Pussycat Janks

Justine Chase searches through the online musician listings hoping to strike gold. Against daunting odds, she hopes to find needles in a haystack in the form of instrumentalists who don’t have slacker-artist issues. She fantasizes about being the lead singer for a country-punk band.

Although she's a first-year student in the MFA program at Long Beach State, her performance has thus far been lackluster. Thirty-five years old, Justine had an adventurous four years at UC Berkeley. She graduated from the English department with highest honors. The crown of her academic career was writing a thesis analyzing the science fiction of Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin. The thesis was published in article form in a student journal, but upon hearing the news, her distant father was unnecessarily harsh, as he frequently is with his daughter. He’s always considered her too brainy and refined to have been born from bona fide blue-collar rough-and-tumble immigrant stock.   

As a result of having spent three nights on a psychiatric ward at Oakland’s Highland Hospital, Justine believed she'd have more to write about than the bulk of students in the creative writing program who are in their early twenties and whose literary discernment she opines isn’t quite as traditional as hers.   

She thinks venturing into music will give her some lived experiences allowing her to overcome her writer’s block. In her wildest dreams, the experience will blossom into an indie music star’s life.

After scrolling down the screen, finding no good leads, but seeing ads soliciting members for chintzy tribute bands, among them No Doubt and The Offspring, she decides to place her own ad. Looking for musical artists with whom to make the youth croon country tunes and dosey-doh in the mosh pit (queer friendly, no substance-use).

Four days after she posts the ad, her phone rings. It’s an unidentified caller from Costa Mesa, a city neighboring the one Justine lives in with Mother Marbles, who is hoping her daughter finds some wholesome friends that’ll bring her out of the shell of depression in which she's ensconced.

“Greetings,” Justine says.

“Did you place an ad on Craigslist?” the caller asks.

“Yeah,” Justine says, hoping she has found a collaborator with whom she can musically enchant youth whose souls have been corrupted by the cookie cutter pop-punk and trap beats that incessantly stream out of phones, computers and tablets.  

“I play lead guitar, love classic country, don’t use drugs or drink booze, and my 12-year-old son is gender questioning,” the caller says.

“I sing, play rhythm and am in a predicament similar to your son's,” Justine says, confident she has found the right person to share her vision of a country-punk reformation of America. Justine hears her dog Nino make a snoring sound in the background, which she interprets to be a confirmation of her optimistic thought.

“Sounds great. We can get together this weekend to try things out. My name’s Jonathan,”

“My name’s Justine.”

“I’ll text you my address,” says Jonathan.

Justine hangs up, elated, tells Marbles about her good fortune, and, addressing her dog says, “The future’s looking up, Nino.”

*

On Sunday afternoon, after trying to immerse herself in a fiction writing exercise that devolves into expository futility, she deletes the untitled document, and has Marbles drive her to Jonathan’s place.

Late model electric vehicles sit in the driveway. As she rings the door bell, Justine hopes she has found someone with whom to share a musical odyssey. She hears dogs bark from within the tastefully designed and meticulously maintained house. 

A trim, bespectacled and handsome man answers the door. He has a tribal tattoo on his right arm. The tattoo is partially concealed by the sleeve of a Johnny Cash t-shirt. He looks to be in his mid-forties, and, after introducing Justine to his son, he guides her into a spare room he has converted into a music practice studio, complete with a voice amplification system and digital recording equipment

Chatting as they tune their guitars, Jonathan tells Justine he has been an accountant for twenty years and would love to have a side gig as a semi-serious musician.

“I know how to play plenty of covers, but do you have any original material?” he says.

“I’ve got a couple of songs I’ve written,” Justine says.

“Let’s hear one.”

“I never play them for anyone besides my mum.”

“Try me,” he says.

Placing her capo on the first fret of her guitar, she begins to play a rhythm pattern on an E chord, alternating between bass notes and the strum of high strings. 

She starts to sing some lyrics she wrote during her second 5150 hold, the one where she got put into restraints after standing up for a boy who had cut on himself and was being mistreated by one of the orderlies.

Abused by the authorities for wanting to be real /

She remembers being introduced to Taoism by one of her college friends, and thinking that there was no religious sign that more compellingly emblemized divinity than the Yin/Yang symbol. After reading Le Guin's translation of the Tao Te Ching she surmised that if there is a divine being, it must also be both masculine and feminine and embody both vice and virtue. She thinks of how most trap music glamorizes life in the inner city and how thankful she is for not being born into circumstances that would make selling drugs, sex trafficking, homicide, or theft possible lifestyle choices.

I thank Great Tao I’ve never been forced to push, pimp, murk, or steal /

She thinks of the disdain she has for militant firearm ownership advocates and for the celebration of ritualized alcohol consumption across so many parts of the world.

No shotgun pick-up parties, no getting crazy drunk /

She thinks of the indulgent lifestyle she had during college, and how it’s partially to blame for many of her present woes.

No coke or meth snorting, cigarette smoking, hits of chronic for country punks /

She strums a B7 chord that creates a tension that calls for resolution, and belts out the one-line chorus to her anthem,

To Great Tao I give thanks, the name’s Pussycat Janks!

Jonathan’s dogs emit howling barks after she plays the twangy outro. Her nerves subside and things seem a little less hostile than they did earlier when her imagination was hampered by the weary weight of the world.