Next year will be the twentieth anniversary of San Diego City Works Press. In the lead-up to this and the publication of Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (in 2025), The Jumping-Off Place will be featuring some of the highlights from City Works Press’s many publications.
The following text, “One or Two Things I Know About Kathy Acker” by Mel Freilicher was published in Sunshine/Noir: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (2005), City Works Press’s inaugural anthology.
By Mel Freilicher
On the eve of her death in a Tijuana cancer clinic, her publisher Ira Silverberg, editor-in-chief at Grove Press, called again, this time trying to locate Kathy’s illegitimate twins: he had been told about them by Kathy’s cousin, Pooh Kaye, the dancer. Elly Antin answered the phone. After initial incredulity, she kind of thought she remembered hearing something about one of them. (Much of Elly’s rich artistic life has entailed creating dazzling and durable superstructures for her own deepest fantasy personae.) One twin? I had known Kathy since we were college freshmen together, and I could assure them both that no such offspring existed. Several days later, Kathy’s second husband, Peter Gordon, the composer, e-mailed a mutual friend inquiring into the whereabouts of said twins, having also talked to Pooh Kaye. Kathy and Peter had lived together for seven years in the ‘70s, on both coasts (they married a month before splitting up): the twins allegedly originated prior to their meeting.
I find it remarkable that these individuals, who knew Kathy intimately at various points in the ‘70s, and some afterwards, should grant even momentary credibility to this tale of the twins. The willingness to suspend disbelief, on the part of people who undoubtedly have a healthy dose of skepticism regarding virtually all other matters, can be seen as a tribute to the urgency of what Kathy represented to all of us. That is, expansive and transformative possibilities, and the primacy of imagination, or the malleability of reality in its mighty wake. (Twins have a definite resonance, being connected to Dionysius and the dual nature of the Roman god Mercurius, a key figure for alchemists. Pindar wrote about twins living one day in the underworld and one in the world above.)
I don’t intend to analyze these individuals here, but their reactions seem to speak to complex emotional states at Kathy’s death, including an uncharacteristic gullibility, and desire to perpetuate her legendary status as well as a living connection with her. I myself managed to refrain from embellishing the rumor, though I toyed with the idea of claiming paternity for the late Herbert Marcuse, eminent Marxist philosopher: the original rumor came replete with nameless professor lover/twin progenitor. Kathy had first moved to San Diego in 1966, after her sophomore year, when she married Bob Acker (an epic in itself, in which Acker was at the apex of a torrid triangle); Acker, more a self-styled nihilist than leftist, followed Marcuse from Brandeis to grad school at UCSD.
In some senses, the rumor could appear credible: Kathy was widely experienced, extremely sophisticated, very mobile, and later highly influential in numerous international arts and community circles. And utterly uncompromising. Kathy’s life and work were a piece in the absolute rigor with which they opposed smothering and authoritarian conventions and platitudinous, bourgeois morality. As the press release for her L.A. memorial at Beyond Baroque so correctly stated:
A ferocious, brilliant, and groundbreaking artist reflecting and assaulting post-innocence America...Acker was a visionary in the traditions of Rimbaud and Burroughs, dedicated to the possibilities of a revolutionary writing that rages against every authority, fiction, and creed, then keeps on going.
Kathy’s writings are deeply involved with embracing others’ experiences, while rendering and recontextualizing her own within “appropriated” worlds of cultural carnage, and also of a gloriously sustaining literary heritage. (She disliked the term “appropriation”: “I just do what gives me most pleasure: write. As the Gnostics put it, when two people fuck, the whole world fucks.”) Kathy’s carefully constructed public image often seemed wrong: deceptively egocentric, way too one-dimensional. That was largely due to forces outside her control, such as the otherwise excellent publication RE/SEARCH’s ridiculous Angry Women issue. (As if 95% of the world’s population isn’t in a rage, or wouldn’t be if they weren’t too exhausted and heavily narcoticized.)
Those who were only familiar with the neo-punk or neo-primitive images—who usually hadn’t read any of her books—tended to be astonished at Kathy’s delicate and well-bred, drawing room manners, and formidable conversational skills. These coexisted with many salient qualities, including wildness (à la Wuthering Heights); solipsism; a lifetime of thrilling, avaricious reading and passionate intellectual pursuits; obsessive and masochistic tendencies, which unfortunately could not always be confined to the sexual realm, where they afforded her vast pleasure.
Certainly, dramatically varied life experiences were integral to Kathy’s rough evolution from Sutton Place to declassé Bohemian, in which she plays a heroine straight out of the deepest novelistic traditions of Moll Flanders, Vanity Fair, and preeminently, the Brontës. After her marriage to Acker, Kathy basically had no contact with her family—before that, they had sent her to the finest (and Waspiest) New York private girls’ schools and otherwise ignored her—till many years later when she inherited a good deal of money from her grandmother. This era included multiple abortions, visits to “free clinics” (along with occasional futile phone requests to her mother for money to go to a doctor), and way too many prolonged, painful outbreaks of Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, requiring much bed rest—one direct link to Kathy’s subsequent love of bodybuilding and motorcycle riding.
Speaking of the legend, her employment then was largely in the wacky world of “adult entertainment.” In San Diego, she rather happily worked as a stripper in several downtown joints and elsewhere (a van took them on a nightly circuit). Most of the people we knew who were out of grad school (Kathy lasted about five minutes in that stultifying atmosphere) had unenviably hideous jobs like room service waiter or editing slick and bogus textbooks for CRM, publisher of Psychology Today ad nauseum. Kathy, aka “Target,” would do an interpretative strip to “Ché,” by Ornette Coleman I believe, after carefully explaining to the audience of mostly sailors who Ché was and why he was so venerable. (In this period she was writing under the noms de plume of RIP-OFF RED, GIRL DETECTIVE and THE BLACK TARANTULA: when she moved to San Francisco, most new friends called her “TBT.”) Earlier, in New York, Kathy had made some porn films and worked for a while in a “live sex show” (i.e. simulated) in Times Square. This gig consisted of composing then acting out skits with her live-in lover Lenny, such as the perennially popular, dastardly therapist/ingenue patient. But when Kathy was driven into a hellish state of unbearable nightmares about leering men, she promptly quit.
It wasn’t only the slippery economic slope which suggested a literary cast to Kathy’s existence: many events were truly larger than life. Most catastrophic was her mother’s Christmas Eve suicide: found dead of an overdose in a posh midtown hotel, after disappearing for days. The suicide greatly increased Kathy’s considerable paranoia, and not just for obvious reasons. Prior to it, Kathy had been hopeful about slightly better relations with her mother. They had achieved a recent rapprochement based on the odd circumstance of her mother suddenly becoming an habitué of Studio 54 and even running in circles where Kathy’s “underground” literary reputation had some cachet. (Then, it was assumed her mother’s suicide was due to finances; now, of course, it’s impossible not to wonder about health problems.) Kathy never learned her biological father’s name. The utter distance from her stepfather seemed to reflect her mother’s feelings. Kathy was once approached by a distinguished looking gentleman who claimed that she was a member of the prominent New York Lehman family. (Kathy was also related to the German-Jewish Ochs dynasty that owns the New York Times.)
Clearly, it’s not easy to live out a myth, as children of the famous can testify. Many among their most unique and accomplished ranks work diligently to minimize the “destiny” quotient by keeping away from, or sharply subdividing their social and intellectual terrains from that of their parents. (Similarly, several political refugees I know with truly epic lives are resolute about normalizing daily routines, de-emphasizing and de-romanticizing their own pasts.) In her work, Kathy was brilliantly in control of that mythmaking tendency. In an essay published in 1989 in Review of Contemporary Fiction, she discusses the current “post-cynical” phase, in which “there’s no more need to deconstruct, to take apart perceptual habits, to reveal the frauds on which our society’s living. We now have to find somewhere to go, a belief . . ..” She writes about her recently completed book, Empire of the Senseless:
After having traveled through innumerable texts, written texts, texts of stories which people had told or shown me, texts found in myself, Empire ended with the hints of a possibility or beginning: the body, the actual flesh, almost wordless, romance, the beginning of a movement from no to yes, from nihilism to myth.
To me, it’s an open question as to how confused Kathy herself was regarding being mythological Kathy, and how damaged by it. Her reputation as occasional diva (to the max) was well deserved. But that chiefly operated in a self-destructive manner, with friends, rather than in customary obnoxious ways: she was a revered teacher, for instance, and a courteous and personable customer. I see these issues as aligned with Kathy’s contempt for therapy (and deep terror of mind control), which of course didn’t prevent an exhaustive reading of Freud and Lacan—she must have been one of three or four individuals from Brandeis in the ‘60s who never went to a shrink! All of this speaks to the poignant questions (way beyond my scope here) of why Kathy made the apparently irrational decision to not have radiation following her mastectomy. And why, at that time, she had recourse to virtually nobody with whom to discuss these decisions rationally.
As to my personal history with Kathy, that would take volumes. We were freshmen together at Brandeis, in the (itself mythic) generation of ‘68. Only nodding acquaintances there, we had several close mutual friends in overlapping cliques of “hip” students (at least a third of the school). At an institution with sharp, highly eccentric, original (and image-conscious) students, Kathy Alexander stood out from the start. (Supposedly, the Ackers were represented in Michael Weller’s popular play, Moonchildren, but we could never identify them.) One of a handful of classics majors at Brandeis, it was well-known that she entered proficient in Greek and Latin (which was astonishing to me, coming from the shitty public schools of Yonkers). Kathy seemed to live in the library, to study constantly, to devour books. Deeply intellectual, her look was vulnerable, pouty, “experienced” and sexy, somewhat androgynous.
Kathy was involved with the very coolest upperclassmen, including several in Acker’s crowd who’d been in the big pot bust. The administration told them to leave for a year and seek therapy (no doubt soul-searching was also recommended). On their return, they were required to live in the dorms—that’s how I came to have a rapport with Acker, who was on my floor his junior year. Kathy was quite influential with the women in our class. Working independently, she and I were chief architects of Debby Anker’s gala weekend (Debby now runs the human rights clinic at Harvard Law School) of losing her virginity—with a lanky, handsome (booted and side-burned) upperclassman who drove a motorcycle and played guitar. (I had somewhat of a crush on him: I was posing as “bi” then, which was chic, though being gay was still beyond the pale.) There was the memorable occasion when Kathy half-heartedly slit her wrists. Two other women on the floor immediately followed suit. The resident advisor (who later was rumored to have joined the Weather underground) rushed into her room and insisted that Kathy stop immediately—otherwise, the whole dorm would be imitating her!
Kathy and I became close almost immediately in 1968, when I migrated from Brandeis to grad school at UCSD. Caravanning out here with friends, including her freshman roommate, Tamar Diesendruck (a painter who became a composer and won the Prix de Rome), four of us crashed on the Ackers’ floor until we found a place to rent. Similar to students in Cambridge and environs, they were living in a spacious, old Victorian house with wood floors. Except to find that in So-Cal, they had to travel to an old section near downtown—and to afford it, they lived directly under the flight path at Lindbergh Field. That was over 15 miles away from the campus, which like UC Santa Cruz, was designed during the years of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, for maximum distance from the city. They hitched to school (Kathy never did learn to drive a car).
Although by no means identifying as a “hippie,” Kathy baked bread, and sewed her own clothes (a contrast to Brandeis where she shoplifted them from Design Research): perhaps an easier task than it appeared, since she wore the world’s shortest skirts. Acker paced constantly. They played Chess and GO; we all played cards. (I remember a prolonged Bridge game on the floor with Kathy, at an anti-military research sit-in.) Acker was quite impulse-ridden. The “Passover seder” they invited us to that first year consisted chiefly of him tying Tamar to a chair, which he sort of danced around maniacally, till Kathy, who usually appreciated Acker’s less aggressive antics, made him desist. (I understand that he’s now a corporate lawyer.)
Primarily, then as always, Kathy was reading and writing. Working in virtual isolation, she was the first peer I knew well to take herself seriously as a writer. Our few models here were from an older generation, particularly UCSD Music professor Pauline Oliveros, and David Antin, critic and poet in Visual Arts. Kathy fervently “apprenticed” herself (as she said) to David, auditing all of his classes. I followed, and we became fast friends with David and Eleanor, taking turns babysitting for their son, Blaise. Both disgruntled with school, we had a Swift seminar together, where we annoyed everyone by incessantly passing notes and giggling. Highlights of our cultural life were the midnight, underground films at a theater way out in East San Diego (which soon turned to porn) that, amazingly, showed the likes of Brakhage and Kuchar, and the Anomaly Factory, a water tower on campus which a group of undergrads converted into an innovative, computerized, hi-tech, theater-lab.
It was absolutely invaluable to witness Kathy’s discipline and comprehensive structuring of her time for reading and writing, as well as self-confident experimentation and professional attitude about getting the work out. Although UCSD was new and in many ways vital (for a university), it was, and still is, all too easy for people in San Diego to behave as if they’re on permanent vacation: many would-be dilettantes. Of course, what Kathy was writing about also became crucial to me, not to mention to post-modern thought—human identity, and how to get rid of (and/or retrieve) it! (Maybe the twins would heroically attempt both!)
Although we were the same age, Kathy always felt that she was a member of the younger generation of punks. (For one thing, she was considerably less seduced by psychedelic drugs, despite occasional coke or opium binges in the old days.) We shared a deep mistrust of Utopian thinking: her chief complaint against “hippies.” I was more concerned with its pernicious effects on Marxist ideology of “scientific” history and a Central Committee somehow spawning a classless society. An activist during Vietnam, afterwards I worked mostly with artists coalitions and organizations staging multi-media shows downtown (and attacking local “poverty program pimps” cum FBI agents). For 15 years, I also published CRAWL OUT YOUR WINDOW, a regional San Diego arts/literary magazine. (One pole of my Brandeis identity had been participating in many civil rights sit-ins, and anti-war marches. A member of CORE in high school, the summer after I graduated, I grew a beard in order to have my freshman image in place for the fall.)
Kathy was extremely supportive of such organizing activities. Certainly she shared the central axioms of our time concerning the pure and incorruptible evil of post-monopoly capitalism, and all governments which serve it—which is tantamount to saying that she breathed the same oxygen as the rest of us. Traveling frequently, wherever she went—Seattle, Minneapolis, East Berlin—Kathy investigated local scenes, meeting people running presses, alternative media, food coops, independent music labels, squatters rights organizations. Our ongoing dialog on “alternative” cultures lasted a lifetime.
It’s impossible to detail Kathy’s significance to me. During my 20's, I was pretty much bicoastal, spending part of each year in New York. She introduced me to many artists and composers there; some became boyfriends or hot sex. We both kind of avoided other writers, but were close to Jackson MacLow and Bernadette Mayer; Kathy used to take me over to Ted Berrigan’s, I’d bring her to Ashbery’s. She turned me on to writers way before anyone was discussing them, especially Bruno Schulz and Elias Canetti. So many stellar individual events, like our wonderful Christmas Eve dinner at (the mobbed) Second Avenue Deli. Afterwards, getting drunk at the Astor Hotel bar, where we composed telegrams to various men whom she wanted to entice and/or tell off; I’d go to the pay phone and send them. (We also wrote telegrams to the Antins and others, requesting that they adopt us and be our family; those we didn’t send.)
In terms of a sibling relationship, I was able to help Kathy in some concrete ways, in her numerous moves from city to city and coast to coast, or when she ran out of money to self-publish. As with all of Kathy’s close friends, many of our longest and most hilarious conversations over the years took place late at night, when she called in great pain over a boyfriend situation. She would describe what had transpired in vivid and obsessive detail. We’d laughingly envision remedial scenes, improvise dialogs and various types of merry retribution.
There’s no simple way to describe, let alone deal with the palpability of absence, which appears to be our chief Millennial legacy. Basically, for me, the short of it is this: life seems inconceivable without Kathy to properly narrate it. It seems, too, that it will always feel that way.
*** Freilicher reminds us that since this was written an excellent biography of Kathy has been published by Simon & Schuster by Jason McBride, Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker (2023).
Mel Freilicher retired from some 4 decades of teaching in UCSD's Lit. Dept./ writing program. He was publisher and co-editor of Crawl Out Your Window magazine (1974-89), a journal of the experimental literature and visual arts of the San Diego/Tijuana region. He's been writing for quite some time. He is the author of The Unmaking of Americans: 7 Lives, Encyclopedia of Rebels, and American Cream, all on San Diego City Works Press.