I never thought O.J. Simpson was guilty of the terrible crimes he was accused of back in 1994. No, I’m not insane. I just think the guy was framed, that’s all. I’ve known the man for years, and he’s always seemed like a good guy to me. And that’s why, a few years ago, I invited him to come along with me, my girlfriend, and her sister on a Caribbean cruise.
The cruise itself was my girlfriend’s idea. Her name was Amy, and she worked as a defense lawyer, often helping out indigent clients accused of horrific offenses. She had always wanted to visit the Bahamas, and had insisted that that would be the ideal place to spend our vacation that year.
Amy’s sister, Christine, was in the midst of an ugly break-up with her boyfriend at the time Amy was making travel arrangements, and so it occurred to her to make the trip into a double-date. After all, I had been complaining for some time about a pal of mine who had been going through some tough times and could use some cheering up, too. I’ll never forget the icy cold stare Amy gave me when she learned the identity of my aforementioned buddy.
59
By that time, however, it was too late. Amy & Christine and myself were already on board the ship, which was just about to leave the port when O.J. hustled onto the gang plank. The girls and I had been awaiting his arrival, and the longer we waited, the angrier they got, certain that the mystery man I had picked to be Christine’s blind date would be some loser who couldn’t even make it to the ship on time. Or worse, a jerk who had decided to stand her up.
“That’s the last thing she needs right now,” Amy growled. “Her self-confidence is a mess already.”
“Don’t worry,” I answered reassuringly, “he’l be here.” I knew he always cut things close, just like on that infamous night when he was almost late catching a flight to Chicago. The girls just glared at me, however, thoroughly unreassured. “He’s a great guy,” I offered. “You know, he used to be a pro football player.”
Christine perked up upon hearing that, but Amy only became more worried. “Sounds too good to be true,” she said. And at that moment we saw O.J. boarding the ship.
“Hey, what’s happenin’, Floyd?” he asked me as he approached.
“Nothin’ much,” I replied, and shook his hand. “O.J., I want you to meet my girlfriend Amy, and this is her sister, Christine.” O.J. greeted the girls warmly, like a total gentleman. They, however, were too shocked to reply in kind. “My blind date is O.J. Simpson,” Christine murmurred to herself. “I’m a dead woman.”
***
Later, in our stateroom, Amy let me have it. “What the hell were you thinking?” she demanded. “How could you set my sister up on a blind date with a murderer?”“Oh, come on,” I said. “O.J.’s got his faults, as we all do, but he’s no murderer.”
60
“How can you say that?” she shot back. “Don’t you watch the news? It was the trial of the century! Didn’t you pay any attention to it? They had his DNA all over the place!”
I was only too familiar with her arguments, because I had, in fact, followed his trial quite carefully, and had had many an argument about it with the boys down at Clancy’s pool room. “What if I went into the bathroom here,” I asked, “and cut myself shaving? The police could come in later and find my DNA in the sink. But that wouldn’t mean I murdered anybody!”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“It’s vitally important to understanding his case,” I said. “Sure, the cops found O.J.’s DNA. And they found Nicole’s DNA, and Ron Goldman’s.
But that doesn’t mean anything by itself. You have to consider it in context.”
“Meaning what?” she asked.
“Take the blood in the Bronco, for example,” I said. “The cops took pictures of the inside of that vehicle the day after the murders, and no blood is visible in those pictures. But then, three weeks later, they took another set of photos, and in those photos, there’s blood all over the place!”
“Of course there was blood all over the place!” Amy interjected. “That’s because he killed those people!”
“Then why wasn’t the blood there the next morning?” I asked. “In the three weeks between those two sets of pictures, the Bronco was in police custody, and somewhere in that time period, the police admitted that somebody broke into it!”
“So what?” Amy complained.
“So maybe someone broke in there to take blood samples from O.J. and the murder victims and sprinkle them around the inside of the car to 61
make it look like he was guilty!” I said. “That’s the only explanation that makes any sense.”
“Oh, you’re so crazy!” Amy whined. “Even if you were right — which you’re not — there’s still no excuse for you setting him up for a date with my sister! She’s scared to death to share her room with him! And you know what that means.”
“Oh, no!”
“That’s right! She’s gonna sleep in here with me, and you’re gonna sleep in her room with that killer!”
***
Meanwhile, as Amy continued making her silly arguments, two men on the other side of the ship were up to no good.“Hassan,” one of the men began, “I can’t find the detonator.”
“Have you checked your pockets?” Hassan replied, clearly annoyed.
The first man looked through his pockets and pulled out a small, black plastic device. He looked sheepishly at Hassan. “Oh, yes,” he said.
“Here it is.”
Hassan grabbed the other man by the collar with his left hand and slapped him senseless with his right. “Listen, Abdul,” he said, “you’d better get your act together real soon. You’ve been screwing up ever since we left Mecca. We almost didn’t even make it into Miami on time to catch the ship because of your buffoonery. Now, you’d better cut it out, or I’ll beat you some more!”
“All right, all right!” Abdul cried. “It’s just that the pressure of this mission has been getting to me! I don’t even know why I’m here any more!”
“You fool!” Hassan hissed. “We’re here to teach those stupid Americans a lesson they’ll never forget! They keep making movies that depict 62
Muslims like us as terrorists. It’s so insulting! But we’ll show them.
We’ll blow up this ship carrying several Hollywood producers to send a message to the world that Islam is not to be trifled with. It’s a religion of peace, after all.”
“Ha ha,” Abdul laughed. “I can’t wait to see the look on Steven Spiel-berg’s face once his head has been detached from his body!”
***
That evening, O.J. and I were sitting at the ship’s bar on the main deck.O.J. was drinking pretty heavily, and I could tell he was depressed.
“What’s wrong, buddy?” I asked.
He sighed and took another drink. “I think maybe I shouldn’t have come out here on this cruise,” he said. “That chick you hooked me up with —
Christine — man, she’s afraid to come near me ‘cause she thinks I’m a killer!”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I told him. “I’ll talk to her about it. She didn’t really follow your trial all that closely. Once she hears the way things really went down, she’ll realize you’re innocent, and she’ll be into you.”
“I hope you’re right,” he said. “I still can’t believe the way everybody turned against me. Even good friends of mine like Marcus Allen, you know? We asked him to come and testify — just to come in and tell the truth about what he knew about me and Nicole — and the dude refused to do it. All because he saw that junk on TV — Marcia Clark and the rest of those jerks lying about me — and decided I must be guilty.”
“I know what you mean,” I replied. “I remember when Chris Darden asked you to try on those gloves, and they obviously didn’t fit. Everybody was stunned at first, but then almost immediately the excuses started. First, they said that the gloves shrank, which is preposterous, of course. If leather gloves shrunk so easily, no one would buy them to use ‘em in the winter. And so then people started saying that the gloves really did fit, and that you were just acting like they didn’t!” 63
“Yeah, that’s right! Everybody had spent months talkin’ about how I was the worst actor in Hollywood, and then all of a sudden I’m Laurence Olivier!”
I motioned for the bartender and asked for a refill for both of us. The bartender must not have noticed earlier who was sitting beside me, because this time, after pouring O.J.’s drink, she threw it in his face and called him a filthy murderer.
“Looks like this is gonna be a long cruise,” he sighed.
***
In the wee hours of the following morning, when even the most ardent partiers had gone back to their staterooms for a little shuteye, the ship was steaming silently through the calm waters of the Carribean. We were about halfway between Cuba and Haiti when, just before sunrise, Hassan and Abdul left their cabin and made their way down toward the ship’s engine room.“What are you doing in here?” demanded the engineer, as the two Muslim maniacs burst into the room. Immediately, Hassan produced a pistol that he had smuggled on board and shot the man dead.
“Hurry,” he told Abdul, “get those plastic explosives set up and put them all around the engine, and remember to put a few of them onto the hull!” Abdul dropped to the floor, opened up his suitcase, and got to work.
Meanwhile, Hassan made his way around the massive engine room, shooting any other workers who happened to be around.
The plan was to use plastic explosives to blow up the ocean liner’s engine, and simultaneously blow a hole in the ship’s side, which would almost certainly result in the ship sinking quickly, even in spite of the airtight doors throughout the vessel and other safety devices on board.
Luckily, the terrorists hadn’t counted on one thing — an ex-pro football player in a bad mood.
64
O.J. and I had been forced to sleep in the same room because no matter how much reason and common sense I hurled at my girlfriend and her stupid sister, I couldn’t convince them that my pal was anything other than a cold-blooded murderer.
Well, as it turns out, years of bedding hot babes (plus perhaps a very mild case of homophobia) made it difficult for O.J. to sleep in a room with another man. So, while I allowed the gentle ocean waves rock me to dreamland, O.J. fidgeted around uncomfortably for half an hour or so, and then decided to go out for a walk.
He meandered aimlessly through the corridors of the mighty vessel, wondering to himself “Where did it all go wrong?” Perhaps he had not fought the public relations battle hard enough — he had allowed the Los Angeles D.A.’s office to define his defense as a “conspiracy theory” involving the entire LAPD.
What nonsense! All he & his lawyers had ever suggested was that perhaps Detective Furhman had found a second glove at the crime scene and then later secretly deposited it behind Kato Kaelin’s guest quarters.
And then, in the afternoon of that same day, Detective Vanatter (fooled by Furhman’s “discovery” of the second glove into believing that O.J.
must be guilty) sprinkled a little blood here & there, so that unwitting criminologists like Dennis Fung would later tie the blood to O.J.
Who’s to say a couple of bad cops, acting independently, couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do such a thing? After all, Furhman had already admitted that he and his fellow detectives routinely planted evidence in order to help guarantee convictions against men they believed were guilty! And Vanatter had a vial of O.J.’s blood, one “cc” of which had gone missing in between the time it was collected at police HQ and the time he turned it over to Fung.
But for some reason, the D.A.’s office, the media, and the vast majority of the public were unwilling to even consider the possibility that O.J.’s defense was valid. Instead, they seized upon anything they could to ridicule it. . to look away from the simple truth staring them in the face.
65
And now, even after having been found not guilty by a jury, he was still being ridiculed. They say he must be looking for “the real killer” out on the golf course. Just another cheap shot. “I’m not a detective,” O.J.
thought to himself. “So I hired some guys to investigate for me. What’s wrong with that?”
He was getting really tired, and decided to see if he could get a rub-down. And so, bleary-eyed, he opened the door to what he thought was the massage room, and that’s when he saw Abdul the terrorist attaching plastic explosives to the ship’s engines, and a dead engineer lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
“Holy moley, you killed that guy!” O.J. gasped.
Abdul turned and looked at him. “Hassan!!” he cried.
Hassan came running from the far end of the engine room, and when he saw O.J., he started firing his gun wildly.
Quickly, O.J. ducked back out of the room and closed the heavy steel door behind him. One of Hassan’s bullets caromed off the door and sped back toward Abdul, piercing through his left eye. Blood spurted out, and he dropped limply to the floor. Hassan quickly cursed fate, and paused for a moment to consider his next move.
Outside in the corridor, O.J. was considering his next move, too. He had started to look for a crew member to report to, but then stopped himself and wondered if anyone would believe him. “Damn, man,” he muttered,
“they’ll probably try to blame this on me!” And so he spun around and headed back into the face of danger.
He flung open the engine room door, surprising Hassan, who was pray-ing to Allah for guidance. O.J. ran toward him as fast as he could (which wasn’t all that fast, ‘cause his knees have been shot since the late 1970’s.) Hassan raised his gun, aimed for O.J.’s head, and squeezed the trigger.
But nothing happened, because he was out of bullets. So he threw the pistol instead.
66
O.J. had never been known as much of a pass catcher back in his football days, but he caught this throw, and hurled himself into Hassan, knocking him to the floor. The terrorist struggled to fight, but O.J. pistol-whipped him into submission. And then he boogied on out of there, and went back up to the room we were sharing.
I’ve rarely seen a man sleep so soundly, or for so long. He totally missed the day trip Amy & Christine and I took in Port-au-Prince, which was a shame, because the weather was lovely, and Christine was becoming somewhat more receptive to my arguments in his defense. I think if he had been there with us that day, those two might’ve hooked up.