The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [52]
When other people I knew in grad school read Kathy Acker’s books they were shocked. Appalled. Particularly most of the budding young feminists. I actually began weeding out women friends by their reactions to her books. The ones that smiled and lowered their eyes with sly understanding and touched themselves, I kept. The ones that freaked out, well, they were idiots. Once I read a paragraph from Empire of the Senseless in my theory of gender class and one of the women began to cry and ran out and barfed. No shit. Pussy, I thought.
When I read Kathy Acker’s books, and particularly any section in which fathers sexually molested or raped or dominated or humiliated or shamed or abused daughters, all I went was yes.
I did not feel shocked. I did not feel appalled. I felt … present.
So it did not take me any time at all to understand that what she was deconstructing was the law of the father. Patriarchy and capitalism. More precisely, the effects of patriarchy and capitalism on the bodies of women and girls. Actually, you know what? I just cracked myself up writing this. If you’ve never read Blood and Guts in High School, you are in for a treat. Every year I teach it I expect to be fired.
You can count the books written by women that precisely articulate these themes on one hand; one hand that has four of its fingers shot off with William Burroughs’ pistol.
But underneath that, what she was also writing was literal. A literal father and a literal daughter and the plainspeak necessary to name it. I’d read sections and stop and look around expecting to get caught or smacked a red blotchy one. You can say this shit? And it can be published?
In this way, her books saved me.
So you can imagine how large it was to meet her and hang out with her. Feminae a feminae.
Many many many people “knew” her better than I. I’m friends with lots of them. That’s actually not the story I’m trying to tell. The story I’m trying to tell is quite a bit more ordinary than that. But sometimes ordinary things are staggering.
I swam with her.
When I swam with Kathy Acker it was at a Best Western shrunken indoor pool with too much chlorine. Trust me. I know chlorine. Her swimsuit was black and blue. Mine was dark red. Her body was decorated with tattoos. Her hair was platinum and as short as a freshly mowed lawn. All kinds of sterling silver sprouted from her face and ears. I had one side of my head close shaven, and on the other side I had Breck Girl long blonde hair. We must have looked like a pretty girl’s wound.
How I came to be swimming with Kathy Acker was I invented a Xine in Eugene - that’s what you to do in Eugene - called two girls review. One day when I was drunk and high with my second husband, sitting on the floor of our next to the tracks rental house I said to him, “Let’s bring Kathy Acker down here to read.” And he looked at me all slow eyed and said, “OK .” Things seemed like they could go like that in Eugene.
It’s not what you think to contact people you think of as mega stars. I dialed information. He called. I wrote down what he should say. He said it. And shebazz. I was swimming in a Best Western pool with Kathy fucking Acker.
I know not all of you would do the tinkle dance to hang out with Kathy Acker. In fact, some of you don’t even know who she was. But to me, Kathy Acker was the shit. She was the woman who staged a break-in on culture and gender, on the prison house of language, and blew it up from the inside out. She was the female William Burroughs.
And after we swam, she talked about pussy spanking.
Pussy spanking, for the uninitiated, is not just foreplay. Christ, most of the women I know now have never had the pleasure, but the good ones have.
When we swam in that ghoulishly green colored Best Western pool, we did