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

by Channie Greenberg

Table of Contents

Chapter Nine: Uncommon Life Forms’ Toxicity

Only two hatchlings stayed in the immediate care of the Boy-with-Aptitude. The four other surviving baby Komodos and their mama were making do on 4-Hers’ farms. Specifically, Mama was housed apart from her young because she had already eaten eleven of her hatchlings.

O’Neily’s lizards earned their keep. They prevented apex predators from attacking their foster parents’ flocks. That one of those Komodos, on occasion, ate a goat or sheep when not fed in a timely manner was a small cost relative to the losses the human youth had previously experienced from marauding dog packs, random coyotes, and rare bobcats. It seemed effortless for the dragons to unhinge their jaws around canines or felines. They seemed to like the taste of fur.

All the same, unrest rocked Jim-Jam Ariel O’Neily’s world. “Captain Jim-Jam Al Bartholomew Triassic” remained unsuccessful in delaying, detouring, distracting, or plain old simply doing away with the interview scheduled by the ecological society that supplied his Komodos and his 4-H friends with metric tons of fishy salvage.

In one way, that green group had been delighted that the captain had provided them with “his” visual proofs of oceanic shenanigans, i.e. with electronic files of their foes criminally driving large shoals of fish into commercial nets. In another way, those people’s steel-toed, work-boot bottomed lawyers had demanded that the skipper, who had enthusiastically armed them with electronic ordnances and who had enthusiastically accepted their masses of useless, illicitly harvested sea critters, be photographed.

The ocean watchdog agency meant to continue to escape media censorship. Therefore, those custodians of the deep blue demanded that they be shot on some ship’s deck, shaking their redeemer’s hand. None of them knew that Captain Albatross was a computer-savvy minor already in legal trouble for letting another kid use his schoolwork. Those Seven Seas vigilantes were equally unaware that they had been maneuvered into providing sup for illegal, four-legged beasts.

Scuttling for a solution, Jim-Jam asked the sailors of the working vacation boats, i.e. of Thar She Blows and of Where-Away, to step in for him to accept the Ecological Society’s admiration. Those pals, however, had as much interest in meeting ultraliberal, self-appointed high-seas stewards as they did in having the discs in their backs surgically fused or as they did in returning to their former, five digit-salaried jobs in high-rise office parks. Hence, the salt dogs, who were taking photos of trawlers with bad behavior, were of no help.

Abandoned by his buddies but needing to be able to continue to feed his cold-blooded giants, O’Neily was up to his fishnets in squid. Making matters more complex, that Mastermind of All Things Algebraic, Some Things Alumina-Based, and Nothing Free-of-Profit was suddenly being attacked by the Good Samaritans of the Deep, Briny Drink. In retaliation for Capt. Albatross’s delay in meeting them face-to-face, they had sold his email address to other nonprofit organizations.

Although the youthful Topology Troubadour-cum-Lizard Cultivator could call to the fore all he knew about the Stuckists’ politics and figurative paintings, none of his representational discourse, even when combined with abstracted sentiments of MFA candidates and lunchroom ladies, provided him any refuge from the green pirates’ image management henchmen. In a word, Jim-Jam’s electronic mailbox was flooding. Other than cancel that email address, there was nothing he could do about the deluge.

* * *

To boot, Jim-Jam’s comeuppance for leaving Mr. Weaver alone to face Raymond Charles Harvest Festival’s hungry hordes came in the form of his being assigned to help the school janitor clean up the morning after the dance. Across that floor, Ralph, Scooter and several dozen other young men and women had puked out their stomachs’ contents after guzzling too much brandymel-spiked punch. In addition, there, Harvest Queen Doris Giskin, after tripping on her pumpkin crown’s dripping seeds, had spilt not only her primped and polished pate, but also her royal, decorative gourd. The gym was a mess.

While Jim-Jam had put to good use the fruit of his school arboretum’s lone, doomed Arbutus unedo, and while Jim-Jam had temporarily escaped Doris’ wrath by tweaking the elections, he was entirely uninterested in mopping up vomit and pips. He needed to use his time convincing a science periodical that his writings on the twenty most lucrative applications of mustelid hides, and on the implementation of magnetic nanoparticles in the solid-phase synthesis of select amino acid amides, which are found only in the inner ears of Komodo dragons, were worth publishing.

Although Jim-Jam grasped that it was stupid for him to try to convince academic outlets of the soundness of his theories, and although he appreciated that naïve gatekeepers encumbered suspect communications by blocking writers like himself from his contemporaries’ appraisal, he also understood that no editor wanted his or her ministrations to be censored via collegial shaming. A person of science might be able to confide in his cohorts that certain editors are idiots, but professionals would continue to refrain from publicly calling attention to the degree to which certain publishers’ heuristics are tosh.

Jim-Jam’s friend, the professor at Maharishi University of Management had explained these truths to him. More pertinently, that newly tenured man had cajoled Jim-Jam, reinforcing his belief that whereas a good twigging of psychology might help scholars create articles beloved to their readers, no single paragraph of insight would ever get published if masthead members were not placated.

It remained unsuitable for Jim-Jam to act as if his mental cogitations, not his manners, were rebuffing editors. No one cared that Jim-Jam worried over a lack of science awards or over a lack of footnotes referencing his research; editors insisted on decorum.

Jim-Jam mopped and moped. He swept and wept. He took hour-long breaks to play Gin Rummy with the janitor. Accordingly, it took all day for the two of them to clean the gym to Ms. Spencer’s specifications. Not until the stars and moon littered the sky was that Inventor of Magnetic Spin Predilections Gone Wonky, Diffuser of Uncommon Life Forms’ Toxicity, and Rarely Acne-Prone Warder of Haberdashery Delights able to return to his investigation of rustproof keychains.

* * *

Back in his shack, O’Neily weighed the ways in which small, metal fetters of coated, torus-shaped links could endear him to the nation’s navy. His seafaring friends often complained that their keys slipped from their chains when those links became degraded. Such weak connections usually occurred at inconvenient times such as during inspections, when trying to instigate “romance” with moneyed tourists, or at times simultaneous with taking a leak.

No military vendors, to date, had addressed that question. Mostly, the merchandisers that were busy ringing up sales to the military profited from nuclear reactors, nuclear shielding, one-off comestibles, anti-nausea drugs, and toilet bowl covers. Many niche markets, like that of rustproof keychains, were, as of yet, unexploited.

Jim-Jam merely had to conceive the military that his was a cheap, safe way to create miniature sets of links. Afterwards, he’d be rich. The navy could fund his future dormitory costs and could exculpate him from his exertions with the green musketeers. The armed forces had enough funds to lubricate all of Jim-Jam’s other blocked negotiations, too.

Best, unlike accredited manufacturers, O’Neily didn’t have to worry about coating thicknesses or laboratory costs. It would be of benefit to the military that his production of gear would take place on a very limited scale.

More exactingly, his production would take place if he could solve a single development glitch. Parkerizing, dipping metal bits into phosphoric acid solutions; bluing, dipping metal bits into boiling sodium hydroxide; and passivation, submerging metal bits in nitric acid solution, all were impossible for his would-be product. One of his large, clumsy lizards had ruled out his trying any of those methods.

That pet had mistakenly knocked its tail into a stand where a vat of acid had been mellowing some metal and had thus discharged a bit of that stuff onto one of its forepaws. The Komodo had then raged so violently that Jim-Jam had encouraged it to eat a Pomeranian, a stray cat, and half of a dozen local squirrels before attempting to lock it out of his workshop.

Even after engaging those fail-safes, during a span when he was making crucial calculations, Jim-Jam had been interrupted by the sound of claws dragging across his building’s door. Lost data or no, Jim-Jam refused to readmit that lizard. He was okay with letting the neighbors attribute another misplaced schnauzer to rabid badgers, with letting the members of the local law enforcement squad claim that alligators were once more swimming through the town’s septic systems, and with letting Mrs. Preenberry go berserk that her backyard’s songbirds, which served as her proxies for sacred human harmonizing, had suddenly winged away. It was better for Jim-Jam’s angry beauty to prowl than for Jim-Jam to have to have to choose between his familiar and his place of safety. Besides, Mom had taken the car to work and he was out of space blankets.

* * *

A little while later, while the clawing continued, Jim-Jam frowned at the miasma that he had created from a tub of steaming, solid carbon dioxide. Bits and snips of three generations of crawfish, which had been liberated from Raymond Charles’ biology lab, were spread on his desk. Jim-Jam could dissect those critters only when his brutes were deep in slumber and only when he decided to take a break from his keychain research.

Near dawn, the youth, whose know-how extended to an annuity of two-sided tape vast enough to wrap twice around Stonehenge, once around select pnictogen-based compounds, and a few times around a forklift’s worth of pabulum, brushed emptied carapaces into the chow bowl on the floor. He then saved a file and shut off his computer.

Other scientists ought to grasp that his model of an adiabatic microcalorimeter could be compared, favorably, to the respective findings of Boyle, of Charles, of Gay-Lussac, and of Avogadro. It made little sense to him that academics were not already fighting amongst themselves for the honor of adding him to their research teams.

Over and above, Jim-Jam had become aware that his knowledge of science was nothing relative to his ability to apply that expertise. Not only hadn’t he killed his red-eared turtles a decade ago, but he had succeeded in splicing their genes to the level at which they took on qualities of organisms more commonly found in mid-Atlantic tidal streams. Those vicious babies, which had been loosened to the municipality’s pool, by Jim-Jam, during their breeding season, made piecework of that tank’s storm drains as they were attempting to enter a nearby intertidal zone via the pool’s unperforated, horizontal pipes. Unluckily, they got stuck in an absorption trench and perished.

Jim-Jam sighed as he revisited those results. Another of his admitted failures had been “the curd,” which Jim-Jam had fashioned from byproducts of witch hazel leaves, olive bark, and sunflower seeds, and which he had combined with linalool and geraniol, thus creating a topical analgesic that readily and gainfully sold in Raymond Charles’s halls. Jim-Jam’s compound had calmed his fellow adolescents’ nerves. Unfortunately, it had also created wonderful combustions.

Although the town’s Memorial Day Fireworks Committee had officially disapproved of using any substance not stamped by the Federal Department of Transportation, and although the county’s three privately-owned triage centers wouldn’t ask, officially, for any gel lacking FDA endorsement, Jim-Jam had sold vast amounts of that sticky, semifluid matter. Even George, the library vagrant, had invested in it.

Eventually, though, Jim-Jam had had to stop selling it. Even though he was blameless in Marina Dupas’ decision to apply that gel, which she had mistakenly judged to be a cyanoacrylate, a fast-acting adhesive, to the retro, banana-seat dirt bike of her brother, there had been a resulting exothermic chemical reaction, a form of oxidation caused by the heat radiating from Ralph’s thighs, when Ralph straddling his bike’s seat.

Marina had meant not to injure but to inconvenience her sibling for locking her out of her room. Ralph had argued that he had thought Marina was visiting Scooter. He refused to admit that he had turned the key in his sister’s door in order to read her diary. When Marina had run into her room, she had found her diary on her desk, not under her favorite stuffed animal.

Ralph’s consequent reinstatement as a guest of Upper Buckwheat County Hospital, however, had not been one of Marina’s intentions. More dreadful, while he healed, she was forced to buy him treats out of her allowance, to spend two hours daily reading graphic novels to him and to make no jokes about the site of his injury. Short of fulfilling those duties, she again had to wash the Dupas’ cat.

* * *

At other times, Jim-Jam succeeded. Master O’Neily, Virtual Scuba Expert Extraordinaire, County Math Olympiad Champ for three consecutive years, and Passionate Purveyor of Historical Rhetoric, had finally completed all of the necessary extra maneuvers to outsmart the security portals that had previously prevented him from reprogramming the banner on Mrs. Preenberry’s webpage. Her site now read “Central Processing: Broken Hearts and Private Parts are Our Specialty. Black Lace Gets Discounts!”

The Teen Svengali, Fashion Prince Postpositive, Sums Sensation, and Remarkable Rubber Band Collector smiled at that electronic depiction. Later, he also, via a firehose hung on a roof two houses away from the Preenberrys’, sprayed the church lady’s posies with a mixture of oven cleaner, soiled turkey feathers, sourced from a nearby farm, and Cajun hot sauce. For good measure, Jim-Jam also remotely rewired Mrs. Preenberry’s doorbell chime to ring out the jingle for the world’s most popular mail order company of “nubile” brides.

A lizard stirred. Jim-Jam frowned. He had yet to contend with Lynnie Lola’s mom, Mrs. Jones. The lass’s parents had no clue why their daughter was still in a near catatonic state. One of their futile attempts to improve her status was to insist that Young O’Neily provide them, at least thrice a week, with new hats. The Jonses remembered that his millinery delights had once pleased their child and hoped that regular purchases of his lace and cotton toppers might move their precious Lynnie Lola past her obsession with insects and scaly beings or at least help her keep up with Doris Giskin. It was vital to them that their dear seek entertainment beyond 1980s movies. They would know her to be healthy when they saw her return to competitive socializing.

Lynnie Lola’s mom texted Jim-Jam every day in an attempt to accelerate his production of head ornaments. She was adamant, as well, that as long as he sold his wares to her by the dozen, that she receive a deep discount. Her and her husband’s rescue of Lynnie Lola from reruns of The Brady Bunch Reunion ought not to be a big-ticket item.

Proceed to Chapter 10...

Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg