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

by Channie Greenberg

Table of Contents

Chapter Seventeen: Demented Patients

Ralph’s mom would personally have escorted Ralph to the local hospital’s locked ward had she known that her son would have willingly embraced that option. In fact, after authorizing his admission papers, Ralph’s mom would have asked the wardens to destroy all of the keys coded to her son’s room. She was exhausted by the humiliation she had suffered from Ralph’s scholastics, and she figured that an unseen child would become an unreferenced faux pas.

At least Marina was not reliant on social promotion. Plus, unlike that girl of the Jones family, Marina was not regarded as being a raving lunatic who could only be pacified, and then just briefly, with ugly hats. Ralph and Marina’s maternal unit had no delusions that Jim-Jam O’Neily’s headgear could heal adolescent trauma. Besides, Jim-Jam was a repulsive nephew, a youth, who, a year earlier, had failed to beautify Ralph’s snout. That loutish child had sold Ralph a basic plaster to cover his embarrassing spot rather than dissolving or otherwise removing the blemish.

Yet, Ralph’s mother couldn’t stand to hear Ralph whine about his cousin, Jim-Jam. Whenever he opened up his yap about that nerd, his mom would smack him, saying that he was wasting his study hours working as a fry cook, had advanced from grade to grade out of social mercy, and ought to be more like that other boy, a lad known to medical organizations and chemistry societies, alike.

* * *

Dr. George Quinton Washington persuaded Ralph not to join the army. Ralph, who had had a momentary burst of vainglory, had, uncharacteristically, chosen to go to the public library to work on an assignment for Mr. Weaver. There, while trying to adjust the microfilm reader, he had met Dr. Washington.

Dr. Washington, unlike most of the grownups of Ralph’s acquaintance, did not slap Ralph when Ralph opened his mouth. Actually, he seemed somewhat interested in Ralph’s well-being. He listened to Ralph drone on about life for almost fifteen uninterrupted minutes. Whereas George could not have cared less about Ralph’s exploits at Deli Deluxe, he was extremely interested in Ralph’s reports of cruelties suffered at the hands of a local nerd.

While Ralph jabbered, George repeatedly checked his pocket watch. At the beginning of the sixteenth minute of Ralph’s burbling, Dr. Washington spoke up. He told Ralph that better than hanging up his deep-fry thermometer and splatter screen and better than donating his ballet flats to Miss Kay’s collection box for the sake of conscripting, Ralph should practice personal fulfillment. More specifically, it would be more advantageous for Ralph to engage in a tramp’s life than to seek rifle rash. Ralph ought not to abandon high school to become part of an organized training regimen; he ought to abandon high school to become a tramp.

As an itinerant, Ralph could avoid tests, the final prom and disoriented girlfriends. He would be able to unload from himself all issues of post-traumatic stress disorder, food poisoning, and bathroom etiquette; insolvents were guaranteed to eat germ-infested foods and were guaranteed to utilize “camp bathrooms.” They similarly commanded no resources for the diagnosis or treatment of mental illness and, because most of them were reckoned unattractive to women, they never got themselves involved in relationships whose potential technicalities included alimony or child support payments.

George “forgot” to disclose that although he was homeless, he had fathered a child and that he collected medical benefits from the United States Social Security Administration. What he did share with his would-be protégé was an offer to introduce him to all of the riff-raff with whom George was acquainted. At a life juncture similar to the one that Ralph was currently viewing, each of those reasonable gents had chosen delinquency over schooling, drugs over civil service, and crimes, both petty and grand, over working multiple shifts at burger bastions.

Likewise, George “forgot” to tell Ralph that he, himself, had spent time behind Deli Deluxe’s counter and had loved that greasy place almost as much as he had loved the chemistry bench. Instead, George enthused about how panhandlers’ lives are permeated with freedom.

Anyway, continued Dr. Washington to a very much fascinated teenager, the life of the dispossessed is altruistic. If not for hobos’ habit of picking through trash, public parks would be overcome by discarded recyclables. Food wasted by restaurants and grocery stores would go unused if not for rolling stones’ proclivity for helping themselves to private dumpsters.

The Yankee Spirit, which once had made America great, would be crushed if drifters stopped squatting in abandoned buildings, stopped up-cycling discarded vehicles, and stopped assigning new uses to other, smaller castoffs. Wanderers’ lives were thick with significance and virtue.

Ralph regarded his possible mentor. The man was smart; he used big words. He was bursting with self-esteem. Most importantly, he had approached Ralph at a time when no one else seemed to care.

* * *

A few days later, George enrolled Ralph as a volunteer at the county hospital. Ralph, who thought he knew a lot about intimidation and coercion, knew nothing about institutional kickbacks and supposed George had only philanthropic intentions.

Once a week, the young mendicant performed ballet. He entertained hospital workers in an employee cafeteria, to music composed by a random tune generator. While he spun and leapt, George collected packets of white chemicals. Those compounds did not originate in the cafeteria’s kitchen and were neither salt nor sugar.

George promised Ralph that once Ralph turned eighteen, he would be able to graduate from volunteer to standardized patient. As an experiment subject, Ralph would emulate other hobos, who made money being wired up or elsewise being used to corroborate medical researchers’ and student doctors’ ideas.

Dr. Washington said not one word about his own experience as a standardized patient or about his and Jim-Jam O’Neil’s scheme to develop a detonating keychain that would be used to blow up the hospital where Ralph volunteered. To George, Ralph was just one more bit of refuse that had oozed from the public system of education.

Until Ralph turned eighteen, though, he had to run faster than the truant officer and act nicer than the hospital workers’ other sources of entertainment. George prohibited him from showing up at the public library for news or at the local YMCA for showers. As long as Ralph was a minor, he and his advisor risked being taken into custody. As long as he dogged George’s days and nights, George felt no guilt when slapping him.

* * *

Grateful to have found a suitable calling, Ralph obeyed Dr. Washington. He hid and he did whatever else he was told to do. For instance, he limited his gleaning of fruit from the community’s arboretum to times when the local police were cruising in distant parts of town. He only harvested from the municipal landfill when the garbage collectors had finished making their deposits. Only when Raymond Charles High School’s night watchman was watching porn in the gatehouse, did Ralph raid that school’s dumpsters.

It seemed impossible to Ralph that a mere week earlier he had been among the boisterous crowd that had cursed the school’s lunches, especially the Sushi Surprise and the International Chili. Quickly, he had transformed into the sort of down-and-out person who praised each wasted meal, especially if an offering had its seals intact. Ralph cried in gratitude when one of his dives yielded two closed portions of Wonderful Tofu Wrap and a half-eaten box of Num-Num Nori.

At other times, too, fortune visited Ralph. Once, behind a drugstore, he found a cache of expired chocolate bars. The former sports stud sucked their synthesized goo, mewing happily over their dubious lipids and starches, feeling nearly orgasmic as those melting pieces dripping into his maw. Unhesitatingly, he yanked free their wrappers, exposing those brunette chemicals for what they were. What he didn’t swallow, he gathered into a bag for his mentor.

Ralph was sick for two days. George, who ought to have known better, in the least because of his chemistry background, had diarrhea for a week. George was so sick that he nearly brought himself to the emergency room at the place he most detested. Providentially, a friend kept him hydrated with two-bit scotch.

After recovering from those laxatives, George sought Ralph. He regaled him with stories about how, when younger, he had benefited from living at the lowest of social stations. Smiling as he spoke to Raymond Charles High School’s latest truant, he referred to the many cytokines that youngsters had yet to discover and that were similarly missing from the lives of weekend warriors. George pointed how that it was nice to be a sportsman, but how necessary it was to be a survivalist.

Only to himself did George muse about the drawbacks of the itinerant life, including, but not limited to the time when George had had to cope with a spinal disc herniation. More painful than a mild burn and potentially longer lasting than a sprained ankle, that rupture had been incapacitating, Upper Buckwheat’s emergency rooms had been maddening, and the resulting radiculitis pain had made it impossible for him to focus. Freedom was one thing, but medical insurance and proper healthcare were another.

Ralph nodded at his mentor but declined to watch the embers of the closest fire. Putting his finger to the edge of any flame-filled trash bin meant leaving behind flesh. No amount of licking or kissing those burns helped. His hobo life was far less exciting than Dr. Washington had indicated it would be.

Sure, Ralph contributed to the common pot the few handfuls of grain that he shoplifted from health food stores or from open bins in grocery stores. Nonetheless, he was constantly hungry. Whenever his tummy began complaining, he’d unroll his blankets next to the most sober of his new brothers. Other than his foraging trips and his performance time at the hospital, Ralph spent his hours watching those chaps get drunk. He couldn’t wait until he reached his majority, when he would no longer have to rely on the free maps provided by local conservation and historical properties in order to avoid being spotted by the police. Being secluded was boring.

* * *

Just beyond town limits, Doris Giskin, who had forgotten her umbrella, made her way to Swill and Bales to complete an assignment for her Social Studies class. Passersby stared. They whispered. Some pointed. Doris smiled. The rain hat flattened her hair. Every few minutes, she removed her glasses and wiped them.

A youth of middle height and unremarkable mass touched her elbow and asked if she was heading up the boulevard. She nodded, but graciously declined to share his umbrella.

He sped ahead, looking back every few paces, but she did not melt. When Doris passed the doorway in which he had taken shelter, he glared at her.

Billy Lou Giskin, Doris’ turkey-breeding uncle, and the owner of the hens that had earlier made short work out of Mr. Atkins, was happy to see his niece. Every decade or so, someone in his clan would quiz him as part of their homework. If not for those projects, he would see little of his extended family.

Drooling minimally, he stuck a finger into one of his ears and then examined the resulting excavations while Doris gibbered. She plied her uncle with a graphic description of the half-gourd that she had worn proudly on her bean during her triumph as Raymond Charles High School’s Harvest Festival Queen.

Seeing that Doris was staring not at him, but into space, Billy Lou stuck his already dirtied finger into a nostril. He examined the results of that dig, too.

Doris spoke, in excited tones about how a classmate, Scooter Jax, and about his friend, Ralph Dupas, who had tried to compromise the hideout of the local geek, Jim-Jam O’Neily, but had, instead, been surprised by “copperheads.”

Billy Lou flicked the crud off of his digit and then picked at the corner of one of his eyes.

Doris kept blathering. Ralph was a boy whom she adored, but who only had feelings for a girl named Lynnie Lola. Recently, though, Ralph had gone missing. Rumor had it that he was hiding out with the sort of transients that rode the back of freight trains, but, confided Doris to her uncle, she knew that Ralph was too smart to get mixed up with crazies.

Billy Lou redirected his attention to a string from celery that was stuck between two of his molars. He knew all about boxcar tourists.

When he was a young man, during the period before he had begun to suffer exaggerated startle responses, before he began to have episodes in which he assaulted metal objects, he had enjoyed the company of such men. His unsteady countenance, however, had forced him to give up hitching rides on cow cages, black snakes, chip pies, elephant cars, and donegans.

As luck would have it, hospital-grade medications returned him to baseline functioning, but not to tramping. The drill crews with whom he was acquainted had been fast to catch him and to send him to the police any time that his meds had kept him from leaping discretely onto flats or freezers.

At least, taking his pharmaceuticals meant Billy Lou would never again risk electrocution from overhead lines or collision with platforms. Those chemical changes, meanwhile, did nothing, as his poultry flocks knew too well, to temper his hobo-inspired knife habits.

Proceed to Chapter 18..

Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg