Creative Writing
Some of Calpernia’s creative writing.
What it’s like to end the night as a showgirl
Dec 12th
Detritus
What it’s like to end the night as a showgirl
- Finish your show
- Drive home buzzed or drunk
- Stumble into your shared home, trying to be quiet even though you’re in a ridiculous outfit, carrying an overfilled purse, a giant bag of costumes, your 4″-6″ heels, the remains of some Jack-n-the-Box drivethru and various other crap
- Unzip and store your silver glitter thigh-high 6″ heel boots.
- Take off eight (8) bracelets. Put them in your jewelry caddy.
- Disentangle giant dangly rhinestone earrings from your long hair and remove them. Put them in your jewelry caddy.
- Take the novelty sunglasses, giant sequined flower, rhinestone clip and miniature novelty top hat out of your hair. Put them in your jewelry caddy.
- Fish around for 8-12 hairpins that are holding your long silky wig or “fall” in place and remove each one, carefully and laboriously. It will be like undoing a puzzle, but with the added joy of pulled hair. Put the pins in a container for reuse.
- Pull off your glued-on eyelashes. Put them carefully in a container for re-use (they’re $6-$12 dollars per pair!)
- Unzip and remove your 26″ waist silver patent leather corset, being careful to catch the resulting shower of tip money, business cards, flyers and anything else you’ve tucked into it during the night.
- Carefully remove your silver sequin panties, taking pains not to catch the tricky and sharp sequins on your flesh-tone fishnets or cut yourself with them.
- Remove your fleshtone fishnet stockings and under-panties, carefully to avoid tearing them, and then store them for later use.
- You’re naked now. Take a deep breath. Observe the interesting way that your legs are imprinted with the fishnet pattern and your torso is lined with an imprint of the corset’s boning. Think about your place in the universe, and what it all “means”. Think about how fat you’ve allowed yourself to get, how old you’re getting. Remember that you “deserve a cupcake when you want one” and “fuck it, you’ve earned the right to be a few pounds overweight”. Still hate yourself for it.
- Un-pin your real hair, brush it (enjoying the sensual feel of running the bristles through to your scalp after a long, hot night of being pinned tightly beneath a wig), and re-pin it up.
- Use some tissue to wipe off your ultra-pigmented red lipstick (topped with red lipgloss and applied over red lipliner). It won’t come off in the shower, you have to do this extra step now.
- Go take a scalding hot shower. Let the water beat against your face, course down your body, warm and soothing. The universe recedes far away and you are a child again. There are no responsibilities, no disappointments. A handful of dishwashing liquid, or Neutragena Facewash, or cold cream is massaged into your face, and the carefully painted mask dissolves into gook that rushes down the drain into oblivion. The person “they” saw on stage is destroyed, gone, washed away. You are yourself again. You begin to think of your bed .
- Lather and wash your entire body. Get rid of all the sweat, makeup, glitter, imprints, cigarette smoke, food smell and fingerprints.
- Towel off and slip into your room. It’s quiet, dark, smells of a scented plug-in, perfume and day-old laundry. You slip in between two perfect, crisp white sheets beneath a snowy white comforter stuffed with soft goose’s down. It feels delicious on your skin.
- Your feet begin to un-knot from a night spent dancing in high heels. Muscles being to uncoil and lengthen, relaxing. You sigh, take a deep breath, close your eyes against the dark room. You wonder how you can ever go on. You dream of beautiful men, anxious scenes with caricatured family members, profound and dark landscapes populated with monsters, angels and mortal souls. The darkness. The quiet. The empty.
I Hate the Bell Witch, But I’m Not Scared of Her
Oct 13th
The Bell Witch House, Photo by : kelly : on Flickr
All the Pretty Little Horses by calpernia
Yesterday I realized that I am not afraid of the Bell Witch any more.
In this month of October, as every year, my thoughts often turn back to the gorgeous Autumns of my Tennessee childhood. Every horizon back home was a fringe of trees, and as the leaves began to turn orange and red and gold, those colors became the peripheral background to our Fall routines: Hog killing at Uncle JC’s farm, hiking with the school Ecology Club, walking the endless fields to find this or that creek to hunt crawdads.
Being someone with an attuned interest in weirdness, the supernatural and folklore, I particularly enjoyed the rare ghost stories told by uncles and grandfathers at our occasional big group suppers, just before we all went into the living room or porch to play Bluegrass gospel together and sip sweet iced tea. (The same family suppers and gettogethers from which I was banned forever somewhere around 1994) There was a story about an enormous rotted log that my Uncle M came upon in the woods one pitch black fall night, the inside hollowed out and dripping with phosphorescent slug-riddled fungus. He told how there seemed to be a sound echoing from inside it, and when he leaned in close he could hear the soft hopeless wailing of little children coming up from somewhere deep underground. My skin prickled and my ears almost popped, it sent such a thrill of horror through my guts. “How terrible, how nightmarish it must have been for those children to be trapped who knows where, under the cold damp earth below that rotting log!” I thought over and over.
But the most horrifying, the most believed story that everyone told in Tennessee was the story of the Bell Witch.
One such haunting is the legend of the so-called “Bell Witch,” a sinister entity that tormented a pioneer family on Tennessee’s early frontier between 1817 and 1821. Unlike the blockbuster films and many other ghost stories, the “Bell Witch” haunting involved real people and is substantiated by eyewitness accounts, affidavits, and manuscripts penned by those who experienced the haunting first hand. This distinction led Dr. Nandor Fodor, a noted researcher and psychologist, to label the Bell Witch legend as “America’s Greatest Ghost Story.”
From the image of a lifeless body hanging from a tree, to the apparition of a pale-faced woman and three children in a field, “Kate” was all-knowing, all-powerful, and the personification of evil. She helped children in danger and nursed John Bell’s wife when she was sick; however, her two missions were to destroy Elizabeth Bell’s engagement and to kill John Bell. She accomplished both. Generations later, many descendants of those who were involved are STILL reluctant to discuss the legend. And even today, unexplainable things happen on and near what was once the Bell farm.
My Autobiography “Mark 947″ in French!
Nov 23rd
1. Au commencement.
J’avais pour habitude de rêver d’un navire noir, échoué au milieu de débris rejetés par la mer déchainée. La pluie, atteignant le sol, m’humidifiait les pieds et les instables surfaces des eaux noires s’ouvraient pour engloutir le reflet d’une lune dégagée. Alors que d’épais nuages fondaient dans les airs et glissaient rapidement vers des fissures rouge√ ¢tres situées entre ciel et mer, les ondulations s’incorporaient aux flaques couleur acier qui se rétrécissaient àmes pieds, déformant les créatures du dessous, isolées et contorsionnées par la mort. J’avais été laissé en retrait, avec ce navire. Il était sombre et l’eau de mer infiltrée l’avait fait pourrir. ¬ ´ Je ne suis pas censé être ici, ¬ ª dis-je au ciel, mais je n’eus aucune réponse. Il était facile de s’allonger, érodé par l’exhalaison des vagues et les doigts du vent àla fois doux et déchirants sur mon dos. Il n’y avait personne ici. Aucune volonté. Aucun mal
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My Autobiography "Mark 947" in French!
Nov 23rd
1. Au commencement.
J’avais pour habitude de r√™ver d’un navire noir, échoué au milieu de débris rejetés par la mer déchainée. La pluie, atteignant le sol, m’humidifiait les pieds et les instables surfaces des eaux noires s’ouvraient pour engloutir le reflet d’une lune dégagée. Alors que d’épais nuages fondaient dans les airs et glissaient rapidement vers des fissures rouge√¢tres situées entre ciel et mer, les ondulations s’incorporaient aux flaques couleur acier qui se rétrécissaient √† mes pieds, déformant les créatures du dessous, isolées et contorsionnées par la mort. J’avais été laissé en retrait, avec ce navire. Il était sombre et l’eau de mer infiltrée l’avait fait pourrir. ¬´ Je ne suis pas censé √™tre ici, ¬ª dis-je au ciel, mais je n’eus aucune réponse. Il était facile de s’allonger, érodé par l’exhalaison des vagues et les doigts du vent √† la fois doux et déchirants sur mon dos. Il n’y avait personne ici. Aucune volonté. Aucun mal
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Calpernia’s Autobiography Now Available for Download!
Sep 30th
Hey kids, I don’t send out bulletins like this often, but things are tight these days and so I decided to start putting my autobiography out there in downloadable PDF format. You can read about it on my site HERE or even download a copy for five smackers here.
In any case, all my best and thank you for all the support! =)
Calpernia
Mark 947 chronicles one woman’s progress from spirit to flesh, a literal transubstantiation by force of will. Raised as a boy by loving but religious parents in the rural heartland of Tennessee, Calpernia Addams found her way on an unlighted path from forbidden dreams to fulfillment as a scholar, showgirl and eventually, as a woman.
Sultry stage siren by night, intellectual chameleon by day, she worked her way to the top of Nashville’s underground entertainment scene without ever succumbing to drugs, alcohol or bitterness, and through it all never lost her heart. When love walked into her new life in the form of a handsome young Army private, it seemed everything had at last come together. Then at the pinnacle of her career, as she was crowned Tennessee Entertainer of the Year in front of hundreds of adoring fans, her love was murdered in his sleep sixty miles away by bigoted fellow soldiers, sparking a national controversy that resonates still.
Whether ablaze in the dazzle of the spotlight or haunting the woods of Tennessee in flannel and pigtails, Calpernia lives her life with the humor and spirit of a woman who can face anything and still move forward with hope intact.
Mark 9:47
43 And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched:
44 Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.
45 And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched:
46 Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.
47 And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire:
48 Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.
- The Bible, King James Version
