The Case That Ate L.A.

When all this began, when we awoke on a cool June morning in 1994 and heard about those two bodies and all that blood and the ex-husband whose initials are almost as famous as those of the university he had played football for . . . in other words, on the day “The Simpson Case” started, the Dow Jones average was about half of what it is today, L.A. still had a pro football team, and 187 was just the penal code for homicide, not a political battle cry.

Since then, we became first-name acquaintances with the dead and the living, Ron and Nicole, Johnnie and Marcia, O.J. and Kato.

Since then, 1,434 other people have been been killed in the city limits.

Since then, we learned of Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the chance that there was life on Mars.

And still, we paid attention to O.J.

The TV images were shut off, the plug was pulled on the radio, and still we followed it, knew the incantatory code words, slow-speed chase, plaintive wail of a dog, ugly-ass shoes, and that never-never land of denial, never beat her, never used the N-word.

Tuesday was the last day, the last time when any words would matter except the jury’s.

And still we care about the Simpson case, as if we are reluctant to be weaned of it, to hand it over to the jury, to the record books, to history.

*

What has been at stake that we concerned ourselves with this? Not an ex-football hero and pitchman, however amiable his demeanor. Not two people dying grotesquely and too young--some of those 1,434 others since must have died as wretchedly. Not even Ron and Nicole’s survivors, tragic though they are.

The trials, criminal and civil, served us as both confessional and forum, the screen through which we could filter race and class and gender and money, matters of hate and trust and disaffection that we rarely speak of, one to another.

To talk about them through the O.J. case figures made it an acceptable abstraction, role-playing, as the antique Greeks wrought their plays as catharsis for the audience.

The Greek chorus was in place for its final performance in Santa Monica Tuesday, too, standing upstage and chanting to the principals and to one another:

“Butcher!”

“Gold digger!”

“Faggot!”

“Whore!”

American catharsis spells it “$impson,” from the first tabloid offer to the $20 bills sarcastically waved in Simpson’s face on Tuesday. With an exception: To the choristers who think the Goldmans look on the case as a kind of annuity, I get the feeling that if the lawyers were not working on a contingency basis, Fred Goldman would accept O.J. Simpson’s check for $1, if signing that check meant Simpson was signing a confession.

The other money--well, where does it end? Movie money, book money, legal fee money. The case bought houses and cars, sold cellular phones and comedy routines. Even Tuesday, someone was announcing that as of today, a $9.99 credit card call can take you through “Ron and Nicole’s last moments with O.J. via a 12-minute dramatic tele-story,” which “up to now [was] too hot to report.”

Nonsense. Nothing is too hot to report. Or to market.

*

Everyone called it a circus, and in truth it lacked only the popcorn whiff of the midway.

The O.J. camp and the camp followers, the man in the clerical collar with a pectoral cross cut from a Pepsi can, the woman who dressed to catch O.J.’s eye, Irma the cookie lady, with her heavy, pro-O.J. sweatshirt for cool mornings and lightweight pro-O.J. T-shirt for warm afternoons, the people who took hours and days out of their lives to come here to goggle and holler--what will become of them?

The reporters will be reunited for other socially defining trials: of Ennis Cosby’s killer, when and if he comes to trial, of the murderer of the 6-year-old Colorado beauty queen, of the college freshmen defendants in the preppy infanticide case.

Where will the others go now, the rubber-neckers and groupies who, like the moon, were only lighted by reflected fame, people for whom no behavior was too extreme as long as it got them on TV? For the Simpson case crossed the mega-wattage live wires of fame and virtue, and gave us people who were elevated to the status of the first without holding any claim to the second.

To conclude both Simpson trials is not to resolve them, nor to shore up faith in the justice system that dealt with them. For the conspiracy-minded, two plus two need never again add up to four. The sides still will not join, or perhaps even meet. On Tuesday, the woman in the T-shirt asked, “What was a 17-year-old doing, going out with a married man?” and the woman in the pantsuit countered, “What was a married man doing, dating a 17-year-old?”

The enduring grief of the Simpson case, beyond that of any murder, is how much we depended on it to voice the things we had to say. That does not prove that the O.J. case was important--only how desperately, pathetically we needed it.