A Friggin' Killer Stones Song

Will he or won't he? That was the question. We were playing cards when someone called and asked if we had heard what was going on. OJ Simpson had a gun to his head and was leading the cops on a low speed chase down some highway in southern California. "No way!" I responded to this late-breaking development. "Yes way!" my friend Lisa replied. The game came to a predictable and sudden halt as we all rushed into the bedroom and gathered around the television.

Sure enough there he was in the now infamous Ford Bronco cruising down the road with (and my guests and I thought this aspect of the LIVE ACTION dramafest must certainly be a collective visual hallucination) people cheering him on. Okay, we weren't just playing cards. We had ourselves a small game of poker going. Very small stakes and none of us play anymore, as far as I know. The point is, we were already in a betting frame of mind.

There were six of us, three women and three men. I'm a poet and the other two girls were as well. The males in the group were comprised of an elected official, a law student and a guy who I believe was doing graduate work in biochemistry. Gamblers that we were, we started arguing and calling out odds on whether or not "The Juice" was going to off himself. As things so often do, it eventually came down to a gender. We girls were convinced he was going to blow his brains out and the boys claimed to have no doubt whatsoever that he would never do it. No one ever actually put any money on the bed, thank goodness. We Platharoos would have lost, dag nab it!

Later that night, I asked my chum, Henry, why he'd been so certain that Simpson was not going to pull the trigger. He admitted that, in fact, he'd had no idea what was going to happen but he'd suspected that anyone as self-serving and cruel as OJ Simpson would probably never injure his own pretty head. He asked me why I thought my friends and I had been so convinced OJ would take his own life. I told him we chick poets are cliches of ourselves. It wasn't inconceivable in the least to imagine anyone committing suicide. I knew for a fact each of us had tried it ourselves at least once in the past. He shook his head in dismay and went outside for a cigarette. I proceeded to clean up the kitchen. I didn't smoke then. I started up again on a small scale. I'm one of those weird people who seem to be able to do that and only smoke 3 or 4 sticks a day. Maybe I'm kidding myself. Playing with fire? Man, that reminds me of a friggin' killer Stones song.