Rockingham State Prison

California’s newest prison seems a peaceful enough place. It is built of handsome stone and wood, in the Tudor style. The windows are covered, not with steel bars, but with plantation shutters. The grounds are carefully tended. Tall trees provide shade. The tallest is a eucalyptus. All its lower limbs have been clipped away, probably just a decorative touch.

It is late Thursday morning, and the guards report with confidence that the prison’s lone inmate is somewhere inside. These guards are situated on the roof of a van parked on the street called Rockingham. They keep watch through a television camera. Should the Prisoner of Rockingham take but one step outside, the world will be alerted.

“Have you seen him?” a cameraman is asked by a passerby.

“Not today, but he’s in there,” he responds, and then he yawns.

“Pretty boring?” She is a tourist in short pants from Chicago. With her husband, she has pushed their baby in a stroller several blocks up the hills of Brentwood to see this place.

“Yeah,” the man behind the camera says. “He isn’t going anywhere today.”

*

The trial of O.J. Simpson, with sporadic exceptions, was a bore. The aftermath has been quite the opposite. The verdict not only has provided a horrifying tour of the fractured American psyche--group therapy on a national scale. It also has instigated a phenomenal campaign to banish Simpson, to eliminate the man, erase him, if not from the world, at least from the world he once chose to walk. (Read: white world.)

Now, since this is wonderful, sweet California, and these are modern, sophisticated times, no one, so far, has done the old-fashioned thing and brought a rope--although even this has been suggested: “Remember the days past,” a nostalgic separatist notes wistfully in a flyer sent around Brentwood, “when O.J. would have been hung from a tree for whistling at a white woman?”

Nonetheless, the attempt to ostracize Simpson has been brutally effective. The demonstrations at NBC, the threat of boycotts against any business that in any way accommodates Simpson or even his lawyers--these and similar tactics have all but locked Simpson away in his Brentwood home. Here’s how it works: Simpson goes out for a doughnut the day after he’s released. The doughnut shop receives a bomb threat. Simpson does not go out for a doughnut again.

This effort to zero out Simpson is not necessarily organized. Indeed, the project has been pursued by factions as diverse as the L.A. Chapter of NOW and the dittoheads of Rush Limbaugh. What they share is a conviction that, cheated by the jury, they must now, as the phrase goes, take the law into their “own hands.” They probably won’t be satisfied, if ever, until Simpson exiles himself to the projects from whence he came, so many football yards and television commercials ago.

Anyone who rows against the current hits hard water. A New York Times reporter picks up the telephone and finds Simpson on the line, ready to answer questions; the story that results is roundly criticized as a betrayal of the cause. The safer tack is to steer clear of Simpson, and thus do his old country club pals let it be known that Simpson won’t be, ahem, welcome anymore, and thus does his agent delete Simpson from the client list.

*

And so the prisoner of Rockingham retreats to his cell, flips on the television: There’s Larry King. Who does Larry have on tonight? Ah, it’s more about me. Shall I try to call in again? Will the switchboard put me through? I don’t see why not. Hello, this is O.J. Hello. Hello. . . . Hello?

Yes, what’s most fascinating, even pathetic, about all this is Simpson’s failure to grasp what has happened. “Maybe I’m a little cocky,” he tells the New York Times, “but in my heart I feel I can have a conversation with anyone.” He talks of wanting to debate his prosecutor, to “knock that chip off” her shoulder. He speaks, weirdly, about his luxury cars, and about his Jacuzzi, not realizing, it would seem, that these are only velvet to cover the chains that will confine him within Rockingham State Prison. At least until the attorneys take it.

Is there anyone who can slip a message across the wall? Has no one told the prisoner his fate? There were two trials in this case. Simpson won only before the jury, which apparently counts for little. Those who participated in the trial conducted outside the courtroom reached a different verdict, and they have sentenced the defendant to this strange, slow death by disappearance.

Is it fair? Is it just?

Don’t ask me. I wasn’t there that night at Bundy.