Juice!

A Novel

Ishmael Reed

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781564786470
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literatur Allgemein

In 2010, the Newseum in Washington D.C. finally obtained the suit O. J. Simpson wore in court the day he was acquitted, and it now stands as both an artifact in their "Trial of the Century" exhibit and a symbol of the American media's endless hunger for the criminal and the celebrity. This event serves as a launching point for Ishmael Reed's Juice!, a novelistic commentary on the post-Simpson American media frenzy from one of the most controversial figures in American literature today. Through Paul Blessings—a censored cartoonist suffering from diabetes—and his cohorts—serving as stand-ins for the various mediums of art—Ishmael Reed argues that since 1994, "O. J. has become a metaphor for things wrong with culture and politics." A lament for the death of print media, the growth of the corporation, and the process of growing old, Juice! serves as a comi-tragedy, chronicling the increased anxieties of "post-race" America.

PART 1

1

None of my Rhinosphere buddies, Snakes60@, Rabbit64@, Bat68@, or Otter73@, would have ever predicted that by June 2007, I’d be sounding like Shaquille O’Neal of 2004, because up to that year, I was like Rasheed Wallace. A team player. A minor Egyptologist. A man who drew technical fouls (called “Rodmans,” after Dennis Rodman) and suspensions for criticizing those who, in my mind, delivered unfair calls against me and my brothers. How did the Times put it after the Los Angeles Lakers were blown away in 2004 by these ragged upstarts, these Motown Hood Rats: “Teamwork Thumps Star Power.” Not always. I found that out the hard way, backing loser after loser all for the sake of the team. The brothers. The Fellas. But now I’m like Shaquille O’Neal. He said after the fifth game Lakers defeat, “It’s going to be a funny summer. Everyone’s going to take care of their own business and everyone is going to do what’s best for them.” Call it enlightened self-interest, pragmatism, or taking a page from Michael Jordan, who said, “To be successful you have to be selfish, or else you never achieve.” Before, if I were a basketball player, I would have shared the ball with my fellow teammates. Like Steve Nash. That was then. Now I was going to be like Allen Iverson, a ball hog. I was definitely going to get my three-pointers, teamwork or no teamwork. I was going to avoid the paint and depend upon perimeter shots. But with this award, I was like somebody who hit a clutch, buzzer, beating three-pointers from the opposite end of the court.

Esther and I are lodged in a suite down the hall from one that was once occupied by General Douglas MacArthur. He used to watch the Friday night fights here. This is a famous New York hotel, the one every travel site advertises with these words: “Since 1893, our name has epitomized the quintessential luxury hotel experience. Each spacious, individually decorated guestroom and suite offers a rewarding union of timeless elegance and up-to-the-moment convenience, luxurious comfort and classic sophistication.” You know the one. How did I get here? The wonderful buffet we had a few hours earlier, attended by some of the most distinguished members of my profession, the speeches from my colleagues, people who up to now considered me a troublemaker, an iconoclast, a gadfly, a witch doctor and even more derogatory things. They were all singing my praises.

Ever since the backlash on the judgment in the O. J. criminal trial, I had been in a rage. So were my e-mail companions of The Rhinosphere. We agreed that this was because the other jury, seeking profits from a marketing strategy called the Racial Divide, had muddied the waters.

Since that 1995 verdict, the Jim Crow media jury has been attempting to double-jeopardize, triple-jeopardize, and quadruple-jeopardize O. J.

Unlike the jury in the criminal trial, where evidence had to be examined, the media could play fast and loose with the facts and were doing so even twelve years after the trial. It comes down to this: who do you believe, some of the leading scientists and forensic experts in the country, or Bill Maher, who couldn’t even begin his 2009 season without a reference to O. J. Simpson? Simpson began as a football player; now his name is included in the testimonies of patients who pay two hundred dollars per hour to psychotherapists. (Tiger’s name too.)

During one point in the criminal trial, one of O. J.’s dreams was entered into evidence. How many dreams has O. J. entered? And in what role?

Snakes, who was not considered a hothead like me, Rabbit the filmmaker, Bat, and Otter agreed with supermodel Naomi Campbell that with the O. J. case all black men were guilty by proxy. (In 2010, Ms. Campbell is O. J.’d over whether she received a diamond from Charles Taylor, the former dictator of Liberia. Mia Farrow disputes Ms. Campbell’s testimony. When Ms. Farrow wrote a book critical of Woody Allen, she was dismissed as a flake even by female critics. With her contradicting a black woman, she will probably be believed.) That was how we all felt in 1995. Rabbit had even said that I’d gotten diabetes because I’d spent all of that time before the tube, obsessed with the O. J. case.

But since I received the news of my good fortune, my blood sugar had returned to normal. At first I was reluctant to sell out a brother, but my family, Esther and Hibiscus, gave me an ultimatum I couldn’t refuse. And you know, it was all for the best. I was no longer fretting about every setback in Michael Jackson’s cases. Alan M. Dershowitz’s book asserting Mike Tyson’s innocence, published in 2004—I would have ordered it from Amazon immediately. Not anymore. Kobe Bryant? Maybe the prosecution meant well when they refused to go along with the judge’s request that a member of the defense team be present when they examined his “victim’s” DNA. What did I know?

And O. J. as late as 2005, they were still trying to trap him, the tenth anniversary of his acquittal for the murders of Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson. But of course, he outwitted Greta Van Susteren, one of those whose career was made by being connected to the case, and he totally demolished Catherine Crier. Escaping their verbal traps.

Even though a number of books had been published asserting O. J.’s guilt, perhaps the vilest and most racist, I had thought at the time, had been Jeffrey Toobin’s The Run of His Life. But hey, maybe Toobin was right when he said that blacks supported Simpson because they are divorced from reality and shouldn’t be patronized or “patted on the head.” Toobin was a graduate of Harvard Law School and an editor of the Harvard Law Review. What the hell did I know?

But even after the decisions rendered by all-white juries in Santa Monica and Las Vegas, conspiracy theorists cling to O. J.’s innocence, no matter how flimsy the evidence for such a position might be. Like the following flimsy evidence, noted by CNN:

MAY 4, 1995–Blood taken from beneath Nicole Brown Simpson’s fingertips could have come from someone other than her accused killer, O. J. Simpson, a prosecution witness said Thursday under cross-examination.

Greg Matheson, chief forensic scientist at the Los Angeles Police crime lab, conceded that according to scientific literature offered by the defense, the blood was inconsistent with a genetic marker in the blood of either O. J. Simpson or his slain ex-wife.

But, hey, maybe Matheson is wrong. Maybe he can’t see “obvious evidence” when it exists right before his eyes. Maybe we should rely upon Dan Gerstein, who, appearing on MSNBC December 26, 2008, to comment about the problems of an impeached Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich, under fire for allegedly offering to sell President Obama’s vacated Senate seat, said, “if it were a movie it would be ‘Mr. Simpson Goes to Washington.’” He said, “The Government was using a strategy from the playbook of the Simpson defense team: create a circus as a way of distracting from the obvious evidence.” Why don’t the forensic scientists Wecht, Lee, and Matheson see the evidence as obvious as this commentator who has no training in forensics? Or Bill Maher? These scientists are probably wrong. Whom should we believe? The talk show hosts, members of the same fraternity as Maher, who said that the winter of 2010 proved that global warming is a myth or the overwhelming majority of scientists who were warning us about the consequences of climate change?

In addition, while engaging in the usual sarcastic and vicious comments about O. J., the media were very respectful of Dr. Henry Lee who still, ten years after the murders, insisted that bloody shoe prints belonging to two pair of shoes, showed up at the crime scene. Not one pair. (But in 2007, they got him, accusing him of pilfering a fingernail, evidence in the Phil Spector case, who, like O. J., is accused of killing a blonde, but no one called his trial “the trial of the century.”) Cyril Wecht, the Los Angeles Coroner, also subscribed to the two-killer theory. Experts Lee, Peter Neufeld, and Barry Scheck claimed that the DNA evidence used in the O. J. trial was corrupted. “Garbage In, Garbage Out.” The New York Times reported on February 4, 2009:

Forensic evidence that has helped convict thousands of defendants for nearly a century is often the product of shoddy scientific practices that should be upgraded and standardized, according to accounts of a draft report by the nation’s pre-eminent scientific research group.

The report by the National Academy of Sciences is to be released this month. People who have seen it say it is a sweeping critique of many forensic methods that the police and prosecutors rely on, including fingerprinting, firearms identification and analysis of bite marks, blood spatter, hair and handwriting.

But the Media jury said that the blacks on what they constantly and mistakenly call “The Black Jury” weren’t persuaded by the reasonable doubt presented by the O. J. defense team. They were into paying back the police for Detective Mark Fuhrman, even though they didn’t hear all of the information about Fuhrman’s racist leanings as revealed through a series of tape recordings. Both Toobin and the late Norman Mailer, writing in New York Magazine, said that blacks are incapable of rational thought. Like members of many other species, blacks operate on the basis of instinct, they were suggesting. Blacks were non-Cartesian. (They don’t think therefore they ain’t.)

2

On June 19, 2004, Larry King did an anti-O. J. show that included Denise Brown, Fred Goldman, Detectives Tom Lange and Phil Vannatter. Denise, who, like her late sister, has dated mobster hit men, said that she was launching a show about domestic violence. Kim Goldman, Fred’s daughter, encouraged people to spit on O. J. were they to cross his path. Fred Goldman, Goldman’s father, accused the late Johnnie Cochran of setting race relations back one hundred years. While this used to bother me so that I would shake my fist at the TV, and uptick my blood sugar and blood pressure, I have been cured. The fact that Tiger Woods still misses fairways and has to make miraculous shots out of the rough, doesn’t affect me the way that such misses did in 2004. (Making miraculous shots out of the rough might be the image of what black men in the U.S. have to do in order to succeed.) Hell, just like Rabbit said when he and I met for the first time. Tiger is worth so much money that he can’t even do ads for Buick anymore, because most people would associate him with a Lexus. And Roy Jones, Jr.? If it were 2004, I would have been in a funk for weeks, my blood sugar monitor telling me to “eat a snack” at watching the great Roy Jones, Jr., getting knocked out. Twice. But things changed for Tiger when he was outed as a serial philanderer in 2010. At that point, all speculation about his racial identity was cleared up. As Wanda Sykes put it, it was his black part that bought the Cadillac and the Asian part that wrecked it. Ben Armstrong, my colleague, said that white women should be grateful that somebody still wanted them. White men were tired of them and taking up with Asian women who served beer to them and their friends while they watched football and encouraged them to go to strip clubs and have affairs. (Of course, I disagreed with him.)

And O. J.? In 2007, he was doing well. Parrying with the hosts of talk shows who wanted to pump their ratings. His children had grown up in his care, even though I think Gloria Allred tried to get them removed from O. J.’s home. (In 2007, Ms. Allred was lawyering for one of Britney Spear’s bodyguards and arguing that her children be taken away. She wanted Michael Jackson’s kids removed from his custody. She’s Lilith of the legal profession. And her daughter, Lisa Bloom—what’s the word I’m looking for? On Court TV, she welcomed the 2008 Las Vegas show trial of Simpson with “alacrity.” A second generation black male basher.) It’s 2007 and O. J. can take care of himself. A one-man growth industry. Like in the old days, making more money for others than for himself. A gold mine of opportunity for Jeffrey Toobin, authors Chris Darden, Faye Resnick, Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, Utility Wagons, and the breeders of Akita dogs. I’m not complaining. I’m getting my cut. Without O. J., I wouldn’t be here. Enjoying these swell digs. How did I, the last man to believe in O. J.’s innocence, come to be dwelling in a suite located in the Waldorf-Astoria? A lot has happened since that day in 1994 when we heard that O. J.’s wife, Nicole, and Ron Goldman, a waiter and some say drug courier operating out of the Mezzaluna restaurant, had been murdered in Brentwood. For me it all began during a vacation in Hawaii.

3

JUNE 1994

I’m convinced that dreams arise from a slough within the psyche. They have something to do with the flow of fluids within our bodies. With Diabetes 2, I’m very conscious of blood arriving at its anatomical destinations. My slough becomes stimulated by the sound of ocean waves colliding with a beach. I wish that there were a better way to explain it. Whatever the reason, being near the beach washes out the accumulation of debris lodging within my mind. Many years ago, I needed a drink from time to time. Nowadays I need two drinks. The Pacific and the Atlantic. They calm my hypertension and my hyperglycemia.

Every time I hear the banging of the waves a dream rolls out. Bad dreams: snakes, rats, dead people. It’s as though my soul is being laundered. By the time I leave for home, I’m less anxious. I’m no longer making the six o’clock run to the Turtle Bay Hilton to buy the mainland papers. I’m away from the fax machine. Online. Away from that monkey on my back, television. I’m always channel surfing from C-SPAN to CNN. Not here.

My wife, Esther, and my daughter, Hibiscus, spend a lot of their time shopping, while I wait in the car. “I’ll be back in ten minutes” means forty-five minutes to them. When we’re not shopping for groceries at the Food Fair, we eat out at some of the restaurants between the beach houses and the Turtle Bay Hilton. Sometimes we might go to one of the hotels in Waikiki. The Sheraton, where we can sit out on the veranda and watch the swimmers and ocean liners. It resembles the main house of a large plantation. They perform the hula here. The poet Kathryn Takara is especially adept at moving her hips to the movement of the waves. We’ve decided that everywhere Americans go, there is a Waikiki. A brassy commercial strip of restaurants, shops, bars, and tattoo parlors.

Sometimes, the Americans come to our part of the island in buses. (We’re in Laie, staying at the Malauki Rentals, in a duplex on the beach.) The tourists arrive at the Polynesian Cultural Center which features a show with pretty mixed-race young people rowing in and out of a stadium in boats while singing and dancing. A little slapstick is added for the entertainment of the audience. Occasionally, a male rower pretends to have fallen into the water and the crowd erupts into uproarious laughter. This must be an example of Mormon humor. We are told that as a condition for their hiring, the natives have to convert to the Mormon religion.

A woman as big as Pele, the volcano goddess, says that the thin women are put out for the tourists, but the heavy women know the hula. They can shake that thing. The Polynesian people we see, heading for the Mormon’s Food Fair, have a casual style. They were no match for the Anglos, who invaded these islands, searching for sugar. Many of the natives are dark skinned and have those full features that we associate with some African faces. Possibly descendants from a migration that began on the east coast of Africa, but some University of California anthropologists contend that the Polynesian people are of Chinese origin. Upon seeing pictures of Hawaii’s early monarchs, however, it occurred to me that I have relatives who look like them.

Critics of Afrocentrism can recognize the facial features in a police sketch as belonging to a black man, but when these features appear on the face of a Hawaiian monarch or on that of a Pharaoh, the identity of this royalty becomes subject to all manner of esoteric hair splitting.

Hawaiian music is different. It’s as cool as green tea. More sugar for the ear. The...