Ladies and gentleman, the holy grail of sick and perverted talk show/tabloid culture- If I Did It. This is the odd "hypothetical" confessions of NFL legend O.J. Simpson, about how he would have killed his ex-wife and her friend Ron Goldman, if he did it. Of course O.J. Simpson didn't kill his ex-wife. But if he did, this is EXACTLY how he would have done it, and explains in detail EXACTLY why he would have done it. Of course, we all know he would never do a thing like that.
This book was originally sold as If I DId It by O.J. Simpson, but because he owed more money to the Goldman family in the wrongful death suit brought against O.J for killing Ron Goldman, it was re-released in 2007 under the Goldman Family name. It was re-issued with additional material, including information about the history of it's publication. There was a ghostwriter named Pablo Fenjves involved, but he apparently put together the book very closely from interviews with O.J. Simpson- this before O.J. Simpson was sentenced to Prison in Nevada for armed robbery,where he still is today. I have to hand it to Fenjves, that's a bold move. I would not enter a room with O.J. Simpson without a .45 caliber handgun in my hand pointed directly at his forehead. In fact, there is a strong likelihood that .45 handgun would "accidentally" go off. That being said though, this is an excellent, excellent book. I read it three years ago in Las Vegas, just as O.J. was begin sentenced for the robbery related charges right there in town. When I was in college, William T. Vollmann did a reading up at Bard, and people talked about how disturbing he was,and how they were afraid of him, but William T. Vollmann never murdered anyone. If you want to be exposed to a truly sick mind, this is the book. There is no faking what O.J. Simpson is. He can not hide the truth even from himself, no matter how hard he tries.
It's funny, when I wrote my two short story collections back when I was in my twenties, my goal was to write like William T. Vollmann or Thomas Pynchon. I don't even read those guys anymore much. It would not be an exaggeration so say that by now I am more influenced by If I Did It.
How grotesque is it? Towards the beginning of the narrative, O.J. writes about Nicole having a terrible temper, perhaps not immediately grasping the irony. That's how sick the book is. What appears to have triggered the murder was two factors in the relationship O.J. had with his ex-wife- they continued to have an off-again on-again physical relationship after their divorce, and that Nicole became associated with drug users, which O.J. did not want his children to be around. A reasonable human being would have dealt with the second of those two factors by calling a good child custody lawyer and a p.i. firm, but this was O.J. Simpson, and well, he heard a little something about his ex-wife engaging in some group sex on cocaine, he got a knife, went over to her house, and, well… the key line is "I had never seen so much blood before anywhere in my life." O.J complains in the book about the media inaccuracy in their portrayal of him as a spousal abuser. Again, he doesn't seem to see the irony. Ron Goldman had nothing to do with anything having anything to do with any of this. He was returning a dropped pair of glasses from the restaurant he worked at.
You may remember from the highly televised trial a character named Kato who was more or less freeloading in one of O.J.'s houses. This blew my mind- directly before the murders took place, Kato showed O.J. a photograph of a woman in Playboy, told O.J. he knew her, and offered to introduce her to him. O.J. was not interested, and instead committed a double homicide out of some freakish obsession with his drugged out ex-wife. Even after reading the book twice, his reasons for committing the murders make little sense to me.
I was sort of wondering though-between when he got off for murder and when he got arrested for armed robbery- there were all those photographs of him in the tabloids golfing with shady looking white dudes. Where did he find those people? The book doesn't explicate that matter.
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