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

by Channie Greenberg

Table of Contents

Chapter Two: Jim-Jam’s Louse

Jim-Jam The-One-and-Only Ariel O’Neily moved back the bridge of his neon blue, suspender-wrapped sunglasses. Using the fourth finger on his right hand to scratch the second forward quadrant of his head, he uttered loudly, “Drats!” Upon retracting his digit, Jim-Jam verified that beneath one fingernail was a dark crimson smear; Jim-Jam had lice, again.

That think-on-your-feet twirler of porcupine quills, builder of egg white-shellacked magic boxes, and assembler of supreme probabilistic algorithms expressed in pseudocodes such as Java or ALGOL, had no time for the literal minutia of the world. In dead on six point five minutes, the door to Jim-Jam’s Make-It-or-Break-It-That-Will-be-Fifty-Dollars-an-Hour-to-You-Mister Workshop would open.

At that inauspicious moment, Mac and Doris, the Giskin Twins, would push their tacky, clad-in-last-year’s-model-from-the-discount-bin, red and purple, with a touch of gold, spandex treads over Jim-Jam’s lintel. It was not the twenty dollars per day that Jim-Jam was charging each of them for the rental of periscopes that would be precipitating their appearance, nor was it the twins’ need to clarify their ongoing confusion about the dissimilarity among fish, salad, and dessert forks, as outlined in the etiquette book that Jim-Jam had sold to them that was propelling them towards his research hut.

Rather, the twins’ stampede on Jim-Jam’s charm-school-therapy-center-bicycle-repair-cum-refrigerator-fix-it shop was going to occur, abounding with complaints, in view of the small matter of a deficiency in domestic bliss at the Giskin home. They held Jim-Jam responsible. Mr. and Mrs. Giskin, benevolent best patrons of the Raymond Charles High School marching band, breeders of Great Danes and of Standard Poodles, Tuesday night bowlers, and Wednesday night bridge leaguers, had grounded Mac and Doris because the twins, acting on Jim-Jam’s advice, had enrolled in boxing lessons.

* * *

Jim-Jam had urged those lessons as an alternative to Mac and Doris’ usual means of resolving sibling disputes, namely of defacing each other’s bedroom doors and of intentionally leaving pieces of onion skin in each other’s bowls of breakfast cereal. Jim-Jam had advised Mac and Doris on that path only after collecting their first day’s periscope rental fees, their weekly fees for instruction on civility, and their charge for the manners book he had sold them. That book was astonishing in its recommendations for gutting squirrels, politely carrying out subterfuge when grabbing the last pair of red and purple (with a touch of gold) spandex socks during clearance sales, and using fish forks.

After paying Jim-Jam, the twins realized that they only had enough moola left, even if they pooled their coins, for a lone order of Deli Deluxe fries. This realization alarmed Mac and Doris as much as anything; there was no good in being indebted to Ralph Dupas, celebrated discus thrower, and brother of Marina Dupas, the latter of whom was a hamster owner extraordinaire and a much besotted patron of Jim-Jam vinegar-makes-a-good-cleaning-agent-and-is-also-a-neat-source-of-electronegativity O’Neily, for a milkshake, apiece. More damaging, the twins had “borrowed” their money from their mother’s purse and from their father’s wallet.

By the time that the brother and sister had calculated their debt, they had missed two boxing lessons. So, the siblings hung up their gloves and then regressed to their former, unceremonious grappling. It “just happened” that Mac and Doris managed to make their living room’s end tables airborne, return the living room’s throw rug to its initial rag components, and transform two of their mother’s best yard sale vases into new bits and pieces henceforth usable only for her mosaic art.

The twins had also succeeded in laying waste to their mother’s silver-plated, framed picture, the one that showcased them as toddlers; their father’s most recent bowling trophy and the family cat. Despite the reality that Mac and Doris had begun their latest tiff by hurling the sofa’s pillows at each other, they had rapidly progressed to hurling the stuffing from those pillows at each other, and then to heaving the actual sofa. Only their mother’s embodiment, at the living room’s entrance, had deterred them from taking life-threatening action.

Being grounded was more than horrible given their need to return to Deli Deluxe to reimburse Ralph. Ralph was already mad at them. The twins had been detected bowling with the less-than-cool Scooter Jax, ostracized Beanstalk Betty, and unpopular Slug-faced Samantha. Lynnie Lola, their erstwhile nemesis, and Ralph’s current girlfriend, had witnessed those associations. It had become known to Ralph, simultaneously, that the twins had, albeit politely, turned down an invitation to Lynnie Lola’s birthday party in favor of joining their mother to hunt down last year’s pullovers during January end-of-season sales. Such umbrage, according to Ralph’s limited forebrain, was unfathomable.

It was bad enough to Ralph and his crew that the Giskin Family’s bargain hunting had resulted in their gleaning red and purple sweaters, with a touch of gold spandex, which matched the twins’ shoes and socks. More awkward was that the two had failed to discourage freckled, freaky Betty, captain of the school choir, from singing the national anthem at the final spring assembly. Two cafeteria doors and numerous pairs of hard contact lens had shattered because of her mezzo-soprano solo.

As for Slug-faced Samantha, a truly beautiful girl, one who arduous appellation derived not from her hemline (boys still lined up to drop their books near her) or from her hairdo (she belonged to the tribe of women who lived perfectly coiffed lives), but from her rivalry with Lynnie Lola. Only Slug-faced and Marina dared to publicly contest Lynnie Lola’s fashion sense. Marina was forgiven on account of her relationship to Ralph. Slug-faced had no reason to be similarly exonerated. Moreover, Slug-faced dared to make hot eyes at Ralph when the rest of the student body knew that Lynnie Lola would break their heads open and suck out the contents if anyone else so much as blinked at her suitor.

Regarding Scooter, Marina’s sweetheart and the only young man at Raymond Charles High School daunting enough to better Ralph at tackle football, all that could be said, if said quietly, was that he was an embarrassment. A less than successful attempt, by Jim-Jam, to alter Scooter’s girth, had resulted in Scooter sprouting shimmering azure hair. That boy glowed as opposed to glowered, attesting to all comers that he was a failed thug-in-the-making.

* * *

Since Mac and Doris found themselves lower than used toilet paper, tree toads crushed between thumbs and forefingers, or day-old nose turds, they were vexed. The Giskins could ill-afford such ranking; Ralph was their primary source of answers for all not-yet-announced Spanish grammar tests, for prewritten English essays, and for five to seven “free” pieces of golden brown potatoes at Deli Deluxe. That fry boy, Ralph, was formidable.

For that reason, when choosing between rattlesnakes and angry parents, between thunder storms and angry parents, between the wrath of Ralph and angry parents, Mac and Doris proved to be both sublime and nearly intelligent. They had elected to demand that the owner of the I-Can-Solve-Your-Postnasal-Drip-or-Your-Sister’s-Lovelife-but-You-Have-to-Choose Hideaway refund them enough money for two orders of French fries jumbo-sized, a month of boxing lessons, and two rounds of milkshakes. Mac and Doris also planned to extort, if only by causing hypertrophic scaring to select parts of Jim-Jam’s dermis, funds for flowers and candies for Lynnie Lola.

Hence, rather than proceed directly from Raymond Charles High School to their home, the twins had fabricated sufficient explanations to cover them during a ten minute detour to Jim-Jam’s sweatshop of noteworthy alibis, divergent interpretations, and exciting excuses. By the time that they got to his door, they would have eight minutes left, give or take five, to pulverize their patron.

If they lingered beyond their upper temporal limit, though, as their mom had reminded them before they had left for school, while they solemnly chewed allium-laced oatmeal, Mac and Doris’ current punishment would seem, relatively speaking, like a long, hot bubble bath filled with sweet scent, rubber duckies, and soaps of graduating size. Whereas their mom had not specified what the greater consequences of their “bad choices” would be, Mac and Doris, independently, imagined having to wash the cat, having to wash the car or, worst of all, having to wash the dinner dishes. The twins were veteran with gummy worms, fluent in instant messaging, and more than above average in their ability to salvage toothbrushes, but they were crummy with soap.

* * *

That unpleasantness was what Mac meant to express to Jim-Jam, while sneezing in the face of that self-proclaimed Salt of the Biosphere and Master of the Microscope. To warm up his adversary, while school was still in session, Mac had shoved Jim-Jam up against the “Don’t Park Here” sign in the teachers’ lot. Doris, in the meantime, had taken iPhone snaps of that encounter, and had dictated copious rhetoric about it, hoping that such a totem might somewhat mollify Scooter and Ralph.

Until Lynnie Lola, Raymond Charles High School’s queen of panache, passed by, Doris had prattled into her phone’s soundtrack device. Upon sighting Lynnie Lola, though, Mac’s twin became distracted by the amazing confection that sat on top of Lynnie Lola’s napper. Someone had fashioned, for the school’s prima donna, a topper made out of a paper party plate adorned with fringe cut from the outside of a cat litter bag. As was the norm, girls trailed after Lynnie Lola, carefully jotting in their notebooks words and images capturing her latest fashionista accomplishment.

Doris, who was correspondingly mesmerized by that tonsorial ornamentation, failed to notice that Mac was using his fist to furrow Jim-Jam’s brow. Heedless of her neighbor’s plight, Doris ran after the bouncy coterie, all the while calculating the possibility of being able to raise enough funds, before the first period bell, to buy a bag of Khitty Khleen.

She also missed the detail that Jim-Jam had aimed his almost complete, prototype anti-tank, rustproof keychain at his abuser, and that before Jim-Jam could recite the atomic mass of the first twenty elements of the periodic table or release his keychain’s safety latch, he was rescued by the sounding of the school’s warning buzzer. Mac had hastily dropped Jim-Jam on the asphalt and had dashed toward the school’s main door. Jim Jam estimated his speed to be greater or equal to that of a mixture of ammonia and picric acid exploding in a laboratory sink.

Having survived that encounter, Jim-Jam spent most of the rest of his school day collecting fives and tens from his acquaintances. Those tributes for the young mastermind’s many feats of profundity included, but were not limited to: supplying Lynnie Lola’s followers with emptied bags of Khitty Khleen; tutoring Scooter on the invariance of the speed of light, on Coulomb’s Law, and on Gauss’s Law mere minutes before Scooter’s science class; and helping Marina catch the lab mice, which her biology teacher did not think should have been emancipated.

Jim-Jam turned those bills into origami puppies, penguins, and grasshoppers. Though his tetrahedral chain fold was suave, Jim-Jam got stuck on a herringbone fold during a class change. Thus, he was forced to cram his money into his pocket in the same way as did less refined boys. Jim-Jam muttered a bit as he smashed in a bill, noting to himself that he ought to have attempted to fold a pecking hen or a tiny wall basket, not a pleated structure.

* * *

After school, when Jim-Jam returned to his If-You-Didn’t-Bother-to-Recondition-It-I-Can-Transform-It-into-Something-Spectacular Lab, he unwrinkled that misshapen note. While refolding, Jim-Jam looked, at precisely thirty-second intervals, at the wall clock, which was mounted in the belly of a whale that he had carved from a broken fencepost. A small, green lizard scurried over the timepiece’s face. Jim-Jam exhaled noisily and picked another louse from his head. Last week it had been carpenter ants. Perhaps his shed would eventually become infested with flammulated owls or with red-cockaded woodpeckers.

Jim-Jam restored his attention to the opened book whose pages of equations with multiple variables sat before him. That math was as easy as was pulling walnut meat from a walnut hull. Another, slightly larger, lizard scampered by.

Knuckle-rapping, which seemed to be located high on the entrance of the retreat of the Man-Who-Can, tattooed enough of a pattern to pierce Jim-Jam’s concentration. The teen watched as slowly his twine, rubber band, and catgut-wrapped door handle angled downward.

Jim-Jam’s mother, whose lawyerly countenance was all but dwarfed by her overlarge, lawyerly briefcase, stood at Jim-Jam’s threshold. She bent a bit and scrunched her eyes; there was insufficient candle power in the strings of holiday lights that illuminated her son’s playhouse. She scrutinized that child of hers, whom she knew could tolerate blueberry fudge, roller coasters, and old Beach Boy vinyls. Her beloved James Jackson Ariel was expert at making dirt muddy and keeping cacti succulent, too.

That she was not visiting his hidey-hole to praise him was clear from the caterpillar mouth she wore. Jim-Jam had previously seen that grimace when his mother had learned that Jim-Jam had “solved” Ralph’s proboscis dilemma with a high-priced band-aid and when she had ascertained, all by herself, that the “magical” formula Jim-Jam had sold to cure Marina of her fear of complicated choices (like whether to wear the blue, paperclip earrings or to wear the ones cut from the residuals of Jim-Jam’s Khitty Khleen millinary endeavors) was merely salt water doctored with food coloring. His mom had proffered that look, too, when she had learned that Jim-Jam’s ideas for slaughtering pet turtles for soup was printed in the September issue of the Wise Owl Column of Capable Teens Magazine.

Jim-Jam’s own face altered as he comprehended that his mother’s brows were thrust together to form a shape mirroring the transmutation of her lips. The last time that Jim-Jam had seen Mom portray that phenotype was when Jim-Jam had turned his younger sister’s skin red and purple with a touch of gold.

Be that as it may, Jim Jam was an accomplished, usually unbeatable contender. He rushed to make the opening gambit. “The problem with lice,” he frowned to his mother, as he pulled yet another tiny critter from his head, “is that they multiply.”

Jim-Jam’s mother, chimera-like in her expression, countered parsimoniously: “The struggle with children is that they come into this world acting like royalty even when they forget to do their chores. When the rubbish is left next to the house, rather than at the curb, where the city workers can reach it, the rubbish gets knocked over by Mrs. Preenberry’s long-haired dachshund. It blows about and needs to be picked up by hand, especially along our subsequently dirtied side path. Afterwards, that side path needs to get hosed down, too. Get moving mister.”

Jim-Jam began to smile, but recognized that his reaction might be mildly infuriating. So, he blanked his face and ran quickly to do his mother’s bidding.

* * *

Mom remained in the doorway of Jim-Jam’s workshop, intending to watch his efforts from afar. All five feet and one and one half inches of her remained stern. As though for emphasis, she stood with her arms akimbo and held her briefcase in an upright position.

Exactly forty-five seconds after Jim-Jam had begun to scoop scattered chicken bones, discarded coffee grounds, and used tinfoil, making mental notes on which items he planned to reclaim, the Giskin twins appeared. Jim-Jam’s mother greeted them with a grunt. They stood for a minute, watching Jim-Jam cart banana peels and shredded office documents. Then the twins looked at Jim-Jam’s mom, especially at her pronounced countenance. They immediately thought about their own parents.

Jim-Jam’s chore seemed awful, but having to wash their cat seemed worse. Nonetheless, seeing no way to retaliate in front of Jim-Jam’s mother, the defeated twins walked home.

Proceed to Chapter 3...

Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg