A Night on the Couch

Friday night in the burbs. The kids are playing. The pizza man is en route. The television is tuned to the NBA Finals. Patrick Ewing goes high above the rim and slams down a shot. This is life. This can’t last.

The picture changes. Madison Square Garden is replaced by the San Diego Freeway. A helicopter camera is locked on a white Ford Bronco. The shot widens to show half a dozen black-and-whites following in formation. A CHP dispatcher is debriefed hastily by a local anchor. The vehicle, he confirms, belongs to Al Cowlings, who had gone AWOL earlier in the day with O.J. Simpson.

Simpson is in the back seat, “holding a gun to his head.”

The dispatcher seems rushed.

“I have to get off now,” he says.

“Go do,” the anchor says crisply, “what you have to do.”

The kindergartner comes into the family room. She notices the television, senses the tension. “What is this?” she asks. The television is turned off. A retreat is made to a set in the back bedroom. Who knows what this is? Certainly not something for little children. Maybe not something for adults. “We are going to try,” the anchor says, “to get back to that basketball game as soon as we can.”

*

After five minutes, the initial flinch relaxes. No longer does it seem so likely that, in the next moment, the Bronco will jerk to the shoulder, its occupants dead. The squad cars stay back. This is not a pursuit, but an escort. On every channel the picture is the same, a white Bronco rolling slowly down an empty freeway. Only the commentary varies.

Larry King interviews an “old friend,” a doctor, who was with Simpson earlier in the day. Is it possible, King inquires, that the football star has lost himself “in an unreal world and is not accepting he has done what he did?”

“Sure, sure,” the friend says.

NBC floats a little box in the corner of the picture, trying to hold its NBA audience. Pat Riley pumps his hands joyfully into the air. “This will sound bizarre,” Conan Nolan cuts in from a car down on the freeway, “but there are some people out here who actually have signs. I just passed one group of people who have a sign that says, ‘Go O.J.’ ” They want him, he explains, “to buck up.”

Psychiatrists are everywhere, speaking in terms of “acute personality disorder” and the “dissociative state.” Jim Hill pleads with O.J. on the air to “be a man.” A former linebacker named Cheyunski tells Channel 2 only God can help O.J. now. Linda Breakstone is asked to describe what “philosophy” the LAPD will bring to an arrest. “He will be brought directly to Parker Center,” she reports. “No more this, that and the other place.”

The doorbell rings. “Pizza man,” the children shout.

The Bronco rolls on. Through the window it’s possible to make out Cowlings behind the wheel. His methods might be suspect, but more than anything Cowlings seems to be that friend everyone hopes they can count on when dark days come. Now, as he changes lanes, two cars of trailing onlookers collide.

“Where are we here, Paul?” an anchor is asked. A good question.

*

The short answer is Brentwood, approaching Simpson’s house. Now all cameras are trained on a parked Bronco. Cowlings, poor Cowlings, scurries back and forth between the vehicle and a doorway, while Peter Jennings reads from a suicide letter: “Please think of the real O.J. and not this lost person.” Barbara Walters reports Simpson might be placed in a cell next to Erik Menendez. Al Michaels reveals he talked to Simpson the day before: “The first thing he said was, ‘Al, I have got to get out of the media business.’ ”

Finally, anti-climatically, with it too dark to see anything and the crowd outside edging beyond control, rocking cars, shouting “Juice,” a CBS street reporter brings the news: “O.J. Simpson just gave himself up.”

And down the hall, the kids are found asleep in their beds. When? And in the empty family room, cold pizza is served with expert analysis. The deep voices all agree electronic history has been made. ESPN’s legal affairs correspondent declares it foolish to prosecute Cowlings. And a psychiatrist says to expect something like a hangover in the morning.

For in the morning, the adrenaline will be gone. In the morning, there will be cartoons for kids, and questions for adults. What was that all about, and why did I watch? For a long time, it had been sort of fun to wonder just how weird this new society of ours might someday become. Now the answer is known. And, at least from this couch, it’s not anything anyone would want to experience again.