On The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker, by Jack Skelley

Semiotext(e), 136 pages (2023)

Chloe Pingeon

I write my own index while reading The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker but when  I reach the end of the book, I realize that, anticipating the reader's interest in contextualization, Jack Skelley has beaten me to the punch. The book is fiercely referential, yes, to the Los Angeles anarchic sex-soaked punk landscape of the 1980s in which the story grounds itself, but also to landmarks that exist within the narrator's own life, holding context only within the fluid boundaries of his consciousness but referred to with such assurance that I begin to think I am simply not in the know.

The narrator, of course, is Jack, but not Jack Skelley, or not really, or you’re not really sure. Jack–the narrator–has a mania to him, a shaky disposition, and a willingness to transgress the borders of physical possibilities in his recollections that leads me to question, if auto-fictitious, the plausibility that Jack-The-Narrator would be capable of scribing even his own version of reality with such lucidity. Because for all the schizophrenic compulsions that the story aesthetically entertains, Fear of Kathy Acker remains incredibly lucid in its convictions and desires. And yet for Jack Skelley, it doesn’t seem to matter much if “Jack” is Jack, or almost Jack, or not Jack at all.  Jack Skelley, after all, doesn’t believe in autofiction. He’s clear about that in the introduction to the novel.

“All fiction, except perhaps pure genre fiction, is rooted in autobiography. The confusion comes in the rhetorical device of parabasis in which the narrator assumes the role of author and pretends to tell ‘the truth.’” 

And sticking by this notion, FoKA is exhilaratingly honest in its disregard for any sense of objective truth. The quest for objectivity is futile anyway. Jack’s in line at the DMV and then he’s having sex with the Sexy DMV Woman behind the counter and then she bites his ear off, and it is imperative to the telling of the story that this all Really Happened, even if, of course, it Really Didn’t. 

As such, the boundaries between the interior self and the exterior world blur. Between reality and fantasy. Between a household name and an imaginary friend. Even within its very form, FoKA is fluid. Written in the 1980s by a Skelley in his twenties, the text has found previous life in fragments as a performance piece, in chapter books, magazines, and at readings. The 2023 Semiotext(e) publication marks the book's first appearance in full, as a novel, and yet the cut-up and spliced-together nature of the text remains. As Amy Gerstler writes in her introductory essay to FoKA, the text is reflective of “a furious burst of drug-fueled artistic and sexual energy, spiritual seeking, and critique of American culture.”

In the first chapter of FoKA, titled “Sexy Day,” Jack is walking down Torrance, and first, he’s in the Mall and then he’s trying to go to work and then he’s watching William Shatner fuck a porn star in his office and then the porn star is writing Jack letters and he’s drifting in and out of sexual fantasies that he’s recounting as histories but that the reader is sure could not possibly be true. And then just when you’re starting to wonder if we might be losing Jack to this churning internal almost decadent world, he brings things back to earth:

“The whole point of everything is to have fun if you can.” 

He’s probably right. 

“The city is a greasy hungry dragon that shits itself and eats its shit. Everybody is walking and driving around there with one goal in mind: to be a celebrity.”

Fear of Kathy Acker has a way of coming around like this.

I read The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker a few times. 

For my final reading, I am on a plane from Paris to New York. There’s tremendous turbulence, the worst I’ve ever felt, and I’m sitting behind a mid-tier famous TikTokker who I recognize by Instagram handle but not by name. 

I start to think about the plane crashing, because I always think about the worst case scenario first just to get it over with, and I’m watching the TikTokker's head bob as the plane lurches and I’m thinking about how odd it would be, within the context of this strange one sided parasocial relationship, if our lives ended side by side. Usually, the worst case scenarios make me feel better. The worst case usually ends with death, and logical reasoning concludes that this is ultimately inevitable anyway. This situation, though, is suddenly the most morbid thing I can imagine. For this man’s physical life to end under the watchful gaze of a stranger who perceives him as a caricature, who presumes to know him but only as an animated performance of self… It’s the most abject lonely notion I can possibly conceive of. I’m seized with guilt. I resist the urge to ask the TikTokker his God-given name. I clutch the rosary that I am wearing ironically. I hope, with a vigor that nears prayer, for his sake more than mine, that the plane stays airborne. 

In Amy Gerstler’s introduction to FoKA, she emphasizes the 1980s texts' enduring relevance by citing Skelley’s allusions to “the public and private scourges/muses of everyday life that continue to plague and motivate us today. These include but are not limited to libido, capitalism, celebrity culture, hunger for transcendence, advertising, drugs, artistic yearning, worries about the destruction of the planet, the siren song of media, coming-of-age terrors, and taboo smashing.”

I transcribe this list on my first reading through the book. It strikes me as remarkably on the nose, both to my own notion of scourges and muses, and to the free-wheeling motivations of Skelley’s “Jack” as he weaves his way through psychedelic literati Los Angeles, teetering on the borders of madness, anarchy, and genius. One gets the sense there might not be much difference between the three.

At a party in LA, after Jack reads a story of his secret lusts, someone tells him they are going to make him famous in the ‘80s. 

“I nod my head, cover my ears, shriek in terror at the thought of becoming a mass-market phenomenon. That wasn’t my image, that was me. But who am I,” Jack says.

On the plane back from Paris I am Covering My Ears and Shrieking in Terror that we might go down and that my seatmate might perish in front of me, perceived, unbeknownst to him, in his last moments, as a Mass-Market Phenomenon. 

In my handmade index of Fear of Kathy Acker there are only 34 items. In Skelley’s edition, there are 54. Contextualization, it seems, at least outside of the whirlwind universe in which FoKA grounds itself, is useless.

My handmade index notes, lest there is some cultural significance I am missing, a reference to Dada Surrealism: “profound disillusionment with and condemnation of the Western emphasis on logic and reason.” 

“Megan: (Sigh…)”, Skelley’s index clarifies.

Skelley’s index proves far more illuminating.

“Who am I?” narrator-Jack asks, in a chapter titled “Sexy DMV Woman.” “And who are these people I call my friends? Who is Michelle Clinton? Who were the people who surrounded me at Bob Flanagan’s party when I was too stoned on mushrooms?”

The names, as names tend to do, all seem to blur together. The question, as Skelley alludes to in his index, of “who is Megan?” becomes almost rhetorical. 

“Alienation expands into infinity. Game over,” writes Sabrina Tarasoff in her afterword for FoKA.

“As society becomes increasingly depersonalized and as there are less and less baseball players with nicknames, my chance diminishes for real personal rapport,” Narrator-Jack laments.

The turbulence settles on the plane back from Paris. I fall asleep without realizing it and I come to in New York. My seatmates are all standing in the aisles. Everyone’s luggage is black and brown and gray. It seems we made it out alive. There is a renewed anonymity as everyone files off the plane. I recognize no one, by name or association. What a relief.