OJ

OJ


Being on tour in a rock band is an isolated existence. You become so obsessed with keeping everything together and trying to get to the next town on time that it’s natural to lose track of the outside world. The only things that matter on the road are the things inside the van’s smelly walls.
It was in this state of frenetic cluelessness that our band, LUNKHEAD, stumbled into Los Angeles. We rolled into town at five in the morning after driving all night from Tempe and woke up Tina. Tina was Pete’s girlfriend who had recently moved out here to L.A. and was putting us up for the next couple of days. She was expecting us, so she had prepared a treat and we sat in the pool of her apartment complex smoking a joint the size of a baby’s leg as the sun came up. Someone said that her building looked like Melrose Place and she said that Perry Farrell came there to buy heroin.
After some sleep Tina took us out sightseeing and we saw all the bullshit, but I also saw Angelo from FISHBONE getting his saxophone out of the trunk of a dope-ass Mercedes in the A & M parking lot. Me and Arnold were really broke so while everyone else bought meals and sat at the outside porch of this Mexican restaurant, we spied this mother and daughter who were obviously not pleased with their food. Sure enough they got up and left, leaving behind their almost complete meals. We leaned in off the sidewalk and stole the plates right off the table. While we were sitting on the curb eating our stolen food (how’s THAT for a punk rock cliché?), who should walk by but skateboarding legend Christian Hosoi! Arnold had tapped me on the arm… “Dude, check HER out…”
I looked up and saw some typical Hollywood glam-tramp wearing a dress made only of string, leaving nothing to the imagination. But the short asian dude walking with her was undoubtedly Christian Fucking Hosoi!!!
“Fuck her-“ I said, pointing, “Check out Christian Hosoi!”
“Holy Shit!” Arnold said, laughing, “Fucking Hollywood…”
That night Tina tells us she’s got the keys to this luxury home she’s keeping an eye on while its owners are on vacation. They were a sex fetish video producer and his stripper/video star wife. Tina’s roommate was a stripper who had gotten to know this girl, who was apparently living the good life. A bunch of us piled into the van and drove through swankier and swankier neighborhoods until we pulled up into the driveway of a huge stucco palace. It didn’t seem like a place where a porn tycoon would live, it was kind of classy.
Me, Pete and Arnold made a beeline for the fridge and went nuts, while some of the others ploughed through the huge cabinets of videos looking for the porn. They couldn’t find any actual pornography but they did find a bunch of tapes with the word ‘fighting’ on them. We popped them in and realized this wasn’t a porn dude, this was some creepy chicks-play-fighting-in-bikinis dude! It was horrible, these ugly girls would wrestle around for a few minutes for no apparent reason and eventually one of them would get their bikini top pulled off and it would end. People PAID for this?!? We were laughing our asses off when Tina poked her head into the room.
“Oh, that’s Cindy.” She said pointing at the screen. The blonde in the striped bikini was the person whose food we were eating. It was weird. Tina said we should go check out the roof. The stairs to the roof were in the master bedroom, which we recognized from the video. D.I.Y. porn. Cool.
The roof afforded us a great view of the Los Angeles basin. It was high on a hill and you could really see how far L.A. sprawled out into the smog. I paced around smoking a cigarette and noting all the differences between L.A. and Chicago. Lower skyscrapers, smog, cleaner streets, more traffic copters. At least I thought they were traffic copters. Why else would there be that many helicopters in the sky? I figured L.A. has a lot of freeways, hence, a lot of traffic reporting going on.
“Jeez, look at all the helicopters.” Tina said.
“You mean it’s not always like this?” I asked.
“I don’t think so.”
We watched them float over us and more and more joined the action. This was getting strange, there were at least fifty helicopters in the sky over us. RIGHT over us. What the fuck?
We went downstairs and took the catfighting video out, much to the guys’ dismay and pit on the local news. Apparently O.J. Simpson was running from the police for some reason.
“Yeah, he killed his wife, you guys didn’t know that?” Tina asked.
What?!? O.J. Simpson? The football guy?
“Yeah! Where have you guys been?” Tina laughed.
We all looked at each other. We know where we’d been. Tour.
Tina told us that apparently a couple days ago O.J.’s ex-wife and her boyfriend had been hacked to pieces in a house that O.J. owned and that suspicion was mounting around O.J. himself. Jealous rage kind of thing. Wow. Who woulda guessed?
The news went on to say that he was on such and such highway heading for such and such address to some house.
“No way!” Tina yelled, “That’s right over there!!”
We ran back up on the roof and Tina pointed and sure enough about a block and a half down the street there were cops up the ying yang. The bronco was blocked by some bushes so all we could see was cops milling around. The helicopters were swarming by now and it became more interesting to see if any of them would collide. It was like a giant swarm of gnats, all hovering perilously close to each other, jockeying for position but never touching.
The standoff got less and less interesting. We couldn’t see anything and the bullhorn guy was all muffled and hard to understand. We watched for about another half hour, smoking a joint on the roof while half the L.A.P.D. swarmed underneath us, then left for the show.
We met back up with Ron, who was having lunch with some relatives when Al and O.J. drove right past the place. Ron said the counter guy had been keeping tabs on the chase and hollered to everyone when O.J. was almost there. Everyone ran outside and cheered them on like idiots. I told Ron he shoulda stolen all their food.
The show that night was the worst one of the tour. We played to an empty hall with some straight-edge bands who, despite being FROM L.A., managed to draw about ten people. We played, hated it, loaded out, and left. The whole thing took about an hour and we were on the road to Reno.
We drove through the night, alternating between O.J. coverage and Art Bell on the van’s crappy AM radio. Art Bell eventually won out, in deference to the fact it was his home state we were now in, and his tinny voice kept us company until the sun came up red in the desert.