If I Did It (12 page)

a lot of parents were holding nice bouquets. Damn! I had forgotten
the flowers. I leaned over and checked the schedule, and there were
at least halfadozen acts before Sydney hit the stage, so I worked
my way down the aisle and hurried into the parking lot. I got into
my car and drove into Brentwood and picked up some flowers, and
I got back in plenty of time.
We watched Sydney do her number, and clapped louder than
everyone else, and then there was a brief intermission. Sydney came
over, beaming, and I gave her the flowers. She looked absolutely
beautiful. When she went over to talk to her grandparents, I looked
up and saw Ron Fishman, Cora's husband. We shook hands and he
led me off to one side. “O.J., man, you wouldn't believe what's
going on,” he said.
“With what?”
“The women. Everybody's mad at everybody. Nicole's not
talking to Cora because Cora's upset about the drug use and about
the people she's hanging out with. Faye got kicked out of the house
by Christian—drugs again—and ended up at Nicole's. Then they
did an intervention without even telling Christian, and for some
reasons he's pissed off about that. It's a mess. It's all a huge mess.”
“I heard a rumor Faye was messin' up,” I said.
“I don't know,” he said. “All I know is that they took her to
rehab, kicking and screaming. She wanted Nicole to go with her.
She said, 'If I go, she needs to go, because she's drinking and doing
coke worse than I am.' But Nicole wouldn't go.”
“I knew this shit was going on,” I said. “I tried to do some-
thing about it, but Nicole wouldn't even talk about it.”
“I know,” he said. “Cora told me that she tried to talk to you
about it, and that you said you were sick of all the bullshit.”
I felt a little twinge of guilt, but it passed. “What's going on
with you and Cora?” I asked. “I'm hearing some stuff.”
Ron looked pretty crushed for a few moments, but he pulled
himself together. “We split up. We've been together for seventeen
years, and it's over.”
He didn't tell me what had split them up, and I didn't ask.
“Wow,” I said. “You're right. It's a huge mess.”
“Yeah,” he said. “And I'm sure we don't know the half of it.”
As I worked my way back to my seat, for the second part of the
show, a few people came by to say hello, but I was a little distracted. I
didn't like what Ron had said—We don't know the half of it—because
I knew he was right. There was a lot of weird shit happening around
Nicole and those girls, and it only seemed to be getting weirder.
As I sat down, I saw Nicole looking at me, like she was won-
dering what Ron and I had been talking about, but I didn't say a
word to her. I didn't want to get into it. At some point, we were
going to have to face this thing head on, and I was probably going
to need her family's help, but this wasn't the time or the place for
it. I was upset enough. If I talked to her now, I knew I'd just get
angry.
I was also very tired. I'd been in about four cities in the past
week, and I had a late flight to Chicago that night, for a get-
together with the people at Hertz. I waited for the second half of
the show to begin. That's what I was there for, after all. For my kids.
I wasn't going o do anything that might ruin things for them.

The second half seemed shorter, or maybe I just nodded off
again. When it was over, Sydney came running over, and we had
our picture taken together. Then I ran into Judy, who was all smiles.
“Where's Nicole?” she said. “Aren't we going to dinner?”
“You guys are going,” I said. “I ain't going.”
Denise came over and gave me another big kiss, and Lou
showed up and shook my hand and said hello. “I'm not going to
dinner,” I told him. “I've got to stay away from your daughter.” I
said it with a big smile, though, as if I was horsing around, but deep
down I meant it. I did not want to be around Nicole.
Much later, during the trial, this whole evening became a huge
issue. For starters, the prosecution tried to suggest that I hadn't
been invited to dinner, and that I was upset about it. I didn't need
an invitation. It wasn't like that. If I had wanted to go to dinner, I
would have gone. But I'm the one who didn't want to go. I didn't
have the energy to get into anything with Nicole, and I knew we'd
get into it if I was there. The last time we'd talked, prior to our brief
conversation earlier in the day, was when she called to scream at me
about taking her friends to that fundraiser. Faye had spoken to her
the next day, to set the record straight, but Nicole had never both-
ered to apologize to me. If I was pissed off about anything, that was
it. I was brought up to acknowledge my mistakes and to do some-
thing about them. Nicole had once had the same values as me, but
I guess they got lost in the shuffle.
So, no. I did not leave the recital “upset and angry,” as some
people would have you believe. And I didn't think the Browns were
indebted to me for all the wonderful things I'd done for them over
the years, as other people suggested—though God knows I had
done an awful lot of wonderful things for them. And I wasn't in the
dark mood attributed to me by several people who were at the
recital, including Candace Garvey, wife of baseball's Steve Garvey,
who got on the stand and told the court that I was “simmering” and
looked “spooky.” Hell, even Denise testified that I was in a horrible
mood. “He looked like he wasn't there,” she said. “He looked like
he was in space.” All of this would have been very damaging, of
course, except that there was a guy from Portland at the reception,
and he saw me there, mingling with my family, and secretly shot a
little video of me to entertain his friends back home. When the trial
eventually got under way, he was back in Portland, watching the
proceedings on TV, and he heard all sorts of bullshit testimony
about my horrible state of mind. He was a little taken aback, to say
the least, so he dug up the tape and sent a copy to Los Angeles, and
the defense team later played it for the court.
What was I doing on the tape? I was laughing. I was cracking
jokes with Lou. I was talking to Denise, who leaned over and kissed
me—for the second time that night. And I was horsing around with
my kids.
I was also doing my best to stay away from Nicole, admittedly.
I wasn't going to go anywhere near that woman. I was sick and tired
of her shit. If she wanted to take herself down, that was one thing.
But I wasn't going to let her take me down with her.

6 .
THE NIGHT
I N QUESTION
I was in a lousy mood after the recital. I was exhausted, and not
looking forward to getting on another plane, but most of all I was
upset about my brief conversation with Ron Fishman. I didn't like
what Ron had said about Nicole and the girls: We don't know the
half of it. The half I did know about was bad enough, but Ron
seemed to think it was worse than either of us imagined. I also
thought back to my conversation with Cora, Ron's wife, and felt
another twinge of guilt. I'd pretty much given up on Nicole, but
she was still the mother of my kids. I had to do something; if not
for her, for them.
For a few moments, sitting there in my living room, I won-
dered if I should threaten to fight her for custody. The idea was not
to take the kids away from her -1 knew that would destroy her

but to shake her up so badly that she'd finally start trying to get her
shit together. The girl was an accident waiting to happen.
As I was thinking about this possibility, Kato showed up. He
was carrying a towel and a magazine and asked if he could use the
Jacuzzi.
“Sure,” I said.
“How was the recital?”
“Fine.”
“Did you talk to Nicole?”
“I went out of my way to not talk to her,” I said.
“You look bummed, man. What happened?”
“Nothing,” I said. “This shit's endless. You should have seen
the skirt she was wearing. She thinks she's still a teenager.”
“Can I ask you something?” Kato said. “Why is Nicole so
fucking mad at me?”
I didn't want to get into it—all that business about Kato living
rentfree without doing anything to earn it—so I told him not to
worry. “You know how she is,” I said. “She puts her anger and crazi-
ness on everyone else.”
I noticed the magazine in his hand. It was the current issue of
Playboy. Kato flipped it open and showed me one of the girls inside.
He said he knew her and could introduce me, but I wasn't inter-
ested. He went off to get into the Jacuzzi and I found myself think-
ing about a Raiders cheerleader I'd known some years back. She
looked a little like the girl in Playboy. I dug up her number and
called, and when her machine picked up I left a message. “Hey, it's
me. O.J. I wanted o see how you were doing, and o tell you that
I'm a free man—a totally free man. Call me.” I hung up and realized
that I really did feel kind of free, but the feeling only lasted a few
moments. I found myself thinking about Nicole again, and then
about Paula. I was pissed at Nicole, and Paula was pissed at me
because of Nicole. Maybe I should have taken Paula to the reception.
I had tried to be respectful of Nicole and the Browns, and once
again I got bit in the ass for my efforts.
I went into my home office and started getting some of my
things together for the trip. I noticed I only had hundreddollar
bills, and I knew I'd need a few fives for the airport skycaps, so I
went out to see if Kato had any change. He was already done with
the Jacuzzi, which he'd left running, and I turned it off and went by
the guest house.
“Kato, man, please try to remember to turn the Jacuzzi off
when you get out,” I said.
“Did I forget to turn it off?” he asked.
Man, I used to wonder if the guy was all there! “Yeah, Kato.
You forgot to turn it off.”
“I'm sorry.”
I held out a Cnote and asked if he could break it, but all he
had was twenties. I borrowed one, and told him I'd pay him back.
“I need it,” I said. “I just realized I haven't eaten anything, and I'm
going to run over to McDonald's.”
“Can I go with you?” he said.
“Sure,” I said. “But hurry up. I'm pressed for time.”
We took the Bentley and ordered at the drivethru window. I
ate my burger on the ride back. Kato saved his for later.

I was busy eating, so I didn't talk much, and I found myself
thinking back to the recital, and to how cute Sydney had looked up
on stage, doing her little dance number. It put me in a dark mood.
The last few times I'd called Nicole to try to get the kids, which I
often did on the spur of the moment, she had gone out of her way
to make it hard for me. She always found some reason not to let me
take them. The kids are tired. They've just eaten. They've had enough
excitement for one day.
I couldn't understand it. She didn't even want me to see my
own kids. It seemed like she was making everything as difficult as
possible for me. It's true what they say about never really knowing
another person. Nicole wasn't even Nicole anymore. She was a
complete stranger to me.
I finished the burger and felt lousy. It had gone down wrong.
When we got back to the house, I went inside and started
packing, laying some of my things out on the bed. Then I went to
the garage to get my golf clubs. There were a few dead balls in the
bag, so I set them on the driveway and chipped them into the
neighbor's yard. I couldn't seem to stop thinking about Nicole,
though. Usually, when I pick up a golf club, the world disappears—
that's one of the things I like about the sport—but this time, I
couldn't get her out of my head. I remember thinking, That woman
is going to be the death of me.
It was probably around 9:30 by then. I figured Nicole and the
kids and the Browns had finished dinner and gone their separate
ways. As I found out later, they'd eaten at Mezzaluna, an Italian
place on San Vicente Boulevard, in the heart of Brentwood.
Nicole's mother, Judy, had left her glasses at the restaurant, and
she'd called Nicole, who called the restaurant, and learned they'd
found the glasses. She was also told that Ron Goldman was just fin-
ishing his shift waiting tables, and that he would be happy to drop
off the glasses at the Bundy condo when he was done. I knew none
of this, of course. None of this had anything to do with my life.
Not then, anyway.
I set the golf stuff aside and fished out my cell phone and
called Paula from the driveway. Either she wasn't home or she wasn't
answering. I think it was the latter. I'd called her several times that
day, to apologize for not taking her to the recital, and it looked like
she was determined to punish me. Hell, for all I knew, she was
already thinking about moving on. If that was actually the case, I
had Nicole to thank for it. The lesson here was simple: It doesn't
always pay to do the right thing, especially if you're doing it for
people who don't give a fuck about you.
Suddenly I felt exhausted. I was getting old. I could hardly
walk anymore, and I'd been told recently that I would eventually
have to have both knees rebuilt. Plus the arthritis was killing me. I
was on medication, but there were days when my hands hurt so
much I couldn't pick up a fucking spoon.
I parked my ass on the low wall near the front door, feeling
whipped. I was trying to figure out how it had come to this. I'd
been somebody once. I'd had my glory days on the playing field, a
number of highpaying corporate gigs, many years as a football ana-
lyst, and even something of a career as a Hollywood actor. It wasn't
over, not by a long shot, but everything seemed more diffic ult now.

It was a little like that business in Alice in Wonderland, where she
has to run twice as fast to stay in place. But hey, if that's what it
took, that's what I'd do. You don't get anywhere in this crazy world
unless you fight for it, and I was willing to fight for it. Still, it
seemed like every day it took a little more energy, and Nicole was
sapping a lot of my goddamn energy.
That got me thinking about family, the meaning of family,
and specifically about my own family. My mother and father sep-
arated when I was about five or six years old, and we four kids—
me, my brother, and my two sisters—stayed with my mother.
She worked in a San Francisco hospital for thirty years, put food
on the table, and kept a clean house. My father stayed in the pic-
ture, though. The marriage hadn't worked out, but that didn't
turn them into enemies. He was always around, and that was an
important lesson for me: When a marriage fails it doesn't give
either parent an excuse to disappear. You have to be there for
your kids.
The way my parents saw it, life wasn't about them anymore—
it was about the four children they'd brought into the world. And
because they felt so strongly about their responsibilities, they made
it work. They talked on the phone every day, but it was never about
their own shit—it was always about us kids. And whenever there
was a problem, they handled it together.
If it was a question of discipline, though, my father took care
of it. And when I say he took care of it, I mean he took care of it. In
those days, there was whuppings, and everyone knew it. You didn't
go crying to Child Welfare or any of that shit, because nine out of
ten times if you got a whupping you almost certainly deserved it.
Hell, I know I did.
Then one day when I was sixteen years old, the old man and I
had a little falling out. My mother called him to say I'd been disre-
spectful to my sister, and he came by the house and called me into
the living room and asked me to tell him what had happened. I told
him, and in my version of the story—which I firmly believed—my
sister had done wrong. My father didn't buy it, though. He told me
to go to my room, and I knew I was supposed to go in there and
wait for him to come in and deliver his whupping. But as I waited,
I decided I wasn't going to get a whupping. I didn't deserve it, and
there was no reason in hell I was going to let him raise his hand to
me. When he came into my room, I told it to him straight. “You're
not going to whup me,” I said.
“What did you say, boy?”
“You heard me,” I said. “You're wrong this time. You try to
whup me, I'll kick your ass.”
It was pretty tense. I had defied him, and he didn't like it one
bit, but he could see that things had changed. I was almost as big
as he was by then, and I knew I could take him, and so did he, I
guess. He left my room without saying a word to me, angry as
hell, and for the next ten years we didn't talk to each other. That's
right: We went ten years without speaking. He would come over,
and hang out, and we even sat at the same Christmas table
together, but we never spoke. And everyone knew we didn't speak.
It was like family lore: The boy defied him, and they haven't spoken
a word to each other in years.