The Ill-Advised Adventures
of Jim-Jam O’Neily

by Channie Greenberg

Table of Contents

Chapter Seven: Confabulations and Covariates

Not too many days later, Jim-Jam and a certain international environmental watchdog organization, which couldn’t make use, licitly or not, out of all of the impounded wildlife in its care, negotiated a contract. Essentially, Jim-Jam became one of the organization’s go-betweens.

In return for filming boats engaged in the sort of purse seine fishing that pressured native fish populations and that failed to return non-indicator species to the sea, Captain Jim-Jam Al Bartholomew Triassic — “Captain Albatross” to his friends — skipper of the trawler Picot, would receive a metric ton of “secondary gleanings” monthly. If Captain Albatross hadn’t surfaced, the ecological organization would have had to continue to leave their “extras” for scavenging birds.

Henceforth, truckloads of marine waste got utilized and the ecological society’s efforts steered them closer to their publicly stated mission. Although a week would elapse before the agency’s next boat could set anchor, and the organization, as a whole, could clinch its affiliation with Captain Albatross, the watchdog group arranged to immediately leave him a ravaged Bluefin tuna carcass at Dock 36.

Although the dock in question was several hundred miles east of Jim-Jam’s home, the Master of Chthonian Planets and Delver into Dwarf Galaxies, i.e. the kid that owed the local 4H gang much compensation for the passels of rabbits and of chickens that had already been eaten by his Komodo hatchlings, arranged to swap, for roundtrip transportation for all of his incoming seafood, half of his portion. Whereas country-bred birds and bunnies ate fish only if it was mixed with meal, rural piggies ate everything. Gas was a tiny cost for wannabe agronomists who were set to receive literal tons of feed. They forgave Jim-Jam his debt.

To obtain footage of fishing gone bad, Jim-Jam bartered with the mates of the work tourism yachts Thar She Blows and Where-Away. In exchange for the automatic, underwater camcorders, with which Captain Albatross gifted them, having obtained them for cheap on Alibaba, those mariners were giving the captain a free sea vacation (which he planned to use for his mother) and as many JPEG files of purse-seining as he wanted.

Those crews’ boats, which floated, respectively, on the Philippine Sea, and on the Sea of Japan, took on deckhands, stewards, cooks, and folks talented at fiddling with engines, allegedly to supply those persons with team building events, rope expertise, fishing proficiencies, and the like. Those fiduciarily fit visitors, landlubbers who had signed up for “high-sea adventure vacations,” on top of that, swabbed decks, peeled onions, and gleamed brass, leaving the hired crews with little more to do than to sooth sunburns, to tend to guests’ diarrhea, and to sort pretty shells. Understandably, those boatmen welcomed diversions. To them, making movies for remuneration was a double win.

Jim-Jam’s pal from The Maharishi University of Management’s Department of Sustainable Living had “introduced” Mr. Make-It-or-Break-It-That-Will-be-Fifty-Dollars-an-Hour-to-You-Mister to those crews when those sailors had been confounded as to how to explain to their two-legged profit pots why their ships, which needed to use motors during flat sea states had been advertised as “environmentally friendly.” The seadogs had contacted the transcendental master as, inherently, they, too, were International Meditation Society equals. That educator had, eventually, connected them to Jim-Jam Ariel O’Neily since he was too busy with his tenure appeal to share mantras or cost-benefit analyses.

Without hesitation, the young “expert” had offered the Jack-tars linguistic legerdemain, in the form of specifics about auxiliary engines preventing localized pollution, and in the form of specifics about auxiliary engines allowing sea going vessels to haul perishable cargo. Those reiterated words, in turn, had been sufficiently persuasive as to cause the people, who paid to volunteer as crew, to sign on for subsequent voyages.

* * *

Jim-Jam stitched three guinea fowl quills to the back of his handiwork. He still hadn’t circulated his paper on quantum tunneling during magnetization, found a method to speed up the growth of the high school’s lone arbutus tree, or worked out how to insure that Lynnie Lola and Doris, simultaneously, would become Pumpkin Queens.

The next morning, though, the Keeper of Komodos skipped almost all of the way to Raymond Charles. Overnight, he had invented a fascinator out of toilet paper tubes, had evaluated the relative protein content of Bluefin roe and milt, and had found a way to cause two royals to ascend, in tandem, to the harvest throne. All that was missing in his universe was for his paper on topological quantum phase interference in magnetic molecular clusters to be accepted by a reputable journal.

So elated was Jim-Jam O’Neily that he even smiled during social studies class despite the truth that Atkins had been replaced by an even sterner man, Mr. Weaver. Mr. Atkins was elsewise occupied, bade by his warden to write an apology to Billy Lou Giskin. Law enforcers, after all, ought not to be lenient with people who tried to filch poultry.

The police, however, had been disinterested in Jim-Jam O’Neily stopovers with that public enemy; they had not guessed that the teen was using his visits to hew Atkins’ mind. The gifted youth had realized that Atkins couldn’t tattle and that he might make a reasonable sounding board for Jim-Jam’s ideas about a device that could destroy enemy weaponry from great distances. The Smartie, however, failed to realize that Atkins could still get Jim-Jam into trouble; it is lawful to chronicle, to store, and to retrieve virtually everything said in prison visiting rooms.

Later, Jim-Jam would also regret that Atkins had, during those visits, unburdened on Jim-Jam all of his unresolved fantasies about blowing up the WHYU radio station. Apparently, Atkins had gathered and hidden all of the necessary supplies. Had it not been for his capture at Bill Lou Giskin’s Swill and Bales Farm, he believed he could have carried out his scheme. Once released, he intended to try again to do so.

Occasionally, Jim-Jam skipped those visits. Venting was good, but the man to whom he unloaded himself was scary. In different circumstances, that boy, who lacked seamanship but advised seaman, was expert at equation twirling but had yet to go to college, and was a kingmaker among his peers but was exasperated with created twin queens, stopped by his high school’s greenhouse to examine the school’s nearly dead arbutus tree. There were too few rays reaching the sapling, even counting those coming from dedicated grow lights, for it to survive at the school’s latitude. Probably, it would not be sitting next to the bromides and the roses during his next visit.

Jim-Jam pocketed the plant’s fruit, carefully placing its astringent berries in the recycled contact lens cases that he had carried with him for that purpose. At best, he could use those orbs, in conjunction with acorns, to create tannin powerful enough to dye freshly molted Komodo skins. Under the most unpleasant conditions, he could make a small amount of brandymel from their juice and pass that treat on to the Harvest Festival’s royal court. Either way, those jujubes would help him make peace with both Lynnie Lola and Doris.

* * *

Lynnie Lola had stopped IMing Jim-Jam since Marina had informed her that Doris, too, was paying Jim-Jam to help her become Harvest Festival’s Pumpkin Queen. Fortified by her beau, Ralph, and by Scooter, Marina’s main squeeze, Lynnie Lola plotted retaliation. She and her retinue paid an unannounced visit to O’Neily’s Shack of Curiosities.

Calamitously, those kids were ill-prepared for the hungry terrors guarding Jim-Jam’s space. Two juvenile male dragons roamed freely there. It would have been unseemly for the Commander of Complex Equations to have left his visual substantiation of fish aggregating devices unguarded. It would have been unwise for him to have trusted a lock to keep out would-be intruders since most of his foes were brutish.

Because of the subsequent face off they suffered with Jim-Jam’s large, lethal brutes, the trespassing teens failed to notice the documents from an ecological organization that lay on his worktable. They read no portion of the prose that indicated just how fantastically moneyed O’Neily had become by marshaling litigation against the organization’s enemies. The young invaders did not realize, either, that the pictorial testimony O’Neily was using had been issued by two sailing ships’ crews or that tapes of tourists scrubbing toilets onboard those sailing ships sat unguarded on Jim-Jam’s shelf.

All that Lynnie Lola’s devotees saw was a four-foot lizard painfully fastening himself to Scooter’s leg and a similarly-sized reptile making quick work out of Ralph’s heel. That was more than they wanted to see.

Lynnie Lola screamed upon witnessing the impact of Komodo anticoagulants on her boyfriend, Ralph, and on his flunky, Scooter. Those two buff teens lay sprawled on the sidewalk, on a block somewhere between her home and Jim-Jam O’Neily’s. A quick-thinking paramedic, who had applied a styptic pencil to the wounded warriors’ seemingly minor lacerations, saved their lives.

* * *

In Upper Buckwheat County Hospital, subsequently, new hemostatic agents were intravenously fed into the veins of the young men. After two days of treatment, the care center released the youths to their parents.

The chief of police visited them, but neither boy volunteered any essentials about Jim-Jam O’Neily’s “pets.” They chose to make up for their lack of derring-do by referring to “the copperhead nest,” upon which they had stumbled. Ralph and Scooter each mentioned having tripped on placid, overwintering serpents.

It was disconcerting, if not maddening, to those popular athletes that puny, nerdy, O’Neily had mutated lizards to man-eating size. The two preferred to espouse the idea that they had overindulged in extracurricular chemicals, hence had hallucinated the gargantuan nature of the defending vipers than to embrace the notion that their high school’s genius had spawned miraculous critters.

Lynnie Lola, too, had had to be attended to after the incident. She remained heavily medicated even after being sent home. Whatever had attacked her confidants had traumatized her. Not only did she miss the Pumpkin Queen Pageant, but she never returned to school.

When her girlfriends visited Lynnie Lola to update her on gossip, she shrugged at them and looked out whichever window was closest to her. She cared little that Doris had led the Harvest Festival Court or that her own clothes were no longer cutting edge. To a great extent, she remained obsessed with interrogating her admirers about whether or not Raymond Charles’ classrooms, lavatories, and other common spaces had ever been completely free of spiders, snakes, and other creepy-crawlies.

Unlike the teens that broke into his hut without his permission, Jim-Jam Ariel O’Neily was most saddened by his lizards’ corpses. Someone who had encroached on his private domain had had enough brawn or stupidity, or both, to smash to death two juvenile, flesh-consuming, reptile giants.

With the tip of one of his shoes, Jim-Jam kicked those pets’ carcasses. Only after donning cleanroom gloves, hand covers fabricated to avoid particle permeability, did Jim-Jam load his former darlings into a wheelbarrow. Even in death, Komodos’ saliva is lethal.

Proceed to Chapter 8...

Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg