The Mod Squad

Untitled

The mod squad. Representatives of Soloi asked to surface and do jobs for "the man.” Deviants asked to infiltrate and bust the deviant. A reversed social flow, the river I grew up in, though it’s all the same river, isn’t it, love war money time. I remember the sympathetic captain guy who broke them all in, like a santa claus mama, a brotherly temptress, avuncular snake. Everything—the L.A. sunlight and palm trees, Julie's sultry motion, rich boy Pete's thin lips and numb-faced Linc—the whole dirty planet seeping sadness. The world, afterall, in The Mod Squad was a half-way house, a go-go club on hold, the 60s at the very least an interesting eddy. A slow bright spin in sunlight, no? September 1968, The Mod Squad’s pilot episode airs. The Summer of Love inside of Vietnam inside of Captain Crunch. Inside of stop-children-what’s-that-swoon. All those Quinn Martin Productions had a quality like chrome, making scary young people innocuous to their parents, making parents honest or finally necessary to their children, neutralizing all threat, neutralizing, PH-balancing, smoothing, flattening.

Neutralizing. Selling.

Julie Barnes the runaway had hair like a waterfall, straight down either side of her face. Glissading so smoothly, like such pure motion—she might as well have been frozen. We could tell she had gone too far into life already, that's why she was still. We could tell she had been somewhere, that's why she was sad.

Pete boy Cochran, car thief, had all the livid twisted idiotic and somewhat embarrassing passion of a kid who has suffered the great lies of our time, certainly, but grew up so filthy rich it was hard not to see him as anything but pinkly pathetic.

And Lincoln Hayes, Linc of street riots and jail time, man—Linc's neck didn't work. If he turned his head, he turned his whole body, utterly stuffed I guess with pain and rage. His favorite word was Solid. Linc seemed to me the one in-between cop with legitimate reasons for fury. I didn't know why—his world was alien to me—but anyone could see he was believably boiling. Anyone could see that the hive of his brain had made him finally silent.

I think Linc and Julie should have been an item. She could have fallen in and through him, pure locution, and had at least a way to speak. While he would be location, a still, flowing wall. Musicmotionmothermind. Hurt/the hurt past words.

Sometimes The Invaders, The Fugitive, and The Mod Squad run together in my mind. A continuous dream, trying hard to convince an ever-resistant planet that an alien presence indeed is at hand, Others have arrived, we ourselves have seen the signs. All while manhunted for a crime we didn't commit, all while hard at work ourselves to solve the crime we didn't commit. And all while slowly seeping, slowly being welded back into the stream (as if we ever left) like ambiguously repentent and angsty children.

Mr. Ed, My Favorite Martian, Jeannie, Bewitched. Nobody's telling anybody and yet everybody knows. The Adams Family. Dark Shadows...Like Vietnam. We are inhabited. We are inhabited by war. We are inhabited by a war still undeclared. We don't know when it began and have no clue about its ending. It's a mistake, but we're in too deep to stop. We're in too deep to even know it, though we know it. United Mistakes of America. We are not the West Indies, we have no promised spices, Indians are not Indians. We arrived like monstrous Magoos, our language all out of alignment. That is the war, thus began the war, though we're never even sure why we're fighting and we can't see what we hate. General Hospital. As the World Turns…We can't see what it is we love to name.

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