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 IN 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 wondered if I should threaten to fight her for custody. The idea was not to take the kids away from her—I 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 rent-free 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 craziness 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 interested. He went off to get into the Jacuzzi and I found myself thinking 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 to see how you were doing, and to 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 hundred-dollar 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 guesthouse.
“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 C-note 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 drive-thru 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. Nicole was told that Ron Goldman was just finishing his shift waiting tables, and that he would be happy to drop them 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 high-paying corporate gigs, many years as a football analyst, and even something of a career as a Hollywood actor. It wasn’t over, not by a long shot, but everything seemed more difficult 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 separated 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 tab
le, and kept a clean house. My father stayed in the picture, 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 disrespectful 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 whup-ping. 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.
A decade later, when I was married to Marguerite, and with my marriage already in trouble, he was at my house in Los Angeles, celebrating Thanksgiving with the family, and I turned to him and said something about some football game. And man, the whole room went silent! It was like I could hear my own heart beating. Everybody was staring at us: He talked to him. Did you hear that?! O.J. talked to him!
And my father just answered, like it was the most natural thing in the world, like our decade of silence had never happened, and that was the day we started talking again.
I think on some level I had always blamed him for my parents’ marriage not working out, and over the years I had come to see, slowly, that maybe I’d been a little hasty about passing judgment. I had simply assumed he was the bad guy, but I had nothing to back it up. And while he’d been there for me as a father, I guess I was still angry at him, because I wanted what every kid wants: Both parents, together, under one roof.
Now here it was years later, with my own marriage failing, and I began to see that there really were two sides to every story—and that maybe my father wasn’t such a bad guy after all. I’m not suggesting I was fully conscious of this, mind you, but I believe that on that Thanksgiving afternoon, with my own marriage in trouble, I began to see that I’d been pretty hard on him—and that, whatever else had happened, he had always been there for us kids. That was an important lesson for me, and that night, sitting on the low wall in front of my house, my stomach rumbling, thinking about all of this, it hit me with a weird kind of clarity: If you fuck up your marriage, you try not to fuck up your kids.
I figured Sydney and Justin would be in bed by then, over at the Bundy condo, fast asleep. I hoped so, anyway. I wondered what their mother was doing at that moment, and I wondered what other unpleasant surprises lay in store for me and the kids. For a moment, I thought back to the night I’d surprised her at the Gretna Green house, going at it on the couch with her friend Keith, in the glow of two dozen candles—while the kids were in the house. It made my stomach lurch.
Don’t get me wrong: Nicole had been a terrific mother—almost obsessive at times—but she’d been screwing up big-time lately.
It’s strange. They say people don’t change, but I say they’re wrong. People change, but it’s usually for the worse.
Ron Fishman’s words came back to haunt me: We don’t know the half of it, he’d said. He was right. We didn’t know shit. Nicole was on the fast-track to hell, and she seemed determined to take me and the kids with her.
I shut my eyes and told myself to stop thinking about her. I looked at my watch. It was 10:03. I needed a shower, and I had to finish packing. As I got to my feet, an unfamiliar car slowed near my gate, then pulled past and parked a short way down, across the street. The driver got out and waved from the distance, and at first I couldn’t tell who it was. When he came closer, I saw it was Charlie. I’d met him some months earlier at a dinner with mutual friends, and I’d seen him again a few weeks ago, when we’d gone clubbing with the same friends. I liked Charlie—he was one of those guys who is always in a good mood, always laughing—and I told him what I tell a lot of people: Stop by when you’re in the neighborhood.
I guess he took it literally.
Now picture this—and keep in mind, this is hypothetical:
Charlie reached the gate, and the first thing I noticed is that he wasn’t smiling.
“O.J., my man—what’s up?” he said. It sounded kind of forced.
“What’s up with you?” I said. I went over and opened the gate and he stepped through and we shook hands. “What brings you to these parts?”
“Not much. I was out to dinner with some guys, down in Santa Monica. Thought I’d stop by to say hello.”
“You’ve got a strange look on your face, Charlie,” I said. “Something bothering you?”
Charlie looked away, avoiding my eyes. “It’s nothing, man,” he said.
“Come on,” I said. “You can tell me.”
He looked back at me, struggling with his thoughts. “You’re not going to like it,” he said finally.
My stomach lurched again and right away I knew. “This is about Nicole, isn’t it?”
Charlie nodded.
“What about her?”
“You’re not going to like it,” he repeated.
“Just tell me,” I said, already riled. “Before I get pissed off.”
Charlie took a step back, like he thought I might hit him or something. “A couple of these guys at dinner tonight, I guess they didn’t know that you and I were friends,” he began, tripping over the words. “They started talking about this little trip they took to Cabo a few months back, in March I think it was, and about these girls they partied with.”
“Yeah?”
Charlie took a moment. “It was Nicole and her friend Faye,” he said.
“I’m listening,” I said. I tried to stay calm, but I was fit to explode.
“There was a lot of drugs and a lot of drinking, and apparently things got pretty kinky.”
“Why are you fucking telling me this, man?!” I hollered. I turned and had to fight the urge to put my fist through the Bentley’s window.
“I’m sorry, man. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Well, I don’t fucking want to know! I’m sick of hearing this shit!”
“I’m sorry—”
“That is the mother of my children!”
“I know, man. I’m sorry. That’s why I told you. I know you two have been through a lot of shit, and I know it can’t be easy, and I thought maybe if you talked to her—”
“Talked to her?! What the fuck is wrong with you? I’ve been trying to talk to her for years. She won’t listen to me. She won’t listen to her family. She won’t listen to her friends!”
“O.J., man—I’m not the enemy here.”
I turned around, fuming, and tried to count to ten. I didn’t make it. By the time I got to three I realized that Charlie was right. He wasn’t the enemy. Nicole was the enemy. I looked at my watch. I had less than an hour before the limo showed up to take me to the airport, just enough time to drive down to Bundy, read her the fucking riot act, and get my ass back to the house.
“Come on,” I said, and moved toward my Bronco.
“Where we going?”
“Just come.”
Charlie got in. I started the Bronco and the gate whirred to life and I pulled into the street, the tires squealing against the curb.
“Where we going, O.J.?” Charlie repeated.
“We’re going to scare the shit out that girl,” I said.
“What? Now?”
“It never fucking ends. Every time I turn around, it’s something new—and none of it’s pretty.”
“This isn’t a good idea, O.J.”
“Fuck that. I’m tired of being the understanding ex-husband. I have my kids to think about.”
“I’m asking you, man, please turn around.”
“Woman’s going to be the death of me!” I said. I was seething by this time, and I began to mimic her: “‘I want to grow as a person, O.J. I want to find myself. I’m tired of everyone seeing me as O.J. Simpson’s wife. I’m tired of living in your shadow.’”
“O.J., please.”
“You want to know how crazy it got?” I said, ignoring him. “After the split, after she dumped me, she began calling to tell me about the guys she was dating. ‘Oh, O.J.—do you think they like me for me or do they just want to get into my pants?’ And you know what I did? I told her to just have fun. I told her she was a great girl and not to worry and to go with her gut. ‘Guys’ll be lining up around the block for you,’ I said. ‘You’re gorgeous and you’re smart. I know you’ll pick the right guys.’ Is that twisted or what? I would think, What the fuck are you doing, O.J.?! And then I would answer my own question: Well, the sooner she gets this finding-herself shit out of her system, the sooner she’ll be back.”
If I Did It Page 17