Word count: 959 | Reading time: 4 min read
Pretzel Logic
The real winners and losers in the O.J. trial.
I think I’m the happiest white guy in town.
Unlike most of my pigmentary landsmen, who are walking around this city with a collective hangdog I have not seen since 1986, when all of Boston was mired in a deep collective funk over the demise of their local baseball franchise, I was kind of pleased that O.J. Simpson walked out of jail a free man.
I won five bucks off the whole thing.
Not because I had some special insight into how the jury would vote.
I didn’t. Like most people in this country, I thought and still think that Simpson did it. And, again like most, I thought that the jury would agree.
The minute I heard about the three-hour jury deliberation, I turned to my wife and, with the smugness of a reporter who has covered too many murder trials, pontificated that the quick decision meant only one thing.
This Juice wasn’t getting out of the can any time soon.
Silly me.
I did, however, have the good sense to listen to one of CP’s sales reps, a fellow Mets traveler named Steven Puccia, who suggested that I bet another colleague on the outcome of the Simpson saga.
Not on whether the jury would rule guilty or not guilty.
That was too easy.
Standing in a thick crowd at the Irish Pub, staring at O.J. squirming in his seat as the camera focused steadily on his beady eyes, there was still, in my mind, only one possible outcome.
So what was The Bet?
That Simpson would walk out of jail before the Red Sox win a World Series, something they have not accomplished since before Kaiser Wilhelm hoisted the white flag of surrender at the end of WWI in 1918.
I made the bet, confident that I would win.
But I did not expect the payoff to come for at least a dozen years — the average length of a life sentence in this country.
Little did I know that the already ridiculous nature of crime and punishment in this country would get even more ridiculous when, at about 1:08EDT, the jury foreman read aloud the verdict that shocked everyone in the nearly all-white crowd at the bar.
Not guilty in the death of Nicole Brown Simpson, a woman who once prophesied this moment by writing that O.J. would kill her and get away with it.
Not guilty in the death of Ronald Goldman.
Not guilty.
But not innocent.
Standing in the bar, trying to suck in a couple of oxygen molecules from the cloud of tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide that filled the room, I watched the look of disgust fill many faces who only moments before wore the slight smirks of the expectant.
“Unbelievable,” said one man at the bar.
“Jesus Christ,” spat another.
“What the…?” muttered more than a few.
Me?
My big mouth was hanging wide open.
But looking at my colleague Scott Farmelant speed out of the bar in disgust, I quickly recovered.
“Hey, Farmy, where we eating tomorrow?” I yelled, giving him grief over the bet he’d just lost.
O.J walked, all right.
But not a decade down the line.
Not even a day.
He walked out of jail before the Red Sox could even play their first playoff game this post-season.
Which won me five bucks and made me the happiest white guy in the room.
Happiest, however, is a relative term.
Compared to the rest of the crowd, I was the happiest.
But am I happy with the way the Simpson case turned out?
No.
While I am glad we live in a country where the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a murderer is guilty — something the notoriously inept L.A. district attorney’s office has a tough time doing — I am deeply saddened that this murder trial became a referendum on racism.
I am deeply saddened that black people feel vindicated now that the Juice is once again on the loose. That they see this trial as a redress for 400 years of abuse, ranging from being hauled over here to work on the cotton plantations to having evidence planted on them by cretinous cops.
I am deeply saddened that white people feel that, if not for Mark Fuhrman, Simpson would be the one crying, and the parents of his dead ex-wife and her friend would be the ones thanking the jury.
I am saddened that, way deep in our souls, blacks and whites will feel a little warier with each other. For the time being, anyway.
I felt it.
And if you are honest with yourself, black or white, you felt it, too.
Walking out of the Irish Pub, I felt the slightest, nastiest tinge of anger at the black man thrusting his fists in the air, shouting loudly into the afternoon sky how happy he was that O.J. was not going away.
Why?
Because to me, this was not an issue of whether a black man killed a white woman or whether a white, racist cop framed a black man.
To me, this was another case where justice has a price.
A price that most — you and me, black, white or whatever — cannot afford.
Yes, it pisses me off to see blacks rejoice.
It pisses me off to see whites sulk.
It pisses me off that O.J. Simpson — rich athlete O.J. Simpson — is doing anything other than counting the cockroaches that scurry across the floor of a jail cell.
Sure, I won five bucks, which makes me the happiest white guy in town these days.
But just thinking about that doesn’t make me very happy at all.
