Thinking of Jesus

I've said before that Hill Street Blues was the best cop show ever. One of the best things about it was Trinidad Silva. You’ve forgotten? He played Jesus Martinez, the menacing and magnetic leader of the Hill Street’s Hispanic street gang. He wore an absurd overcoat; he called Captain Furillo “Frankie,” as in “Yo, Frankie.” My memory is he sucked a toothpick.

I thought of Jesus lately when thinking about Iraq and kindred uproars: all our talk about how the state is failing and we are reverting to “the tribes.”

Well, yes. Civilization is a precious achievement, hard won and fragile enough to vanish in a moment. Æschylus understood this, when he showed Athene as she drove away the furies:

Go then. Sped by majestic sacrifice

From these, plunge beneath the ground.There hold

Off what might hurt the land; pour in

The city’s advantage, success in the end.

--Æschylus, The Eumenides, 1006-9 (Richmond Lattimore trans. 1953)

But Æschylus understood: the furies are the city. Families, networks, alliances: sure, we have to tame them, but they are what give the city its lifeblood and its sinew. One of the many virtues of HSB is that it was about the first TV show ever to deal frankly with that issue. Jesus was scary and funny, but Frankie needed him. And Jesus, in his own way, needed Frankie: in the end, he was a man of political vision who cared for his community at least as much—well, perhaps almost as much—as he cared for himself. Moreover, he was a man of his word. You could deal with that guy. I don’t know of anything quite like this before, but if we are thinking of “street government,” don’t we see just a hint of Tony Soprano around here somewhere?

I got curious about Jesus the other night. Through the magic of Google, it was easy to track him down. His offstage name was Trinidad Silva. He was born in 1950, which means he was in his early 30s when he tangled with Frankie. Outside of HSB, he had a bit of a career. He played the Punk #2 in the Blue Chevie in Steve Martin’s The Jerk.

He played guys with names like Carlos and Hector and Ramon. He played an older and perhaps more complicated gangster-- Leo “Frog” Lopez-- in Dennis Hopper’s Colors; Janet Maslin said Hopper had “a superb eye for the poisonous flowering of gang culture” (link).

Imagine my dismay, then, to learn that Silva died at just about the time Colors opened—--killed in an automobile collision with a drunk driver at Whittier, CA. He had not yet finished his work on Al Yankovic’s UHF—they had to rewrite the script, and they gave him a special credit.

I’ve never seen Colors or UHF, but I know that he left at least one fine piece of work behind him, and I am grateful for it.

Oh, and a propos of nothing, he’s here, too. I like the one about “caterers.”