I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real and Imagined) Read online

  The story behind the publication of If I Did It is part of the reason this book is destined to become a lost artifact, despite its temporary status as a bestseller: The book was originally a pure money grab: Simpson and his cowriter (screenwriter Pablo Fenjves, a neighbor of Brown’s who paradoxically testified against O.J. during the ’94 trial) were to cobble the book together for Judith Regan, a highly successful, highly unscrupulous publishing magnate with HarperCollins, a company owned by News Corp. The machinations of what was really going on here remain unclear; Fenjves was told that the revenue would go toward Simpson’s children, while Regan later alleged that her only motive for publishing the memoir was to prove Simpson’s guilt. Regardless, the book was aborted before it came out. The public was predictably outraged by what it assumed If I Did It would be, and further incensed by a TV special that was intended to coincide with the book’s release (in theory, Barbara Walters was going to interview Simpson during the November ratings sweeps). For a moment, it looked as if If I Did It would never exist. (HarperCollins reportedly destroyed four hundred thousand copies of the book before it went on sale.) But then something even more bizarre occurred: A bankruptcy court in Florida awarded the rights to If I Did It to Ron Goldman’s estate. As one might expect, the Goldman family had always been very, very against the book on the grounds that it exploited the death of their son. But Simpson (despite his victory in the criminal trial) had been found guilty in the civil suit filed by the Goldmans and now owed them $33 million. And since Simpson was living in Florida — a state whose bankruptcy laws were heavily tilted in O.J.’s favor — the Goldmans were never going to see any of that money. So a judge decreed that the Goldmans could publish If I Did It as financial compensation for Ron Goldman’s death. The family made some key changes to the book’s presentation, most notably the addition of a not-so-subtle subtitle (“Confessions of the Killer”) and one of the most consciously misleading book covers in the history of literature: The words I DID IT are printed as large as possible in red, while the minuscule word IF is lodged inside the letter I.

  My copy doesn’t even have O.J.’s name on the cover, a crazy idea that makes total sense. The reason it makes sense is that people still do not like the idea of O. J. Simpson writing this book. They want to imagine that the book was created against his will. If you don’t believe me, try reading If I Did It in public. The moment anyone figures out what you’re actually holding, they reflexively embrace (or feign) disgust.

  “Why would you want to read that?” a writer friend of mine asked when I told him how fascinating it was.

  “Because it’s a murderer writing about murdering people while still pretending he’s innocent,” I said. “It’s totally unique. Would you prefer to read an essay by a journalist who interviewed O.J. about this situation?”

  “Well, yes,” said my friend. “That would be great.”

  “Would you want to read a roman à clef about an ex–football player who murders two people and escapes prosecution?”

  “That might also be okay,” said my friend. “It would depend on the execution. But those are different situations. It’s just fucked up that O.J. is the author of the book you’re reading.”

  “He didn’t make any money off it,” I replied. “Why is someone interpreting the event a better source than the person directly involved?”

  “Because he’s obviously lying,” my friend said. “And it’s just weird.”

  It is weird. That’s true. The book is nuts. But that really wasn’t my friend’s argument. He was using the word weird in place of the word wrong, because wrong seems self-righteous. “It’s just wrong” seems like something Mitch Albom would say about If I Did It. But this wrongness — this abstract wrongness that can’t be verbally justified, because it harms no one — is why O. J. Simpson is despised in such a culturally penetrating context. It’s a hatred that transcends his alleged crimes or his ability to divert justice. When Lizzie Borden was acquitted of her parents’ murder in 1893, the people of New England were outraged — but Lizzie didn’t taunt the public for failing to convict her. She just moved into a nice house with her sister and became a recluse. A century later, Borden is “hated” by no one; anyone captivated by her life is predisposed to think about the murders from her perspective (and to hunt for any clue that might validate her improbable innocence). Over time, the public will grow to accept almost any terrible act committed by a celebrity; everything eventually becomes interesting to those who aren’t personally involved. But Simpson does not allow for uninvolvement. He exceeds the acceptable level of self-directed notoriety and changes the polarity of the event; by writing this book, he makes it seem like the worst part of Brown and Goldman’s murder was what happened to him, and that he perversely wants the world to remember that he killed them (even if he’s somehow internally convinced himself that he did not, which is what I always assumed during the trial). He keeps reminding people that he is famous because two other people are dead.

  There are many, many sports fans who believe Kobe Bryant raped a woman in 2003 and was never penalized. Nothing — nothing — has happened in the subsequent ten years that would lead anyone to be convinced Kobe was wrongly accused. But Bryant refuses to acknowledge that the incident even occurred. He won’t answer any question related to the accusation and just pretends like he doesn’t remember anything about it. A lot of people still hate him for this, but they can’t access the incident in question. It’s now a footnote to the rest of his life. They have to hate him for other things, so they accuse him of shooting too much and being a terrible teammate and trying to be cooler than he actually is. We have to inject our distaste for his alleged crime into things that don’t really matter, so most of the criticism comes across as unfair and ad hominem. Kobe (probably) did something bad in Colorado, but he handled it perfectly. O.J. keeps doing the opposite. He elects to tell a terrible story that cannot not be interesting, because he’s the only person alive who can know what he knows. There is no comparable text to If I Did It. If the only thing that mattered about reality was the proliferation of information and perspective, it would be an invaluable document. But nobody thinks this way, except maybe me. If I Did It teaches us nothing we consciously want to know. It only proves that O.J. knows the most about what happened on June 12, and that he doesn’t care at all.

  In Airplane!, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar portrays Roger Murdock, the doomed aircraft’s copilot. However, the principal comedic utility is that he’s really playing himself (but refuses to admit it). His most memorable scene is when a little kid enters the cockpit, instantly recognizes him, and says, “I think you’re the greatest, but my dad thinks you don’t work hard enough on defense.” It’s funny, but also smart: Movie Kareem pretends to be offended by the remark, but Real Kareem clearly finds the criticism amusing (or else he wouldn’t have allowed it in the script). It shows a sense of humor that he had never presented before. But the joke is bigger than that. The core of the joke is that it’s ridiculous to pretend that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is anyone besides himself. You can’t be a seven-foot-two character actor; even if Kareem had the acting chops of Philip Seymour Hoffman, he can’t disappear into another being. He can only be who he is, and even a child can see this. So the center of the joke (better known as the unfunny part of the joke) is that Kareem is denying who he obviously is. He wants to disappear into society, and that’s impossible. It’s something everyone can understand in theory, but nobody accepts in practice. He is supposed to be happier than he is. He is supposed to like being Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and he’s supposed to like that we like it, too.

  Before 9/11 happened, we used to think O.J.’s Bronco chase was going to be the last collectively shared moment in America. “The culture is splintering,” people like me would postulate, “and this wacky circumstance will mark the last night everyone watched the same thing at the same time.” I probably wrote those exact words at some point in 1994, which is ridiculous for multiple reasons — bu
t the main reason it’s ridiculous is because I never saw one second of that police chase.

  I missed the whole thing.

  Now, I realize I’m not the only adult in America who didn’t watch this event while it transpired. But I’m the only adult I know who missed it in totality. I was at a movie. I had just moved to Fargo a few days before, and my cable still wasn’t hooked up. My apartment was just boxes stacked upon boxes. I had to choose between watching game five of the NBA Finals in a bar or seeing the movie Backbeat downtown. Either way, I was going to be alone. I decided to watch the fake Beatles in a big dark room. The film was disappointing. For some reason, I sat through all the credits, which I normally never do (I guess I was being “extra alone”). I finally walked to my car, parked diagonally on a popular street that was completely empty. Seconds after I turned the ignition key, the radio DJ artlessly interrupted the intro of a song (I believe it was “Runaway Train”) and said something baffling: “We’ve just received word that O. J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco is parked in front of his house. O. J. Simpson has parked his Bronco in front of his house.” I remember being mad about this. I remember thinking, “The media is out of control. How is this news?” I drove home, still thinking about my disappointment with the movie. I entered my dark apartment and saw the light on my answering machine blinking way too rapidly. I pressed the button and was mechanically informed that I had fourteen messages. I rarely got fourteen messages in any given month. This is bad, I thought to myself. Someone has died.

  But the messages were all from different people, and none of them made sense.

  “Chuck! Are you watching this? Call me if you’re watching this.” (beep)

  “This . . . this is the craziest fucking thing . . . this is the craziest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.” (beep)

  “Why is he doing this? Is this real?” (beep)

  One of the last messages happened to mention O.J. by name, so I deduced that this really was about death (although not anybody who hadn’t already been dead yesterday). I turned on the television; even without cable, I could get a fuzzy version of Fox. I started calling people back, and they told me what I’d missed. It was an easy story to explain, because nothing actually happened. A man nobody had ever heard of drove a sports utility vehicle while his famous passenger pointed a gun at his head and was cheered by idiots. It was a little like the end of The Blues Brothers, but way slower.

  Because I missed this event, I think about it a lot. I don’t know why. [I’m tempted to make up some capricious, impossible explanation that would make sense within this essay, but I’ll resist.] Earlier that day, while I was sitting at my desk at the newspaper that employed me, the TV next to the copy desk had aired footage of Simpson’s friend and lawyer Robert Kardashian reading a four-page letter from O.J.: At the time, no one was able to locate Simpson, and the letter seemed like a rather unambiguous suicide note (everything about O.J.’s life was written in the past tense). I recall a few reporters speculating that O.J. might kill himself, but the speculation was casual. For the most part, working-class people were not yet obsessed with this state of affairs — the inception of that worldwide phenomenon was still eight hours away. For one final afternoon, O.J. News still seemed like News of the Weird. But I’ve often wondered what would have happened if O.J. really had shot himself that day (which might have been his original intention). Suicide would have galvanized his guilt irrefutably, and it would have erased him from the earth. But people would definitely like him more than they do now.

  As I write this, O. J. Simpson sits in the Lovelock Correction Center, a medium-security prison in northwest Nevada. It’s uncomfortable to make the following statement, but it must be made: O.J. is serving an unjust sentence. In 2007, he tried to steal back a collection of his own memorabilia from a hotel room in Las Vegas, and he used a gun. That was stupid. However, he was somehow convicted of kidnapping for doing so, which is equally idiotic. He could face up to thirty-three years in prison for this crime (although a Nevada judge reopened the case in the fall of 2012). Everyone concedes that his sentence was backdoor retribution for the murders he was acquitted of; no one in power can directly admit this, but nobody can deny it without seeming naïve. I feel no sympathy for Simpson. But I wonder: Does O.J. realize that this (technically unjust) sentence was his best-case scenario? Does he comprehend how his forced disappearance from society is perhaps the only thing that will salvage whatever remains of his legacy? Is he aware how much people hated his unwillingness to behave like someone he wasn’t?

  He will never, ever be free. At least now he doesn’t have to try.

  HITLER IS IN THE BOOK

  So here was my problem: I was not going to write about Adolf Hitler.

  It did not seem like a prudent move. What was the upside? I certainly did not want to write anything that could be misinterpreted as an apology for Hitler, which seemed (almost inescapably) likely, unless I just typed the sentence “Hitler was evil” over and over and over, the same way Jack Nicholson typed “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” in The Shining. I also saw no benefit in writing about how Hitler was a bad person, since no one needs to read a book that informs them of what everyone already knows. I thought I could just write around his existence, or just sprinkle in a few references when writing about other people, or maybe write about him in a way that made it seem like he wasn’t actually there. But whenever I mentioned this to people (and particularly when I mentioned it to Jewish acquaintances), they found this strategy troubling. “Hitler is in the book,” one of these acquaintances said during a casual Chinese dinner. No, I responded. You must have misheard me. I said Hitler is not going to be in the book. “Then you’re doing it wrong,” he said. “Hitler is in the book.”

  So I decided this guy had a point.

  I decided that Hitler would be in the book. I would write an essay about Hitler. But as soon as I made this decision, everything changed. Everyone now told me the opposite of everything they’d told me before.

  “You better make sure you let your agent read whatever you write before you try to publish it,” said my closest friend. My friend is Jewish (and so is my agent). “People will go crazy if you write about Hitler. It doesn’t matter what your argument is. You can’t write about Hitler. It’s just one of those things.” When he said you can’t write about Hitler, I could not tell if he was talking about non-Jews in general or me in specific. [I now suspect he might have meant “non-serious non-Jews,” a literary category I dominate.]

  Because I worry about everything, I started worrying about this. I started wondering how this could possibly be done, assuming every person who advised me on this issue was simultaneously correct.

  There seemed to be two central contradictions at play.

  The first was that it would only make sense to write about Hitler if I had something new to say about him — something that no one else had expressed before (since such an attempt could only be justified if there was more at stake than facile entertainment or narrative obligation). The second was that I could not contradict the preexisting vision of Hitler within the public consciousness; whatever I wrote would need to reflect the prevailing view of who he was and what he believed (because there are certain aspects of society that are not open for debate). The Hitler I described had to be the Hitler we collectively imagine and accept.

  So here is the new problem: I have no choice but to write about Adolf Hitler, despite the fact that writing about Hitler is a terrible idea. And I have to write something creative about him, but without writing anything that isn’t already established and accepted. I have to do something I shouldn’t do, and I have to be interesting without being interesting.

  At least it will be short.

  Since his suicide in 1945, there’s been a worldwide obsession with “explaining” Hitler. This is most easily seen in Ron Rosenbaum’s aptly titled book, Explaining Hitler. Published in 1998, it’s great for multiple reasons, many of which only serve to increase my fear
over writing anything about Hitler that anyone could care about in any way whatsoever. In the book’s introduction, we learn that Claude Lanzmann, the French filmmaker who directed the nine-and-a-half-hour Holocaust documentary Shoah, was outraged over the very notion of using Hitler’s baby photo as the Explaining Hitler cover image (in essence, Lanzmann was offended by any visual image that forces people to consider Hitler as an innocent person).The final quarter of the book tackles the various theories on what caused Hitler to enforce the genocide that defined him, primarily examined through the perspective of various writers and academics. The opinions run the gamut of human possibility: There’s an argument that blames the social history of Germany, an argument that suggests anti-Semitism is intrinsic to Christian culture, a contention that Hitler was somehow akin to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and a claim that Hitler had already decided to exterminate the Jewish race as early as November of 1918 (and that everything that happened in World War II was solely the product of this one singular obsession, and that all historical evidence to the contrary is simply Hitler being esoteric and duplicitous on purpose). Some of these theories are stronger than others; none is entirely devoid of merit. Still, one passage near the end of Explaining Hitler struck me as the most meaningful, perhaps because it instantly illustrates why every attempt at explaining Hitler collides with the same philosophical wall. What follows is Rosenbaum writing about Emil Fackenheim, a Jewish rabbi and philosopher who died in 2003:

  Fackenheim . . . makes an exceptionalist argument about Hitler and human nature: You cannot locate Hitler on the ordinary continuum of human nature; you cannot merely say that he is a very, very, very, very, very bad man, perhaps the most wicked yet, but still explicable as the product of the same human nature, the same psychological forces that produced, say, the next-worst human being and the next and the next until we reach ourselves. No, Fackenheim says, Hitler is off the charts, off the grid, in another category of radical evil entirely.