The Ill-Advised Adventures
of Jim-Jam O’Neily
by Channie Greenberg
James Jackson Ariel (“Jim-Jam”) O’Neily is an adolescent virtuoso, a bright teenager who has a passion for invention. But he is also a loser who postures as a champion. He remains a regular target for his high school’s most popular kids and for his school’s fiercest intimidators.
Jim-Jam is nasty and sweet, vainglorious and insecure, book-brilliant and publicly stupid. He is often inadvertently funny. His life is far from perfect; he tiptoes around his disapproving mother and finds himself battling another highly capable nerd. He’s arbitrary in friendships, spews balderdash and focuses on profit margins. Jim-Jam is a rascal on the rise.
Chapter Six: Sad Poultry Vent Sexing Specialists and Dragon Food
Disguised as a poultry vent sexing specialist, Atkins snuck into Swill and Bales Farm, property of Mac and Doris Giskin’s uncle, Billy Lou Giskin. Billy Lou presided over forty grown-out acres, where he raised roughly ten thousand fowl. Billy Lou also husbanded a small herd of goats, a large, lame horse, and a pack of dogs that regularly interbred with “friendly” wolves.
After an unfortunate encounter with Billy Lou’s canines, Atkins sought shelter in a brooder coop. There, he suffered more losses, explicitly to his manliness, from the occupant hens who thought he was there to force artificial insemination upon them. Each of those girls, all of whom weighed between six and seven kilograms, were in a heightened state of excitement. Their regiment of onion bits and neem leaves, pressed together with yolk taken from their less promising eggs, compromised what little tranquility might have ordinarily filled their bird brains.
Not to mention, those turkeys, when penned, were awarded just four square feet of space apiece. Because their claustrophobic environment led them to charging and fighting such that their mortality rate climbed upwards of ten per cent, Billy Lou desnooded, debeaked and toe-clipped them. It didn’t matter to him if his brooders were an angry flock.
In any event, it was into that domain of temperamental avians that Atkins had escaped. There, the hens mistook him for another human being bent on torturing them.
If he had defended himself with a simple stick, not his maser, he could have driven those not-entirely-stupid birds to his pickup truck. Had he understood that abducting large fowls was an activity best performed at night, when only Billy Lou’s dogs, electric fences, and membership in the local bikers’ association, stood between those rotund, theoretically inept birds and possible poachers, Atkins might have accomplished his mission and might have done so unscathed.
However, because the Social Studies teacher had acted senselessly, in addition to his injuries, he was routed by the local police chief. That chief was married to the second cousin of Billy Lou’s wife. Since that wife was also Billy Lou’s first cousin, the man of law was twice a Giskin.
Atkins was arraigned for larceny, for looting, and for miscellaneous acts of theft, as well as for bad taste in weapons, an ordinance that the chief made sure was quickly passed into law through his brother-in-law, the district judge. Trespassing and the assault and battery of helpless creatures were added to the complaints against Atkins.
* * *
While Atkins languished in the county jail awaiting sentencing, Jim-Jam was provided with a surprise means of feeding his critters. Mrs. Atkins insisted on giving Jim-Jam so much cash that he was able to restock his food locker with cases of pemmican. That woman of words had been waiting long decades to divorce her husband but had lacked grounds that would enable her to receive her and her husband’s mutual holdings uncontested. Jim-Jam’s reveal of her husband’s infidelities provided her with the very lines of reasoning she needed.
Mrs. Atkins rewarded Jim-Jam for her pecuniary emancipation. Haplessly, she had paid him, and he had ordered the large delivery of dried meat before she had learned that all of her and her husband’s joint properties had been mortgaged.
At least for the time being, Jim-Jam was avoiding juvie, since he had been able to repress his maniacal reptiles’ hunger. If not for Mrs. Atkins’ generosity, Jim-Jam The-One-and-Only Ariel O’Neily, Crusader-of-Intramolecular-Magnetic -Exchanges-and-Collector-of-All-Manners-of-Ploys (as well as of other kinds of long hooks used to propel barges), might have had to introduce his pets to the taste of tiny tots or to have gotten involved in the cockamamie world dominance scheme proffered by George, the library-squatting drifter. His giant lizards were somewhat willful when underfed.
* * *
His feet on a picnic table, the ferocious snuffle of his growing lizards the imagined music in his ears, Jim-Jam thought about what would happen if, instead of being supported by Mrs. Atkins’ largesse, he had had to sell his cousins’ funfair images to researchers. There was no guarantee that the boys would have survived the gigacoaster.
Maybe Mom would have sued Lake Mercurial for several million dollars, thus enabling his uncle to retire at age thirty-nine, his mother to buy herself a boy toy, and himself to rent a breeding ground for Komodo dragons. Thinking more carefully about the situation, maybe his aunt would have hung him from his high school’s tallest flagpole. Thanks to Mrs. Atkins, there had been no riding on rollercoasters, no sale of information about family members, no law suit, and no lynching.
Having forbidden his charges to ride the dangerous amusement park attraction, but not having limited their access to cotton candy, partially raw hotdogs, or caramel corn, Jim-Jam returned his cousins intact, but sick to their stomachs. His aunt filled his hands with money anyway.
* * *
Later that night, in his workshop, Jim-Jam twiddled the IF-transformer that he had so gingerly placed within the cavity of his most recently gutted pocket radio. He needed to find a way to fit supervenient long wave/medium wave switches into his contraption if he was going to be able to amplify the light produced by Raymond Charles High School’s scoreboard.
Lynnie Lola meant to reign as Pumpkin Queen and Jim-Jam meant for her to enjoy all of the glory afforded by modern technology. The King of Quintessential Strictures wedged a jeweler’s tool into the ball grid array splayed before him.
His thoughts returned to his hatchlings. He had no idea whether or not a Native American mixture of concentrated fats and meats was healthy for monstrosities from Indonesia.
Rolling his eyeballs counterclockwise, Jim-Jam considered that perhaps he should try to feed fish to his pets. The Komodos came from an island within the Lesser Sunda Chain. Likely, they had evolved to eat marine food discarded by humans, whether that food was left behind voluntarily or not.
Jim-Jam had personally witnessed the size to which fish could grow. Once, when waiting for table service in a sushi restaurant, he had seen supplies being delivered. It had taken two employees and a driver to carry a single Northern Bluefin tuna from the seafood truck to the eatery’s kitchen. One such entity could provide half of a week’s worth of protein and calories for Jim-Jam’s brood. If only he could make sense of how to buy a similar swimmer, at wholesale cost, and if only he could make sense of how to bypass the paperwork needed for trafficking in critically endangered species, his reptiles could sup well.
Thus, the curator of asymptotic curves, friend of minimal surfaces, and groom of quadrilateral equations, which began on tangent planes before winding around a bit only to putter out without being measurable by the Dupin indicatrix, smiled as he fiddled with some polyester yardage, doodled a small number of Stygian scenes, and tore bits off of a slightly moldy ginger poultice. He had read that vessels, originating in select European countries, gathered Bluefins visa via the purse seine fishing method.
* * *
Jim-Jam sighed. An IM drew his attention away from his lizards’ possible comestibles. If he failed to secure the school’s Harvest Festival crown for Lynnie Lola, he might as well offer himself up to his young dragons. She was alerting him, for the fiftieth time, that she expected his cooperation with her objective.
Maybe he could grandstand the student government. Sammy Whitespoon, council vice president, remained indebted to Jim-Jam for fixing a flat tire. That repair had taken place on Sammy’s sister’s car, a shiny vehicle of speed and color to which Sammy, possessed of only a learner’s permit, had “accidentally” palmed the keys in order to drag-race in front of Deli Deluxe. Sammy had not considered that his midsummer night’s fun could include road debris such as broken disc drives, hewn bottle caps, and bits of tin cans. Conveniently, Jim-Jam had made such calculations and had arrived at the competition with his patch kit in hand.
In a like manner, Jenny Fisch, the president of the tenth grade delegation, owed Jim-Jam for the couture he had fashioned for her, from a Khitty Khleen bag, an entire package of miniature paper umbrellas, a squirrel’s tail, and some bright blue thumbtacks. That distinguished head art had been in other ways embellished with strips cut from a tie-dyed, prewashed, set of Jim-Jam’s tighty whities (no one had to know the fabric’s source), a sugar-covered licorice pellet, and a wind-propelled pinwheel. Several of the popular crowd’s Facebook pages had noted that Jenny’s chapeau had been second, that week, only to the one worn by Lynnie Lola.
As well, Frank Hu, the newest member of the council and a former denizen of New York City, had yet to repay the school’s brightest boy for his help with Frank’s most recent PSAT scores. For fifty dollars an hour, Jim-Jam had tutored the erstwhile Sudbury School student in the intricacies of syntax, word choice, and idioms. Frank’s urban life might have formed him into the sort a youth that was fearless in the face of adversaries like Ralph and Scooter, but those same urban years, spent in a student-determined educational milieu, had left Frank unfamiliar with sentence diagramming, with the meaning of grammatical terms, and with the ways in which reading ought to be learned together with writing. Pulp fiction, especially space opera and cross-genre mysteries, comprised most of that kid’s literary lexicon. His chief setback was that standardized exams expected teens to be familiar with the works of old, dead, white European men.
Nonetheless, if Lynnie Lola were to become the Pumpkin Queen and not just a court royal, above and beyond getting councilmen and councilwomen to stuff the ballot box, Jim-Jam would also have to suck down Mac Giskin’s beefy knuckle sandwiches. Doris, Mac’s twin, too, wanted to be the lead monarch. If she were to be voted a mere princess, becoming dragon chow would be the easiest of Jim-Jam’s escapes. Doris had yet to forgive Jim-Jam for his lessons in manners, his role in her and her brother’s boxing apprenticeship, and, correspondingly, their most recent shakeups with their parents. She did not take kindly to having had to bathe their cat, either.
Jim-Jam shook his head. He ought not to be blamed that Mac and Doris’ boxing instructor had found nasty pleasure in pitting those siblings against each other. More readily, the twins ought to have lauded him, their neighborhood’s Gatekeeper-of-Portable-Railguns-and-All-Other-Handy-Treasures. Mac had won, during a recent sports tournament, the “best beginner” trophy when defending himself against Doris. Jim-Jam ought not to be faulted that Doris had failed to pull her punches. He was not in the wrong, either, for Doris telling him, in front of the many other students standing in the high school vestibule, that he was going to help her become queen.
Making circumstances more complicated, Doris had recently friended Ralph on LinkedIn. Ralph, too, was one among the handful of Raymond Charles students, who were unsatisfied with the services of the Computer Wizard/Social Hierarchy Iconoclast/ Lizard Lover. Ralph continued to hold a grudge against his cousin merely because the expensive adhesive bandage, which the Never Abstemious Whiz had sold the jock a year earlier, had brought just temporary relief for the sporty kid’s pus-filled spot, and because a cockroach, which had been loosed in Ralph’s place of work, Deli Deluxe, had been weakly linked to the Mathematical Wonder. Jim-Jam was kinder, wiser, and more generous than most of Ralph’s associates, aside from Scooter Jax, Ralph’s chief sycophant.
At any rate, in a manner poles apart from earlier encounters, Doris goaded Ralph. She thrilled at the idea of Ralph macerating Jim Jam’s maxilla and zygomatic bones. Such chivalry, its barbarism aside, excited her coterie so much that her followers, too, prodded their boyfriends and their rivals’ boyfriends to perform related coarse acts on Jim-Jam’s body. The probable results were at least as much interest to those trendy females as last week’s hat fashions.
Even more damaging was the realization that Doris had announced, via her website, and via classified ads in the school’s newspaper, that she had in mind that Ralph, Lynnie Lola’s most important real estate investment, was cute. Lynnie Lola, who was purportedly fuming, did not know that all Jim-Jam had told Mac Giskin’s mildly pox-marked sister was that she ought to focus on something other than egging on the school’s male population to pulverize him. He ought to have reminded Doris that she and the rest of the girls would regret the demise of their most favorite milliner.
* * *
Shrugging, the lone teen in the entire county able to read Gorgias in the original Greek, reached for a recently emptied bag of Khitty Khleen and set to work gluing sequins. Neither Lynnie Lola’s nor Doris’s coronation would help him. If he could make the singular arbutus plant in the school’s greenhouse sprout orange leaves, he would be able to survive the upcoming festivities and would be able to do so lucratively. At least, the strawberry tree’s bark had already turned a reddish hue.
Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg
