TIES THAT REMIND : Like It or Not, O.J. Was, Is and Always Will Be Part of Our Lives in Los Angeles

Angelenos-- real Angelenos--are no more enthralled at seeing one of our local illuminati than a Washingtonian would be at spotting a congressman: just one more body taking up a good parking space, an annoying celebrity Sigalert.

A couple of years back, waiting in an endless bathroom line at a concert, I saw a well-known TV actress, very glamorous, emerge with beautiful grace from a stall . . . with her long velvet skirt caught up in her pantyhose in the back. (Did any of us say anything to her about it? Are you kidding ?)

So many famous and once-famous people float about these parts that we need helpful descriptions to be reminded of them, like “onetime matinee idol” or “former child star.”

But to all who parachute into town for the Simpson case, in person or by satellite imagery: Los Angeles’ memory didn’t need any prodding to remember O.J.

Possibly one in 10 cars on the freeway wears a license plate frame pledging the driver’s eternal fidelity to USC, home of the Trojans, home of O.J. Simpson.

For several years, I taught at USC, and after every final exam, when I took my students for pizza at a campus hangout, we sat at the big table under the big picture of the big guy, No. 32, the Heisman Trophy winner . . . a man who didn’t seem to be any color but Trojan cardinal and gold.

By then, he’d been on television since my students were babies: in a Buffalo Bills uniform, in Hertz commercials, in some football stadium shouting into a network microphone and, finally, in the movies.

I had encountered him twice, first in 1984, as he carried the Olympic torch up the killer hill known as the California Incline. I met him again in the steam of an NFL locker room in Buffalo, right after the Bills beat the Raiders in the playoffs. It was the first public event since the start of the Gulf War; he was covering it as a sports event; I, as news.

Like a figure in a funhouse mirror, O.J. was anywhere you chose to look, in any configuration. Now he is on TV again. No. 32 is now case No. BA 097211.

They say that at any moment, someplace in the world, an “I Love Lucy” episode is being rerun. So it has felt here, with The Trial; for months past and months to come, some element of the People of the State of California vs. O.J. Simpson is always crossing our paths, intersecting our consciousness.

For me, it began last June 12, the afternoon and early evening of the murders. I was in Brentwood, at a benefit held at a house right across the street from what we now all call “O.J. Simpson’s Rockingham estate.”

I had broken my foot the month before and, rather than use my orthopedic cane at so elegant an event, I limped along on an old family souvenir, a Malay sword cane with a rusty, foot-long blade concealed inside.

Later that same night--at about the time of the murders, I realized later--I was close by again, at another fund-raiser. My friends teased me later about my curious proximity to that night’s events. It was a good thing, they said, that the district attorney had been at the fund-raiser, too, or I’d be in big trouble.

Judge Lance Ito’s dogs go to my vet. His parents go to my dentist. Another dentist, not mine, brokered a meeting between two of his patients: juror No. 6 and the Channel 9 anchorwoman who interviewed her after she became the former juror No. 6.

Six degrees of separation is about four too many, even in this vast city.

To you who can switch O.J. on and off like daytime dramas: The case may make for diverting table talk where you live. But here, where we have smoldered and shaken and slid away--here, the Simpson matter, as Lance Ito so delicately calls it, is real. And we must live with its consequences, long after you may have gone back to “I Love Lucy.”