One of OJ's greatest fears had to be: What did his father's homosexual genes say about OJ's own manhood development project? Would he too become gay? How was he to cope with the everyday embarrassment and taunts from his peer group? This was indeed a very heavy cross for any male child to bear, but especially so for a black ghetto male child where one's reputation meant everything.
Having perfected a smooth ability to lie and "play off" deep psychological injuries, OJ was able to "put up a convincing survival front," a form of male posturing that is part of the "codes of the streets" and useful in parrying the endless insults and taunts he could barely deal with during the cruel teenage years of the 1960s.
Lying must have seemed to OJ as being an easy way to plug the psychological dam that was constantly threatening to breakout and crash in on him. And so, lying undoubtedly became the front line of his psychological defenses.
But that dam would finally break when OJ discovered that a younger, more virile version of himself, also a Heisman Trophy winner, and member of the elite Pro football hall of fame, his best friend and the best man at his wedding to Nicole: Marcus Allen, was caught having to admit that he was screwing OJ's wife, Nicole. As was normal for OJ about his feelings, he "played this off" too, as if it did not matter that Marcus Allen his best friend, was screwing his wife. But to make sure he knew, Nicole had asked OJ to intervene and ask Marcus to "back-off."
However, as Marcus told the author, Gilbert (during the time OJ was trying to get Marcus to testify in the Civil trial -- to the effect that he (Marcus) had indeed screwed Nicole), Marcus balked. He was not going to commit professional suicide on OJ's behalf. Plus, Marcus was not buying OJ's line that he did not care. According to Marcus, OJ cared, alright. In fact he cared so much that he did not even have the vocabulary to express his pain.
And as much as OJ continued to pretend that he did not care, he certainly cared about the rumors circulating at the time, rumors that would be memorialized in a front page photo by the Enquirer news magazine, that showed Nicole and her friend Faye Resnick walking along the beach while Nicole held a nice size stick of driftwood, a small tree limb to be exact, that she amusingly pointed out to Resnick was the best measure of the size of Marcus' penis.
If that kind of knowledge would not make OJ explode into a paroxysm of murderous violence on the night of June 12, 1994, then surely Nicole's slights and conscious attempts to goad him and get under his skin, did. Three stars
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