O.J. and me: The Bills, the murders, the Norm jokes, and growing up under the shadow of the Juice

“Nice beaver.”

“Thank you, I just had it stuffed.” [Hands over a stuffed beaver.]

It’s a beautiful back-and-forth between Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley in The Naked Gun, a scene concreted in my cortex as I distinctly remember sitting through it, age eight or nine, next to my grandmother. For some reason, this sticks out more than the body condoms or the hot-mic urinating or the completely forgotten and random “the kind of legs you’d like to suck on for a day” line. In fact, by the time I turned 12, my older brother and I had seen the entirety of the trilogy in just such a setting: grandma’s living room, popcorn, assorted sweets, a purposefully rented VHS. All this had nothing to do with supervisory negligence or content ignorance. Where I come from, in this brood, Naked Gun was to be family-viewed and together time-celebrated for a simple fact: All the films co-starred O.J. Simpson.

I grew up in Buffalo, just a few miles from the apartment buildings where, as legend had it, a new-to-town Simpson first lived after being drafted in 1969 by the Buffalo Bills. The tailback from a hardscrabble San Francisco background, fresh off a dynamic Heisman season at USC, was ascendant, electric, a bounding, galloping barely-in-color highlight swirl of too-big shoulder pads. He could juke like Barry Sanders, gather steam like a freight, bounce off defenders or leave them in dusty belittlement, all in steamy aggression that was equally, violently upright and downhill. In nine seasons with the Bills, he was a five-time All-Pro and Pro-Bowler, he was a four-time league rushing leader, and he was the first ever to rush for 2,000 yards in a season. He was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame three months after my second birthday. And then came act two.

Of course, this was all in the before times, the way before times. Though my Bills running back was Thurman Thomas, even in the era of my earthly arrival and football baptism, O.J. lore hung in the gray Buffalo atmosphere like the ever-present prospect of snow. He used to drink at Mulligan’s on Hertel. He’d come in wearing a fur coat. This was the site of a gangland execution, where Rick James, another local hero, was a regular. My uncle beat a Bills tight end in arm wrestling in that very same joint’s back room. Such stories dotted my formation, peppering holiday time get-togethers and spicing the vibes of wood-paneled dining rooms where Genesee Cream Ales flowed, Marlboros forever-burned in ashtrays, and the heartbreaks of lost Super Bowls festered. My grandfather was at the game where O.J. broke the 2,000-yards record, his teammates hoisting him off the field on shoulders, in slow motion it seemed, like the end of Rudy. I’m not sure if he actually was, or if this is the kind of inflation and memory bloat of ancient tales told by old men to young boys, remembered by middle-aged men thinking of dead grandfathers, everything now soaked in wishes and colored by sports-movie snippets. Remembrances half-flooded by alcohol and the interminable beat of the years. Truth can be as immaterial as DNA evidence sometimes. What I am sure of is the look on my grandfather’s, my uncle’s, faces, the reverence, the near holy hush that would descend when they would discuss the man’s playing days, the first Bills glory period. This plus the objective fact we all knew his work as Nordberg in Gun was equally great. Because we would watch, rewind, and watch again, see him lit up by a multitude of gunshots, but then get a bonk on the head, and then burn his hand on the stove, but, then, the wet paint on the jacket, with a perfectly delivered, “oh no…” Who would think to add a cake to the face? Then a bear trap?

June of ’94 was near the beginning of days of being able to stay home alone. With parents out on weekend nights, I’d sometimes be left with a Sega Genesis and Mighty Tacos and echoes of an empty house. That fateful Friday night a ringing phone was an uncle in L.A. Turn on the TV. It’s O.J. He’s running. Or, rather, driving. Or, rather, passenger-ing with police escort. The news had broken just days before that he was not thought to be involved in the murder of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman; it had washed over the house like a much-awaited oh phew call from the doctor. It’s benign. He’s not a suspect. And now this. This same uncle, a lawyer, seemed the family’s on-the-ground reporter, a first responder. During the trial and for a while after, that same uncle remained steadfast that Simpson was not guilty. Or at least, maybe, there was reasonable doubt. We tell each other all kinds of things about the ones we love.

What I remember most from my childhood were the Hertz commercials, the hurdling, and the way his occasional presence as a sideline reporter made certain Bills games extra special. That smile measured in tonnage rather than watts, a hulking affability, the easy grace of former athletes, slightly broken but wizened for it, a once great who had done it all, who could walk into any room, anywhere, and be instantly adored, could rest on the laurels he’d broken so many tackles to attain. There was an earned and easy goldenness about his presence. Charm that could be felt through the TV, in our living room. And, certainly, in living rooms the city over. He was one of us up there. He had done it. And everyone loved him.

The trial was the only time, aside from Bills games, where my grandfather commandeered the television. I watched along, Grandma providing salty snacks like it was another sports thing, Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden bungling, Johnnie Cochran hamming. But mostly I watched my grandfather. It was the old saying about how you should never meet your heroes, except times one million and reframed as an episode of The Twilight Zone. Never see your heroes charged with double homicide. Never see yourself or the man you admire the most do the emotional and logical gymnastics it takes to think maybe, maybe, he didn’t do it. At the time, I mostly just wanted us to go back to watching Columbo. There seemed to be far more whodunnit doubt in any of those episodes.

My reaction may have been overly informed by Norm Macdonald. The dryness was my cue. There was a Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts divorce joke that I could never get out of my mind, that I couldn’t stop repeating. The premise was the punch line. And how perfect: the thing right in front of you, the stupid thing, the world itself, is the funniest bit. Was that the point? Was this life? Could you really get away with murder and was that funny? I wondered through his delivery. Coyly un-ironic, direct, obvious, he leaned in. He wasn’t just the funny one, he was the good guy, relentlessly, the clown who was the only one who could see. But the O.J. jokes weren’t just about something or someone else. Not entirely. In the same way that the Bills were somehow the butt of a riff on the otherwise completely joke-less X-Files.

By my thirties, there seemed to be something of a renewed interest in Simpson and the trial. Like a new generation coming to an old band. I’d stare flabbergasted at casuals and youths and non-sports people in my new Midwestern town who themselves would wonder, “Wait, was O.J. actually good?” I special-ordered and devoured the Simpson penned If I Did It, a theoretical but also, probably, actual admission of guilt, reasoning that proceeds were going to the Goldman family, rationalizing that none other than Chuck Klosterman had marveled at the singularity of such an artifact. I watched Cuba Gooding play him in The People V. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story, my perspective flipping on the tragedy of Marcia Clark, of Darden, of the whole bungled justice system. Another former Buffalo expat and I would sit with beers and compare notes on O.J.: Made In America, reliving our shared trauma, shaking heads at the injustice, the surreality, forming little lectures in our minds of ourselves in this epic. We would text each other whenever one of us stumbled onto Naked Gun. We’d wonder if we could or should still enjoy it. When it was late at night and nobody was around, I would. I still do.

Around the time of my fortieth birthday, one quiet night, my kids fast asleep, my father long dead, my uncle dead, my grandparents dead, my brother 500 miles away, the Bills again on the heels of a hopeful and successful and ultimately crushingly sad end to another season, a friend brought over a six-pack and a present he looked near giddy about. Thinking it odd how proud he seemed, how beaming, I gently tore at the wrapping paper. There was a framed, signed photo of O.J., running roughshod over some New York Jets, with gentle whirls of Sharpie-ed cursive, likely formed by the proud hands of a sociopathic double murderer. Macabre, twisted, its existence in my home was an affront to society and all good taste. What I found touching though was my friend’s sick understanding, of my existence, of the city of Buffalo, of our precarious position in the world of close watchers, of impassioned fans, who care so much, who tie their hopes and identity to the on-field performance of unworldly athletes who we will never know, whose inner lives we couldn’t begin to comprehend. My wife shook her head in disapproving understanding, as she had learned to do with most facets of my weird fascination, with this particular twisted tangent of my personal history. Apologetic, I promised the photo would be relegated to an out-of-sight recess of the basement. I did nothing wrong in this act, so I told myself, so I told her. I am but a recipient, a witness of the world’s absurdity. In truth, I hate this little corner of my basement and sometimes wonder on vibes, residues, and if I’m somehow complicit in the ceaseless roll of Bills on-field disappointment. And yet sometimes, maybe more often than I’d like to admit, I go visit, take a little peak, as we all must face ourselves in the mirror now and again. I hate this little part of myself. But I surely won’t ever outrun it.