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

by Channie Greenberg

Table of Contents

Chapter Eight: Twinkly, Binky, Buckley Boo

After burying his behemoths, Jim-Jam O’Neily saw to Doris’ crowning. His hurried efforts at electoral fraud resulted in the Giskin girl being able to set the school’s newest hollowed squash on her head and in her being able to parade three times, under a spotlight, around the school’s basketball court. Only a handful of popular kids sniggered when missed pumpkin seeds dribbled down Doris’ nose. Doris was in her glory.

As reigning royal, Doris had managed, too, to make Ralph dance with her. After one shared song, though, she lost his attention. Ralph seemed more interested in yakking up Mr. Weaver, who was posted next to the PTO-supplied, baked goods-laden table, than he was in discovering whether the bodice of Doris’ gown was stuffed with natural or synthetic cloth. Scooter, Snorkel, and the rest of the school’s “admired” boys, too, avoided dancing with Doris, leaving her to wonder how Jim-Jam had managed to raise her to queen status.

Doris’ social elevation was no mystery to the Keen Manipulator of Quadratic Equations. Hardly any new lines of code had been needed to adjust the program that tabulated the votes for the dance’s court. With ease, he had turned a mouse into an ogre.

It had not been as easy for Jim-Jam to steer his own fate. Had he been emancipated, he would have spent the evening laboring over Mrs. Preenberry’s website rather than joining the multitudes attending the autumnal celebration. As far as he was concerned, Mrs. Preenberry could take a long walk off of an undersized precipice or could find some other permanent means to liberate herself from all breathable environments.

Jim-Jam O’Neily had not forgotten that the matron had raided the consecrated dining room of Deli Deluxe, causing Mom to cut all sugary treats from Jim-Jam’s diet. He could not, moreover, forgive Mrs. Preenberry for making him forge an entire term’s worth of papers for her son, Snorkel, and thus causing him to become indentured to Mr. Weaver.

* * *

It had been bothersome Doris who had forewarned Jim-Jam. She had emailed her remarkable chum the caution that Mr. Weaver meant to bring breach of copyright charges against him and Snorkel. In perusing Mr. Aitkin’s old records, it seemed that Mr. Weaver had caught the similarity in the work submitted by those two boys during the previous year and had cited federal laws allowing schools five years to prosecute students for misdeeds categorically vis-à-vis the illegal use of others’ raw goods. Atkins was in jail, but Weaver enjoyed taking Atkins’ place as school prosecutor.

After scanning Snorkel and Jim-Jam’s newest papers into his computer, and then running those sheets through some anti-plagiarism software, Mr. Weaver definitively concluded that Jim-Jam had contributed to Snorkel’s efforts. Mr. Weaver did not push for expulsion for Jim-Jam, much to Mrs. Preenberry’s chagrin. Yet, his industries forced Snorkel to complete his education elsewhere.

Like Atkins before him, Weaver wanted O’Neily’s service. Atkins’ reasons for wanting to harness O’Neily, though, were antithetical to Atkins’. Where Atkins had sought revenge, Weaver sought an alternative sort of “social betterment.” He wanted to commingle his mind with that of the kid.

Weaver was aware that O’Neily was on the favorable side of bright and that it would be strategic to force friendship on him. If adequately groomed, O’Neily could help Weaver become a better teacher. Weaver failed to understand why his students loathed writing treatises debunking superstition, making lists of the subordinate themes in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and deconstructing the parallel theses in Candide.

Reasoning, which upheld strict principles of validity, was everything to him. Its complement, convoluted logic as espoused by O’Neily, was an intellectual indulgence. Jim-Jam’s magnum opus on civil rights, “slightly borrowed” from Socrates, and written in response to being caught in the O’Neily/Preenberry plagiarism quagmire sealed the lad for social studies service.

The protest, which Jim-Jam penned against his impending forced labor, endeared him to the social studies substitute teacher. Mr. Weaver had longed for an ally with whom to discuss the emphasis on intellectual commerce, especially in relation to its impact on the steam engine’s development in Age of Enlightenment dramas but had found no one of suitable mental rigor in the teachers’ room.

Jim-Jam had written:

So, banish me. I would sooner be conscripted to stores, to bars, and to pool halls than to allow your policy to poison my name. I will not sermonize about imaginary virtues; there are none. False safeties belong to rah-rah girls, to athletes, and to Student Council members.

My rectitude is earmarked by my good standing in trigonometry, by my publicized ability to translate Russian into German, and by my singular repute among competitors at the county Science Fair. Expulsion, be it sinister or good, will destroy more justice than can be created by thousands of teachers.

You deign to pronounce a dire verdict upon me, but you forget that such decisions belong to The Maker of Men. In truth, your name is no more sacred than is the graffiti on our soccer field’s walls. If yours is an act of calculated tyranny, then mine is an act of righteous insurgence.

Expect Raymond Charles’ fifth column to continue to be unimpressed by your college degree, by your manicured nails, and by your fortnight visits to the university library. This is the age of the underdog, of that rarity that holds fast to the heels of bigheaded rulers who extend abuse.

How dare you respond that you are acting for “the good of the people”? I ask, “For how many people?”

Realize that most Raymond Charles High Schoolers “wear the uniform.” When we smile for grades, we are actually documenting your words as evidence against you. There is no gain in your petty jealousies, in the squabbles provoked by your imagined moral infractions, or in your elevating yourself at the cost of children.

We teenagers accept no part of your asphalt roads, your brick houses, and your cookie-cutter corporate positions. In exiling me from freedom, you not only bring the masses to your door in angry protest, but you also engender my mother’s wrath and cause our nation to grieve.

Respect that when my generation is forbidden to venture beyond those desolate places of thought constituting your doctrines, you fashion your own doom. The doctors and policy makers of your old age will give you placebos and increased taxes instead of crowning your silvered head with compassion.

Your dogma is your legacy. You think yourself wise, but I know you to be foolish.

It followed that Mr. Weaver asked Raymond Charles’ principal, Ms. Spencer, to sign over one hundred hours of Jim-Jam’s time to Social Studies projects at the same time that he asked her to permanently expel Scooter Preenberry. Among his successively required services, Jim-Jam had to aid Mr. Weaver at the Harvest Festival. More particularly, it was his job to add seltzer to the punch, and to replenish the cookie trays.

* * *

While he poured and refilled, Jim-Jam watched several performances in the theatre of his mind. He imagined redirecting Mrs. Preenberry’s website links to graphically visual URLs emphasizing human-mauling alligators or to URLs emphasizing Wicca ceremonies. That woman’s staid paradigms of theology could be repurposed to generate entertainment. As well, her blog, which currently focused on matters of “civilized parenting” and on fried chicken, could be connected to seasonal scores for backwoods ice hockey teams and to “adult” photos of Mr. Preenberry’s recent “business partners.”

As a matter of fact, Jim-Jam had already tried to upload the latter, but time and again had been stymied by messages exclaiming that such recreations could not be optimized inasmuch as they were encapsulated in packets too large for his processor, or that such recreations could not be transferred over a connection as slow as his. The young virtuoso was working on accessing those URL’S via alternate routes.

Jim-Jam left his mental auditorium to return to the dance. Neither scheming retribution nor lining up chocolate chip cookies and unscrewing soda bottle tops was as gratifying as was grappling, in his backyard workshop, with science journals over the publication of his newest thesis about the utility of synthesizing amorphous solids for use as home construction supplies. He would have preferred not to have had to spend time emptying the gym’s trash bins, but to be writing about the ways in which solar energy, coupled with aluminized polyethylene, can be used to incubate reptiles.

He had tested that hypothesis one afternoon when he had secreted a Komodo in his mother’s station wagon. Mom had been adamant that he accompany her to the local mall but had left him no time to empty the family car of the killer, which, earlier, had been chewing on Old Man Hizasky’s wolfhound and on Mrs. Trumpeter’s half-wolf, half-husky mix.

To avoid additional problems with missing pets, Jim-Jam had goaded his monster into snoozing off its digestive process in the cave-like domain of the rear compartment of Mom’s auto. Not having known about Mom’s plans for shopping, Jim-Jam had hidden his less-than-domesticated killer in her trunk under an old thermal tarp. That space blanket comforted and quieted his ambitious reptile. His scaly destroyer had slept during Mom’s entire spree and for ten hours after that.

It had cost Jim-Jam a large chunk of bluefin tuna to motivate that scary critter to exit the family car. Fortunately, Jim-Jam had managed to evacuate that space more than fifteen minutes before Mom had begun her morning commute.

He had had the blanket because he had originally used it to remove polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons from the soil around his workhouse. Those hazardous chemicals were the byproduct of one of his studies on naphthalene solubility. Jim-Jam meant to create competitively priced mothballs and had initially been untroubled that his study would increase the furan load in his neighborhood. Only when his crawfish went missing and others of his lab creatures died did he second-guess those biohazards.

Shrugging away such satisfying memories, Jim-Jam poured a small vial of brandymel into the punch truncheon. He was no longer interested in compromising the Pumpkin Queen’s court, but could still use his honey-flavored arbutus spirit, the liquor he had distilled using both meadowsweet and linden flowers, to help his classmates feel less distressed.

* * *

Raymond Charles’ Proctor of Punctuation, Imitator of Isometric Etchings, and Perpetual Pundit of the Digestive Vestiges of Partially Eaten Corn Dogs, frowned. He needed some way to escape the festivities and to return to his hidey-hole to write up what he had learned about Komodo dragons in relationship to waterproof/windproof shelter barriers. An organic and medicinal chemistry journal published in Hyderabad, India, read by scholars the world over, was having an open submission period. Publishing a paper there might yield new revenue streams.

In spite of his best efforts, Jim-Jam believed there would be no more sales of head coverings to Lynnie Lola. Her currently sordid tresses would benefit from lids that featured his intricate designs, but after encountering Jim-Jam’s dragons, she was not yet ready to even try shampoo, let alone decorations. While the other hairspray-stiffened bouffants swirling around the makeshift sprung floor were adorned with his work, Lynnie Lola had been his best customer. Deprived of the pay package he had gained from her voguing, the Master of Molecular Magnetostriction, Prince of Phonemic Awareness, and Conductor of Intellectually Confounding Puns needed new sources of money.

Space in Ivy League dormitories was expensive. More immediately, Jim-Jam needed to hire, preferably from among the ranks of the local 4Hers, qualified sitters for his growing clutch. He had to puzzle out funding.

Sighing as he watched his contributed ruddy liquid mix with the transparent pineapple ices and seltzer, which had been already been poured into the bowl, Jim-Jam turned to leave. Exiting was easy; Mr. Weaver had driven even Ralph away from the snacks so that Mr. Weaver could confer, alone, with the newly divorced head of Language Arts.

* * *

As Jim-Jam walked home, he deliberated whether or not he should have let his pets feed on George, that library-squatting beggar who, by dint of elbows and spitballs, kept all comers away from the town’s only microfiche reader. It was one thing that the indigent researched bomb assembly as part of his planned protest against medical institutions. It was another thing that he had assigned himself the role of Keeper of the Machine. No library patron could employ it unless the hobo was in the library’s latrine or otherwise absent.

The young genius’ noodlings soldiered into order as he arrived at his backyard workshop. Large ponds of water had converged, rushing the slope that separated Jim-Jam’s home from his laboratory. Spring had brought not only buds and blossoms, but also rains ill-contained by the local reservoirs. To say nothing of the degree to which the contour of the O’Neily yard made slippage from the family’s trash corral leak slowly and significantly onto the workshop’s dirt floor.

The Komodos that Jim-Jam had posted as replacement guards had taken advantage of that overflow, darting their tongues into the malodorous fluid seeping past his workshop’s external walls. Litmus paper soon indicated the fundamental nature of that muck. Other than autopsying his pets, Jim-Jam could not completely ascertain the type or extent of damage that ooze would cause them. Regardless of the inexactitude of his findings, his home was dangerous to them. They would have to be rehoused.

Later, after removing as much of the residual chemicals, both within and around his workshop as possible, using capping and precipitation, Jim-Jam contacted the 4Hers. He offered his “guard dogs” to any of those children willing to home them on their farms. Jim-Jam made no mention of the probably poisonous substances upon which those critters had supped or of the known venom which they exuded.

Proceed to Chapter 9...

Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg

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