Too Much Shit in Empire City

Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective is one of Kathy Acker’s very first novels, “a pornographic mystery” set in New York City of the early 1970s. Unlikely ever to have succeeded as pulp fiction, Acker’s unsaleable thriller nonetheless kickstarts one of the best runs in American letters; shot through with fragments of other early masterpieces and anticipating the author’s many modes and obsessions. Outside of its chronological significance, Rip-Off Red reads salaciously in its broader context—as a proto-punk instalment in a 1970s resurgence of noir sensibility, and part of a multi-perspectival portrait of New York from its bad side, just in time for the city’s insolvency.

Acker’s titular detective bears no small resemblance to her author, and in a breathless opening paragraph, Rip-Off Red describes her life prior to intrigue after Acker’s own precocious bildung:

I’m five foot three inches brown hair curling all over my face, bright green eyes, I’m 26 but my body’s tough from dancing if you know what I mean—well I got bored doing a strip, well first, I got bored doing that Ph.D. shit and being frustrated professors’ straight-A pet, especially being faithful to a husband who spent all his time in bed dealing out poker hands; I left school, descended to the more interesting depths and became a stripper, even that finally bored me, so I decided, on my 26th birthday, to become the toughest detective alive.

On that note, Red and her lover—maybe brother—Peter Peter, head to New York City to open shop. The couple’s first case begins as soon as they board the plane. After a mid-air hookup, the stranger across the aisle spills her guts to Red. Her name is Sally Spitz, and she is in urgent need of a detective. Every night at 10pm, Sally explains, her father goes missing for hours. All of their family’s money is disappearing by way of strange cheques that he has only apparently signed; her mother is worried sick, and dad, a special envoy at the United Nations and the owner of a lucrative diamond mine in apartheid South Africa, claims to remember nothing.

Red takes the case, presumed a cinch, and makes plans to continue a fling with her client on arrival. Not a day later, however, Red notices a commotion on Second Avenue and 57th Street; a woman has been murdered. Pushing through the crowd, Red recognizes her lover from the plane—“dame by the name of Sally Spitz,” killed across the street from her family apartment. Red is sickened, shocked into a fleeting profession of monogamy: “I’m never going to kiss anyone again. From now on my life’s devoted to the logical inductive and deductive search for all criminals. I swear to dedicate my life to solving the mystery of Spitz’s father, to avenging Spitz, and to avenging my murdered love for Spitz. I’ll only make love with Peter Peter.” This conviction, naturally, is short-lived.

Red’s disposition toward her surroundings is nymphomaniacal; and the novel’s terse, first-person account of a detective’s descent is constantly interrupted by a lurid, lyric stream of pornographic detail as Red manages to bed every even remotely suspicious or implicated person that she meets. In Acker’s novel, sex is handshake, sex is interrogation, sex is language, sex is money. Every brusque exchange composing the many illicit and social economies of the noir city becomes sex, in which respect Red is detective and gigolo at once—two noir tropes compounded, where Red’s desire appears to drive the very distress that she investigates.

In the chapters to follow, Red infiltrates an after-hours club frequented by her quarry, the elusive Mr. Spitz, run by one of the many secret societies that compose a shadow U.N.—an implied network of neo-colonial brokerages and criminal fraternities. Spitz is not all that he seems, as Red soon discovers, and his nighttime forays are far less forgetful than his wife and former daughter had presumed. Here Red enters the hidden abode of politics, just so many backrooms and parlours, private chambers and members-only scenes of secretive influence. In Acker’s version, however, the debauched civic leaders and staple villains of noir are condensed into the figure of a literal father, whose political favours exchange within a system of sexual tribute—a version of the proto-capitalist dynamic that Freud mythologizes as a “patriarchal horde,” or power over a given society’s sexual prospects.

Red attempts to dispatch this paternal power lay by lay, flouting the incest prohibition and moving on the kingpin’s men, and daughters, one by one. In an underworld where sex is tacit currency, Red spends favour without reserve—and Acker’s paternal figuration of political power actually commends pornography to her demonstrative purposes. Most of Acker’s books depict some version of this father-horde dynamic, where sexual transgression tends to redistributive, revelatory extremes; but Rip-Off Red … is one of her most stridently political attempts to attribute the obscene power of the patriarch within American society. At the outset of a long digression on the nuclear family, Red drifts into communist reverie: “I have a dream. A world of delight birds sing to a real sun in a real city no one leaves out anybody. Everyone does what he she wants. A materialist revolution is happening; whatever you have you get more.”

Even beyond the frequently obtrusive bursts of fucking, Rip-Off Red … is deceptively multi-layered. In undifferentiated prose, the details of Red’s investigation blur a lucid dreamwork—a visionary plane of retreat, or meta-text continuous of life’s abiding menace. In the second of four sections, Red tells the story of her childhood—Oedipal drama sharpened to a Sadean prod. This seamless movement between past and present, conscious and unconscious, doubles the typical noir depiction of interpenetrating, and yet structurally separate, worlds or socio-economic strata. To noir plotting—which spans and transgresses the boundaries of economic and vernacular zones, binding modes of perception to a corresponding class interest—Acker adds another underbelly, one of impeded and repressed experience, such that each detail of the case at hand assumes a double signification.

After this doubling, Red’s own origin story merges her quest to avenge the memory of Sally Spitz—a contingent apparition whose structural sisterliness grants Red permission to seek out the primal, Blofeldian father, Mr. Spitz, as an aspect of her own upbringing. The trope of the murdered client enacts a simple substitution—the detective, insofar as her task is now a vendetta, assumes the sacred placement of the victim herself—and when Red is escorted into Spitz’s lair for a climactic disquisition, she is welcomed as family. “Do you want to join me,” Spitz entreats: “do you want to live with me?”

This headily Oedipal rewriting of the standard thriller and its tell-all denouement is fascinating in a larger context, where Acker portrays the secret societies of genre convention in a literally incestuous light. Noir typically conceives of capitalist society on the order of simple conspiracy, where covert agencies horde power and swap favour to the disadvantage of all but a familial elite—such portrayals are a likely response to the pace of cartelization, and sometimes borne out at a municipal level. But Acker’s incestuous detective story extrapolates an obscene, pornographic permission from this alleged intimacy of influence, appearing to literalize these preferential arrangements after the fashion of an archaic family firm. Ironically, Acker’s family romance appears as so many ethnocultural and regional monopolies are actually losing influence—and her elegy to the father’s waning power seems to recognize as much in its facetious chivalry and ultimate refusal to conspire.

For all of these reasons, Rip-Off Red … reads provocatively today, amid a host of new moral panics corresponding to those periods of intensified wealth transfer that accompany a reactionary flight to the family and its few amenities. Acker’s mock-conspiratorial depiction of backroom “globalists” manipulating public life grafts onto any number of falsely persuasive right-wing tropes in the present, as Red’s attempts to disperse the nuclear family by sheer wantonness perform just as transgressively before a new Cold War Moral Majority.

Difficult as it is to adapt Acker’s extremity to strictures of contemporary taste, her vision may be coming into style again, for all the most upsetting reasons; where the right-wing of the American ruling class courts neo-feudal familialism during a crisis that the centre proposes to manage by authoritarian politesse and market graces. In this respect, Rip-Off Red … is far more than a time capsule or curio—written in 1973 and published in the early twenty-first century, the novel seems to herald the domestic ravages of neoliberal globalization, years in advance.

As notably, Rip-Off Red … sheds its genre by the end, becoming a kind of oblique Künstlerroman. Red declines Spitz’s offer to join his conspiracy, and the rushed finish liquidates the narrator’s identity altogether:

I want to keep having adventures, I want to be a hermit; work like mad for six months, for one month break loose: fuck like mad, find out everything. I’m not especially interested in being happy. I live on almost zilch money.

I’m not longer a detective. I’ll decide to become someone else.

Red’s retirement is Acker’s birth as a writer, as biographer Jason McBride explains: inside of several months, Rip-Off Red will become the Black Tarantula, leaving the rest to history. And yet, in spite of Acker’s flight from this experiment, the themes and zones of Rip-Off Red … reappear constantly throughout her work, with the insistence of a plot from which we can’t awake: the dream of someone else’s city; buildings we’d like to explode.

Playlist:

For the uninitiated, I host a weekly radio show on 101.5 UMFM, based on Treaty 1 territory, where I play more or less whatever catches my ear. Yesterday night featured an hour of harsh noise from some of the best in the game—ear-saturating, molten bliss.

Listen online or explore the archive at umfm.com:

RADIO STATE JULY 17 2023:

Like Weeds - Until There Is Nothing Left

Fossa Magna - Contractual Punishment

Form Hunter - Partisan Temptation

Knurl - PFVP4