Listening Blind to Simpson Sequel

In this whole spinning, teeming, scandal-greedy planet, perhaps 90 people are actually being allowed to listen to what goes on in the courtroom where O.J. Simpson is again on trial.

On this day, I am one of them, in the Audio Room annex of what is left of the Trial of the Century.

A year and some change ago, the murder trial seemed to hold the wide world rapt. You could pick up the signal in Tibet, so I am told. I was watching in Scotland when I heard Robert from Aberdeen call CNN to report indignantly that he could very clearly see the supposedly faceless jurors, reflected in Christopher Darden’s bald head.

Even with TV beaming l’affaire O.J. around the globe, seats in the courtroom were at such a premium that the New York Times and La Opinion had to share one. The local FM music station that wanted five seats must have mistaken the trial for a rock concert.

Every day, O.J. Simpson’s reality crowded out ours. Yet the civil trial is virtually off our radar; remembering our absorption now is embarrassingly like running into an old flame and wondering how you ever felt so passionately about that?

The reasons are manifold.

* By judge’s order, you will not find the trial on TV or radio, live or otherwise. We have no wall-to-wall audio-video O.J. to hash over on coffee breaks or at dinner. The great barroom icebreaker, the universal elevator chat topic, is gone.

* Sequels never attract like the original. In the pyrotechnic criminal trial, the world was on first-name terms with Marcia and Johnnie. This jury has asked that the lawyers introduce themselves to refresh their memories. “Shows what an impression you’ve made,” the judge observed.

* The life-for-a-life phase is over; the stakes now are money, a poor substitute for a more dire penance, and far less dramatic.

* Downtown L.A. is not Santa Monica. The bus exhaust clouds at Temple and Spring versus dolce far niente sea breezes. Downtown’s sidewalks, once haunted by Manson’s girls with Xs engraved in their faces, have always invited crackpots; Santa Monica’s broad courthouse greenswards invite thoughts of croquet.

The notably humorless Karl Marx posited that when history and its characters repeat themselves, the first act is tragedy, the second act, farce. I thought of that in Santa Monica as an attorney in another case, trying to look solemn, had to walk by all the O.J. cameras struggling awkwardly to carry into court his exhibit: a life-sized gray mannequin pierced here and there with red straws to indicate entrance and exit wounds.

*

Packed to the gunwales, Department Q still holds only some 40 press seats, a dozen or so more for the public and the court, and the principals: judge, jury, attorneys, plaintiffs, defendant, court officials, witnesses.

So as a concession to vast interest and limited space, the judge allowed a closed-circuit “audio room” near the courthouse.

You enter the audio room as clean as you would the visiting room at San Quentin. No recording devices are permitted, and no cell phones, lest someone on the other end inadvertently overhear testimony, or some reporter is rash enough to hold the mouthpiece up to the speakers.

This day, only six of us are in the audio room, capacity 41. It will undoubtedly fill up for the Bruno Magli moment, for Kato’s latest take on reality, for Simpson himself. Just now, business is slow enough that the amiable security officer who searches us can read the paper from masthead to classifieds.

Unlike the courtroom’s group dynamic--everyone laughing at what is funny, gasping at the shocking--there is no etiquette for this abstract listening. Where do we look as the LAPD cop struggles to convey where he saw drops of blood? At the pinkish-beige wallpaper? At the twin speakers on the mirror-backed counter? In the audio room, courtroom silences go unexplained. The bangs and bumps are mystifying. We cannot lean on the visual crutch of context--attitude, nuance, body language, the eye filling in what the ear misses.

The rest of the world will have to read the words we are hearing. Reading requires as different a discipline from listening as listening does from watching. In the 1960 JFK-Nixon debate, the TV audience gave the win to Kennedy, while radio audiences tended to give Nixon the honors.

To all but 90-some people, O.J. II offers neither. In this, the parallels between O.J. and the Rodney King trials are striking. Both first trials were televised, and both ended in acquittal. The second--the federal trial of the LAPD officers, the civil trial of Simpson--take place without cameras or microphones. (Some who think it’s unfair for Simpson to face a second trial applauded the federal trial of the LAPD officers . . . and vice versa).

The LAPD officers were convicted. We won’t know about Simpson for months.

The last I looked, the statue of justice had only a blindfold. Not earplugs.