A Note on OJ
O.J. Simpson has died at 76.
Some memories:
Sunday, June 12, 1994. My fianceé, Sara — who would soon be wife #2 — and I went to a 7:00PM AA meeting in Westwood. She was the meeting secretary, and I had the coffee commitment.
After the meeting, we went out with a few of our “sponsees” for coffee in Brentwood.
The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf was on San Vicente Boulevard, barely a mile from Sara's apartment, which sat on the corner of Gretna Green and Bundy Drive. Sara and I drove home -- down Bundy -- around 10:00 that night.
Our best estimate is that we drove past Nicole Simpson's condo only 10 to 15 minutes before she and her friend Ron Goldman were stabbed to death. Nicole lived perhaps 400 yards up the street from Sara; they had mutual friends.
We didn't hear sirens that night. The next morning, we jogged together up Bundy, planning to do our usual run around the Brentwood Country Club. We were redirected by the police, who had most of the street blocked off.
The TV trucks came that afternoon. So very many TV trucks.
Sixteen months later, on a Tuesday morning in October, I did something I'd never done before and would do only twice more in my teaching career: I stopped class to turn on the TV so that we could watch a live event. (The other two occasions: 9/11 and Obama’s first inaugural.) My students gasped when the verdict came down and OJ Simpson was acquitted; a young Black woman shouted "Yes!"; the one older white woman in the class began to cry.
I locked eyes with the prettiest student in my class, a fierce and poised 20 year-old. She mouthed "wow" at me, and I mouthed it back.
That woman is now the mother of my children.
The murders and the trial transfixed a nation. The much-publicized disparity between how Black and white people saw the case drove home the reality that a wound some had thought healed, festered still.
Trial coverage preempted soap operas, and the soaps never recovered. (People discovered they'd rather listen to "experts" prattle about murder and DNA than watch pretend doctors fall in and out of love.) The nation met a lawyer named Bob Kardashian, of whose offspring no more need be said. It is not hyperbole to claim that the OJ Simpson trial changed American culture more than any other event that decade.
Sara and I both enjoyed and lamented the notoriety our street -- there were still actual middle-class people in Brentwood in 1994 -- received. Sara and I would divorce eight months after the not-guilty verdict. Her beautiful art-deco apartment building would be torn down in the mid-aughts, replaced by something taller, more luxurious, and far less interesting.
These are scattered thoughts, of course. What matters is that while OJ has now been gathered to his people, a sweet and lovely son and brother named Ron Goldman went home much sooner, and in the worst possible circumstances. Ron died next to his friend Nicole, a deeply-loved and admired mother, daughter, sister, and friend whose pleas for help had been so often ignored. May their memories be a blessing.