Who’s Afraid of ‘Kathy Acker’?

AMERICAN THEATRE: “Everything you can think of is true,” goes a Tom Waits lyric I find equal parts inspiring and chilling. It’s a line I thought of frequently while reading my old friend Jack Skelley’s trippy picaresque Fear of Kathy Acker, a channel-surfing fusillade of sex, self-loathing, and deadpan humor he originally wrote four decades ago, when he was a poet and musician on Los Angeles’s punk and alternative literary scenes.