, a terrific old two-level drugstore that appeared to have been built in the Forties. As soon as I got inside, I was hit by a powerful deja vu. Gus, the old Japanese pharmacist who used to fill out the prescriptions for my medication ten years ago was still here! Better yet, he appeared not to have aged a day. When I'd first started taking the anti-depressant, I'd always felt slightly ashamed whenever I went to pick it up. But Gus never made me feel bad, and after awhile, I'd come to enjoy making the little trips to the drugstore to purchase my medicine. Back then I clung desperately to anything with an element of ritual. When you feel like everything around you is going to disappear at any moment, order, form, ritual -- these things become incredibly important.
Being in the store again was like a time warp. Virtually everything was in the exact same spot it'd been ten years ago. In fact, I could swear that some of the dusty old medicine bottles on the shelves were the same (they couldn't be, couldn't they?). It made me think of an episode of Twilight Zone where this guy goes back to the town of his childhood only to find it completely untouched. The first place he goes back to is the old drugstore, so he can have a chocolate phosphate again. That's what it felt like now. Had they had chocolate phosphates at the Brent-Air pharmacy I would have had one for sure.
I did the next best thing I could think of. I headed straight for the magazine rack in the back of the store. Ever since I'd been a kid, I'd loved magazine racks, especially if they were in a drugstore. I would spend hours poking through the pages of movie magazines, comics, occasionally sneaking a peek inside off-limits stuff like Confidential, and Uncensored. Even though cool magazines like Confidential had been replaced by the dogshit like
The Enquirer, the sense of prowling around the magazine rack had never lost its magic.
A cover of People caught my eye. "The Complete Guide To the Trial Of O.J. Simpson! " shouted the cover blurb. I took the magazine to the counter, behind which sat a beautiful, if somewhat blank-faced girl. That's another reason I'd always liked The Brent-Air pharmacy. They always had incredibly gorgeous girls working there. Most of them were idiots. This one was no exception.
"You too! " she chirped, not looking me in the eye and apropos of nothing, since I'd hadn't said a word to prompt the response.
As I walked back down Barrington, I noted that the most of the condos on the street had the same red brick walkways that I'd seen in front of Nicole Simpson's place. Only the bricks in front of Simpson's had been stained with bloody footprints left by her dog, who, after the murders had gone crazy running back and forth, tracking blood all over the place and making the walkway look like some kind of crazy Rorschach test.
Heading back down towards the park, I passed several monstrously overweight women, one after the other. All of them were walking tiny, ugly dogs. Suddenly, I started laughing. I felt like I was in a Fellini film. Actually, for all intents and purposes, I was. God, what a story this would make! Think of it! A guy returns to the place he'd lived in ten years ago, on the excuse that he's looking into a murder case. But the truth is, he's really looking for something else. The problem is, he doesn't know what it is.
So what the hell is it anyhow? A ghost of some kind -- who the fuck knows? All he knows is that ten years ago, he'd lived on this very street; he'd shared an apartment with a woman he'd been wildly in love with. Ah, but this is no ordinary romance, no sir! The woman, you see, is his old high school sweetheart, a lovely lass who he'd rather rudely dumped just after graduation. Fifteen years passes. Then one day, out of the blue, he runs into her by accident (he thinks) and -- boom -- they immediately embark upon a torrid affair, as if no time has passed. The sex is amazing. They fuck in motels, they fuck in the backseats of cars, telephone booths -- you name it. There's a little problem though, in the form of the woman's husband -- a prominent Los Angeles psychologist -- not to mention three children. But the woman (actually, it's wrong to call her a woman, because in his mind she has forever remained a teenager; so has he, for that matter) is so smitten that she decides to divorce her husband and marry the old boyfriend. And that's exactly what she does. Even before the divorce is final, she takes her three kids, bids goodbye to her million-dollar Pacific Palisades home and moves in with our man, who, for lack of a more fitting description we'll simply call a starving writer. "I don't care!" she assures him. "I don't care that you have no money, or that you drive a beat up 1972 Cadillac, or that you seem to have no apparent purpose in life. I love you. I have always loved you! We were meant to be together forever! " Which, by the way, is the very title of a cheap Dell paperback he'd purchased back then, and which he'd obsessively read (as if by reading it over and over, maybe he'd come to actually be able to buy into some of this New Age horseshit). In any event, the lovers are reunited; they're firmly committed to one another; a marriage date is set; rings are purchased -- the whole schmear.
Pretty romantic stuff, huh? But there is a little problem here. Our hero, he's not feeling so hot, see? He's been acting a little strange lately. Just prior to embarking on this little fling, he's been engaging in certain highly highly peculiar activities. He's quit his job, sold all of his worldy belongings; he seems to be attempting to dispose of everything that ever meant anything to him, photos, memorabilia, furniture, musical instruments, old love letters. He's even flushed his entire tank of tropical fish down the toilet (and he was very fond of those fish, trust me! ). He can't sleep anymore, so he stays up all night staring at the tube with the sound off. He he can't stand noise. Actually, he can't stand sound.) He consumes massive amounts of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. He eats Morton salt straight out of the shaker. He gulps pills without even bothering to read the labels. He spends his days driving aimlessly about town, babbling to himself about things like disembodied spirits, death, mutilation... stuff like that.
Well, it's no wonder. The poor jerk's just been through a string of what- - if you care for explanations -- you could call some real bad luck. His wife has left him, his house has burned down in a freak accident, his car has been stolen, his inner ear has exploded, leaving him partially deaf and with no sense of balance. He can't concentrate on anything for more than three seconds. Often he can't understand what people are talking about. He suffers long fugue spells in which he has no memory whatsoever. One day, for no apparent reason, he falls off the side of a mountain, after which he wanders, dazed and disheveled, through the town for over two days, not knowing who he is, babbling to any stranger who will listen to him.
After a brief stay in a hospital, our man boards a plane for Salzburg, Austria where he has been invited to convalesce at the home of an old girlfriend, a ballet teacher. The ballet teacher does her best to rouse him from his depression, even offering to bequeath unto him her wonderfully-muscled body to do with what he may (without any promise of anything even resembling affection on his part!) Alas, he cannot (or will not) respond.
While in Europe, he spends his days sitting in graveyards (his favorite is Pere Lechaise) where he carries on long conversations with assorted ghosts and spirits and dreams he will find a crippled French girl to take care of, and she will love him and he will be faithful and they will live in a tiny flat near the cathedral of Chartres and one day, because his love is so overpowering, her spindly, useless legs will grow strong again, and she'll look at him bright-eyed and say, "I can walk, my darling! I can walk!" He is, by this time of course, quite insane.
Upon his return home, the insane man falls into the romance with the ex-highschool girlfriend, and.....poof!.....just like magic, all the pain is gone. And for awhile there, everything is hunky dory. Everything is really and truly OK.
Of course it's not OK at all. Soon, our hero begins experiencing all kinds of bizarre and highly unpleasant symptoms -- like if he's in a restaurant all of a sudden he'll start crying for no reason and he'll have to run outside. His hands shake. He feels like walls are closing in on him, like things are going to start flying off in all directions, like the ground under him is about to open up and suck him down into some....thing. He thinks people are reading his mind, laughing at him, plotting against at him. He wakes up at 3:00 a.m. drenched in sweat, gasping for air. Nights are one long spasm of terror. Sometimes he blacks out for no reason. But his new/old girlfriend tells him, it's allright sweetie, it's allright. Don't worry, I'll take care of you, I'm here, baby....
All they ever do is fuck. They fuck ten, twenty times a day. Pretty soon the sex starts to get kind of kinky; she wants him tie her up and smack her around and stuff. She wants to get fucked in ass. She dresses up in trashy lingerie and asks him to shove assorted vegetables up certain orfices. He thinks she's kind of wigged out but at the same time he likes it. This is new, uncharted turf.
But there's a problem. Pretty soon, he can't get enough of fucking. The minute he's done fucking he needs to fuck some more. His testicles will not stop pumping testosterone! He can ejaculate seven, ten, fifteen times in a row! When she's not home, he sits around the apartment jacking off like some goddamn chimpanzee. He's a fountain of semen....a veritable human penis!
Soon he begins exhibiting symptoms of extreme paranoia. He doesn't trust her. He thinks she's screwing somebody behind his back. He thinks she's plotting against him. He thinks she's trying to poison him. He can't stand to be by himself. When she's not around he goes bonkers , imagining all sorts of horrible scenarios. He tracks her every movement, he spies on her, he calls her friends to check up on her. Totally distraught, he goes to see a limping psychiatrist who lives in a house with no walls, and even though the woman is no doubt capable, the setting is so bizarre that it just makes him feel even crazier than he already is.
Pretty soon, the girlfriend starts getting sick of his antics. "You need to go out and get a job," she tells him, "Do something, get your mind off obsessing over everything. You have a family to take care of now."
He tries -- he really does. He gets a job, albeit it's sort of the wrong job for a guy who's so sexually messed up. It's editing a porn magazine. An extremely sleazy porn magazine. All he does at the job is sit behind his desk and fantasize that she's fucking someone else, she's fucking her ex-husband, she's fucking her lawyer, she's fucking lifeguards with no hair on their chest, she's fucking Negroes in a pile of dirt while a really bad English blues band plays "Born Under A Bad Sign" in the background. He sits in his office and locks the door and jacks off to pictures of pregnant women with big nipples, and he calls her, ten, twenty times a day. When she doesn't answer the phone he has panic attacks; he can't breathe, and the next second he's in his car driving like a crazy man back to the apartment, and if she's not there he goes totally nuts, starts breaking up the furniture with assorted karate moves, calling everybody who knows her, cursing and screaming at total strangers.
The girlfriend, meanwhile, is pretty fucking nuts herself. She has put all the dressers in the house in front of the windows, erected them like some gigantic barricade, because she thinks a lunatic (not him. Some other lunatic!) is going to begin spraying bullets into the apartment and kill her children. She washes her hands fifteen times a day. She incessantly checks her littlest one's penis (Hmmmmm. Something weird about that). She plugs her kids' noses and ears with cotton balls (one time when they're out of cotton she actually uses cigarettes) to keep germs from infiltrating their bodies. She tells him horror stories about how Doc Pain (that's what they call her ex) used to do weird stuff to her, like make her go for three days without eating any food, during which time he'd hypnotize her and then do really horrible things, like fuck her with broomsticks and burn her nipples and one night some guy from Country Joe and the Fish had died in this house where they were living in Laurel Canyon. The guy had OD'd on laughing gas, but she and Doc were so fucked up at the time that they just left him there for three days, they didn't even call the cops or anything, they just kept doing more drugs and snorting ether and meanwhile this guy is lying there dead and stinking on their goddamn living room floor.
Then she tells him an even weirder story. She tells him, see -- that all those years, fifteen years ago when they were teenagers, that she'd cast a spell on him! She tells him that one time she stole some of his hair and fingernail clippings, and afterwards she'd taken a book out of the library on witchcraft and she'd made some kind of fucking goddamn voodoo doll. And using this doll, she'd cast this "love spell" on him in which she bound him to her eternally and for all time. And she says that's why he's so crazy about her, and that's why they're together now all these many years later.
Some very cosmic, very crazy shit.
But don't forget, our guy, at the time, is stone, fucking nuts. So when
she tells him this spell business, he buys it. It's the only thing that makes any sense.
So I have a curse on me. Oh ho! And now that the cat's out of the bag, the girlfriend becomes truly, openly whacked out. She walks around all day reading the bible and she insists he read it too -- especially Revelations. She writes letters to God. When they're driving in the car now, all they listen to is Swaggart or Oral Roberts or one of those guys; they talk incessantly about how God ordained it all and that they're on this mission for the Lord, and they're going to save humanity, and how all this was "meant to be" from the beginning of eternity.
Stone, fucking whacko shit, son.
So that's what they do, that's their life -- they talk about God and they fuck. And when they're fucking, sometimes he looks at her face and her eyes are all rolled back into her head and she's babbling gibberish and talking in tongues and whipping her head around and snarling, "Fuck my goddamn brains out, you fucking cocksucker," and she looks, goddamit....she looks demon possessed -- that's what she looks like!
And then something really awful happens. He's at work one day in his little porn office and she calls him and says, "It's over. I don't love you anymore. And by the way, don't come back here."
Naturally, he immediately jumps in his car and drives a zillion miles an hour back to the apartment, and when he gets there he bangs and bangs on the door, and who finally opens it but her parents! She's called her goddamn parents! And between the three of them they've packed all her stuff in boxes, and her father, this big, ugly red-faced anti-Semitic bully of a movie-producer says to him, "We know what you've done to our daughter, and if you ever come near her again, I swear to God I'll kill you."
So he has no choice, and he leaves, driving away into the night like a whipped dog. But he can't stay away from her. So now he drives by her house day and night; he crouches in the bushes, he spies on her through the window; he feels like a goddamn pervert but he can't help it. He really can't help it.
A couple of weeks later the girl calls him and says, "I have to see you." She's living in a new apartment now, chock full of all the stuff they'd bought together. At first he says no, but she tells him, "Come over and fuck my ass, I can't stand it. I need you to cum all over my tits." And boom -- he's gone, and the whole bloody, crazy shebang starts all over again.
She's in total control now and she loves it. She's eating it up. One day she'll toss him out on his ear, and the next day she'll phone him and say, "Come over and fuck my face. " And our guy, our poor demented hero, he's still got enough of his brains intact that he knows that he's either going to wind up killing himself or killing her (sure, he's thought of it!) and so finally, in total desperation, what he does, he gets on a Greyhound bus and goes to Bakersfield (Bakersfield, for Chrissakes! Tell me this isn't a goddamn movie!) where he checks into a motel and he doesn't leave that motel for three and a half weeks. It's his de-tox chamber. He knows he's got to cut the cord or else he's a goner. (Fortunately, while he's at the motel our man embarks upon a little fling with a very highly-sexed female security guard, and that kind of helps him get over his Jones with the whacked out ex-girlfriend).
Anyhow, that's it. End of story. Well, sort of. I mean, the guy never sees her again, but still, he knows he's lost it and that the real problem has nothing to do with the old girlfriend at all. She was just some burnt out 31-year old neurotic nymphomaniac, and what had happened was, he'd gotten addicted to pussy! Now the real task is at hand -- to get to the bottom of whatever it was that made him so crazy, whether it was Oedipal stuff or demonic stuff or whatever.
Quite a little movie, eh? And now walking down Barrington, past the fat women with the ugly little dogs, past the horror apartment, past the death bricks, ten years more of his life down the shitter, he starts laughing like a madman, realizing that he couldn't have made up a story like this in a million years, that this is the greatest thing ever!
Cars with angry looking drivers whizzed by. It was odd. People driving on this stretch of Barrington drove like lunatics. Not just fast, but angry fast, reckless fast, crazy fast. I recalled how many accidents there had been when I lived here. It seemed like practically every day the cops were scraping some poor chump off the pavement.
Back then, after things really gotten bad and I was reading the Bible every day, I'd decided that the street -- maybe the entire neighborhood even
-- was literally infested with demons. One day while I was out walking, some guy had handed me a bible tract. Normally, I'd have told him to get the hell away from me, but now that I was a good Christian and all, I took it. It turned out to be very interesting (and of course back then, I'd decided it was amongst the many things that were "meant to be").
The tract had explained how certain parts of the city were more populated by demons than others; how for example places like downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood were particularly infested. It made perfect sense, really. If houses could be haunted, why couldn't neighborhoods be demonized? Why not even a nice, safe, secure little haven like Brentwood?
I thought again of Nicole Simpson, lying in a bloody heap, her throat slashed through to the spinal column. Was O.J. possessed by demons? Who the hell knows? But he'd killed her allright. There was no doubt about it. All you had to do was look at the guy's eyes; they were totally dead. The whole story was right there.
My eyes used to look like that. Karen once told me that I had the eyes of a person who was dying.
I pictured O.J. sitting in his little 9' 'by 12' jail cell, and all of a sudden I felt incredibly sorry for him. The poor fucker couldn't really help himself. He'd been obsessed with her. When you're obsessed, you're a puppet, and if there's somebody that knows how to pull your strings, you're fucked. I had no doubt Nicole had done plenty of string pulling. Sure, to the world, he was O.J. the great and powerful. But inside was a different story. Inside -- at least on that particular night -- after she'd humiliated him, what he felt like was just another worthless nigger. That's what she made him feel like, and he killed her for it.
I was beginning to feel kind of woozy again, so I sat down on a bus bench. I didn't like sitting there because the bench was practically on the street and the insane drivers came really close to you, but there was no place else to sit. The bench was directly across the street from the Brentwood Recreation Center. It would've been more comfortable to go sit in the park, but for the life of me, I couldn't bring myself to do it. Too many goddamn ghosts in that park.
Ignoring the whizzing cars, I opened the magazine to the article on the Simpson case. The article, a chronology of June 12, the day the murders, was practically a repeat of a story that'd been published a week earlier in another magazine. Between the two pieces, you could get a fairly comprehensive picture of what had happened that day.
10:00 Nicole Simpson shops for her children, Sydney 8, and Justin, 6, at Star Toys on Barrington Place near Sunset Boulevard in Brentwood.
I'll be damned. She was right here -- in the Village -- on the morning of the murders.
1:00 p.m: Ron Goldman plays in his weekly Sunday afternoon softball game at the Brentwood Recreation Center. "Ron seemed happy," says Jeff Keller, a friend at the game.
I just sat there staring at the page; my head was buzzing. Back in the crazy days everything had a double meaning. Everything had significance. It was a sign of schizophrenia, I knew. Now I refused to allow myself to indulge in anything resembling what psychiatrists call "magical thinking." But I sure could have if I'd wanted to.
It was the first time I'd ever realized that one of the murder victims and myself shared the same last name. And now I was reading that he'd played ball every Sunday right here in the park I was sitting across from. My park!
I pictured Goldman, laughing, jawing with his buddies. Eight hours later he'd be lying in a heap with his throat cut, not two blocks from here.
I folded the magazine and got up from the bench. Then something odd happened. I was standing, and the next moment, I was flat on my back. I'd fallen -- I don't know how -- and now here I was, lying in the middle of the street. The demon street. A second later, a car coming around the corner came within six inches of running me over. The driver laid on his horn. "Fuckin' idiot!" he yelled out the window. Even after he'd gotten around the corner, the guy kept sitting on his horn. It was weird. Some guy almost hits me and he's yelling at me. Strangely, I wasn't angry. I wasn't frightened. I just sat there, listening to the sound of the angry horn disappear down the street.
I got up and shakily and made my way across the street to the Recreation Center. I was limping. Aside from the embarrassment of having fallen down, the whole thing struck me as rather funny. Here I'd come back to the scene of the nightmare time, the place of the absolute blackest, most horrible period in my life -- a time when it had seemed that literally everything, both inside and outside my skin, was conspiring to kill me -- and for no apparent reason, I'd fallen down in the middle of the fucking street... and almost gotten run over to boot! It was too hilarious for words!
When I got to the park I noticed that there was blood on my shirt. I'd cut my hand -- not much of a cut, but the damn thing had leaked all over my white shirt.
I went into the bathroom at the Rec Center. When I saw myself in the mirror, I really started laughing. My shirt was covered with blood, and my face was white as a sheet. I looked, for all intents and purposes, like an escaped serial-killer.
I had some clean t-shirts in my gym bag in the back of the car, so I figured I'd better change. The good folk of Brentwood wouldn't take kindly to some maniac walking up and down their fair streets.
As I changed shirts, I wondered -- for the first time in many moons -- what had ever happened to Karen. Through the grapevine I'd heard all kids of stories. She'd gone into a loony bin. She'd become a lesbian. She'd shaved her head bald and started hanging out with a bunch of weird people who were into witchcraft and other occult stuff. That she'd become anorexic-bulemic; finally when she gotten down to about seventy-five pounds she'd been forcibly hospitalized. I had no desire to know the truth or the falsity of any of the stories. As far as I was concerned, she was no longer amongst the living. I recalled that towards the end of things she'd told me that she'd literally killed me and buried me. She'd used a visualization technique that Doc Pain had taught her, in which she'd pictured the entire thing (it was a way of freeing yourself from the past). She told me she'd pictured me dead, lying in my coffin. She'd said "goodbye" as she heaped dirt on my grave.
I'll never forget when she told me that. It was like someone taking a knife and cutting my heart out. It was raining and I was sitting in her car in the parking lot of the Red Robin restaurant. "How could you?" I blubbered wetly. "I thought you loved me!
"I did," she said cooly, lighting up a smoke. "But that's over now. Now you're dead." I knew it was true. Later, after I de-toxed, I tried to do the same thing with her, but I never could, not until years later.
After I changed shirts, I drove back down Barrington and parked just off San Vicente. I wanted to check out Mezzaluna, the restaurant where Ron Goldman had worked. There was no particular reason for doing it: I just wanted to soak up some of the vibes.
The people in Brentwood had an odd look about them. At first
I couldn't figure out what it was. Then I saw it. They were self-conscious! And just underneath that, they were scared. Of course! It wasn't just that the media circus surrounding the Simpson case had cast their cloistered little village in the spotlight; it was that their little bubble of safety had been shattered. Death had entered the scene. He was their neighbor now.
I sat in Starbuck's, a claustrophobic little coffee shop in Brentwood Gardens where Nicole Simpson and her friends used to hang out after their workout. I ordered a tall cappucino (lousy cappucino) and took a seat at one of the outside tables. The night before, Hard Copy had run this piece called
"Nicole's Double," about some blond who lived in Brentwood and had gotten a movie deal because she looked like a dead person.
As I sat there, a dozen Nicole Simpsons and Ron Goldmans walked by.
All I could think of was, they're dead and I'm not. I knew they were flesh and blood people, that they had families and friends who loved them, but their deaths meant nothing to me. Murders happen everyday. One day you're here, the next day you're a pile of shit lying on the pavement with your face stabbed off. That's the way it is.
What I was doing here, I knew, had little to do with Ron Goldman or Nicole and O.J. Simpson, though surely, what had happened to them had unearthed some of my old demons. But what was it exactly that I was looking for? I still didn't have a name for it, but I could feel it all around me. The neighborhood was thick with it. Maybe it had something to do with the crazy guy who stalked his girlfriend on these same streets ten years ago -- as O.J. Simpson had later stalked Nicole -- maybe not. Maybe it had to do with the transsecting of parallel lines of fate. I still didn't have a name for it. All I knew for sure was that I had work to do.
I wanted to walk around Brentwood Gardens after finishing my coffee, but I found my legs would barely carry me. I was completely drained. I almost didn't have the energy to walk back to my car. If I wanted to continue this little investigation, I was going to have to come back another time.
When I got back to my car there was a parking ticket plastered on the windshield. I immediately panicked. My first thought was: It's a sign. But what was the message? You're not supposed to be doing this? Or did it mean I was supposed to be here, but something -- some otherworldy force -- was trying to prevent me from getting to the bottom of things?
Then I noticed the guy behind me pulling a ticket off his windshield. I looked up the street. All the cars had tickets. I breathed a sigh of relief.
Then I got in my car and beat it the hell out of there.
-30-
REASONS WE DON’T CARE IF HE KILLED HER
- YOU DON’T KNOW HER
- SHE WAS A PIG
- OJ HAD A BIG PENITH
- IT WAS JUST TV.....
ARE YOU GETTING THE PICTURE YET?
WHO GIVES A DOOTZ IF HE KILLED HER
THAT PUTZ WITH THE NECK BRACE....
BECAUSE WE LOVE FISH....
National Computer Turds
Email: runyon@aol.com