Ishmael Reed, Juice!

When they were selecting jurors for the O.J. Simpson case, I told co-workers that, if I were on the jury, I would keep notes of everything that happened and publish a book about it when it was over. I would call it, The Time I was on the Jury in the O.J. Simpson Trial.

A lot of people got upset about jurors making book deals. Prosecutors making book deals didn't bother them, or police, judges, or district attorneys. You don't think multi-million dollar book deals had any effect on their decisions?

For that matter, we have presidents, generals and secretaries of state becoming millionaires from their book deals. You don't think that has any effect at all on the life-and-death decisions they make?

Anyway, the Simpson trial was almost over when the thought occurred to me that I could write a nonfiction book from the viewpoint of a car wash attendant who watched the trial and commentary on TV when he went home after work.

I could share amusing anecdotes. There was the first day or two of the trial. A hippie girl working at the car wash didn't know why they were even bothering with a trial. The limo driver already testified that Simpson kept him waiting for a couple of minutes! And he seemed winded when he finally came down for the ride to the airport! What further proof did they need?

Then I could go into the fact that the hippie girl was a firm believer in UFOs because she and her friends saw a light in the sky while they were in the woods after dropping acid. And it couldn't have been an LSD-induced hallucination because they all thought they saw it. She was later fired for stealing from the customers' cars.

That would be pretty much my only anecdote, now that I think about it. After that, it would just be stuff I saw on TV.


But Ishmael Reed did something vaguely similar with his novel, Juice! It's an interesting, detailed, factual discussion of the O.J. Simpson trial and the news coverage around it in the context of a novel about an editorial cartoonist.

A great book.

I had assumed Simpson was guilty. After reading it, I'm not so sure. There's a pretty good case to be made for his innocence, or at least that evidence against him was planted, and there are other, more likely suspects.

I didn't remember some of the things I read in the book and didn't believe it until I did an internet search. For example, there was the fact that both Denise Brown and Nichole Brown Simpson dated a Mafia killer who was in the witness protection program.

The book is always interesting and pretty funny in places.