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

by Channie Greenberg

Table of Contents

Chapter Ten: Ugly, Greyish Things

Mr. Weaver, that locum of a Social Studies teacher, failed to appreciate that the Young Creator of Chemically-Enhanced Bovine Fluid, Guardian of Dangling Participles, and Vanguard of Ten Hues of Permanently Staining Invisible Ink, shouldn’t be stuck with eighty more detentions. As a result, he was in danger of receiving poisoned apples.

Sure, Jim-Jam ought not to have abandoned Weaver at the school’s Harvest Festival. On balance, the odd duck of a Social Studies instructor should have cared whether or not O’Neily met the submissions deadline for an eminent Indian chemistry journal. Yet, Weaver only worried over his child slave’s ability to draw a sufficient number of maps depicting global rainfall, and over his ability to sketch enough graphs illustrating developing nations’ economies’ dependence on the international ore market to change Weaver’s classes’ designations from naptimes to “best part of the school day.”

Since no deadly fruit turned up on his desk, Mr. Weaver told his unwilling protégé that he was supposed to have become an infectious disease specialist, but having failed calculus three times, had made himself of small use to the Center for Disorders of Structure or Function. That agency, as the entire world is aware, insists that its employees are able to compute population vectors when addressing the fighting of airborne contagions. As such, the agency refused Weaver as their civil servant.

So, Weaver made due with ordinary government work. Namely, he taught pox-marked kids, who were busy trying to clandestinely use their smart phones, the particulars of the Wars of the Roses. Since dynastic conflicts little interested Weaver, he taxed O’Neily with making sure that his age group knew that Frankfort, Bismarck, and Pierre are not cities in Europe, but are capitals of states. The teacher wanted all of his students to come to terms, too, with the fact that eleven capitol buildings, especially those in Delaware and in North Dakota, lacked domes.

O’Neily capitulated but did so simpering. His maps were not assemblages of light and dark shapes, but were composed of colored microcalligraphy enumerating swear words in Arabic, in Persian, and in Chuvash. Likewise, his graphs depicted not only nations’ relative wealth of precipitation, but also the names of the last fifty years’ worth of grand champions of the Westminster Kennel Club’s dog show.

Jim-Jam was never caught by Mr. Weaver for those misdemeanors. He was, though, found guilty, for similarly unscrupulous domestic acts by Mom.

* * *

Apparently, Jim-Jam’s mom, a woman that was certain that offspring ought to be facile with old-fashioned, printed figures, and not just with electronic certainties, had remembered that her pride and joy, that youth into whom she had poured hours of teacher-parent conferences, pounds of hamburger meat, crates of pink grapefruits, cases of sugar-free granola bars, and far too much money for Internet connections to foreign universities’ collections, had books that were overdue at the public library.

Deciding to treat herself to an actual lunch hour, Mom had scooped up the pile of borrowed items that her son and daughter had left scattered on their family’s sun porch, had grabbed an erstwhile neglected bottle of goat yoghurt from the fridge, and had driven to the municipal complex that housed the local library.

While lingering before the shelf containing the works of Marcel Proust, Honoré de Balzac, and Gustav Flaubert, Mom was intercepted by a smelly bloke intent on harrumphing at her. George, the drifter and physical chemist, had decoded Mom’s connection to his greatest competitor. That man, whose permanent appointment as a professor had been denied because his review committee had determined that his research was really directed at creating multiple insurrections against the established order, tattled. That street sleeper told Mom about Jim-Jam’s poisonous varmints, about reptiles whose very saliva contained over fifty strains of toxins.

Mom fumed and then dashed for her car.

George smiled. He had made sure to share nothing with the good lawyer about his having bugged Jim-Jam’s cell phone or about his interest in Jim-Jam’s research on miniature armament controls. The mendicant still meant to steal that technology of his. George intended to ensure that Jim-Jam’s designs for rustproof keychains, which could be wired to destroy large, armored vessels, would not render the teen rich, but would, contrariwise, provide George with a thermodynamic weapon fit to actualizing George’s dream of payback. George fancied revenging himself on Upper Buckwheat’s wicked medical center and on a handful of the community’s urgent care facilities.

That former academic was intimate with those institutions. After accidentally blowing up his lab, but before living a poor person’s life, he had spent a decade serving as a “standardized patient.” That is, George had hired himself out as an actor who played the role of patient for local medical programs.

George had read about that salaried means to help save lives in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Quickly, he had gotten good at helping young, lab-coat bedecked medical students process emotionally difficult situations. For scores of future doctors, all of whom needed to practice examinations, George willingly pulled down his pants or stuck out his tongue. His characteristic chronic hemorrhoids and recurring impetigo made him a favorite among those budding health care providers.

Eventually, though, a poorly given case history ended his career. More explicitly, George’s younger brother had been admitted to the same hospital as the one in which George was primarily employed. That brother had arrived on a gurney, in a semiconscious state, having suffered a heart attack. In the ER, that brother unintentionally flummoxed the sweet gal in her early twenties, who, until that brother’s appearance at that crisis center, had been her class’ top doctor-patient communicator as well as its best clinician.

Upon assessing George’s brother, though, that little girl had fainted. She had correctly assessed that the man on the stretcher next to George’s was not an actor, but a man with an actual life-threatening situation. It was all she could do to hook up a heart monitor before she slid to the floor.

A week later, that young lady was cut from the medical program. Relatedly, George was also cut from the hospital’s employ. Subsequent to watching the medical student faint and subsequent to screaming like an underfed zombie, George foamed at the mouth. Days after his brother’s death, George continued to mess up most of his cues.

Just as the teaching hospital could not tolerate a doctor who left the everyday behind during an urgent situation, the teaching hospital could not tolerate an actor who traded performance for realism. No one in the human resources department cared that George’s reaction was a normal one given his having witnessed his sibling expire, let alone having beheld that his brother’s death was due to professional ineptitude.

After that double whammy of lost employment and lost kin, George flipped burgers at Deli Deluxe. He got fired from the French fry palace, too, on the grounds of his throwing boxes full of paper cups and plastic forks at his shift foreman. No one cared that George’s aggressive act was in reaction to his foreman’s critique of the exactitude of shoelace knot in George’s bow tie.

A bicycle delivery job followed fast food work as did a stint mucking cages at the community zoo. Eventually, George made his home in the regional airport’s arrivals terminal and then, much later, took up residence in the town’s library.

Although being able to enact his revenge on the louts that had let his brother jump the mortal coil meant having to mentor Jim-Jam, George was motivated. It was also the case that he had an unparalleled opportunity as the kid’s erstwhile associate, Maharishi University of Management’s newly tenured Professor of Sustainable Living, was busy on an extended London honeymoon. That man’s privately bartered bouquets of hugs and kisses were of no use to O’Neily when it came to solving thermodynamic equations, but his sudden unavailability was of great use to George.

* * *

Meanwhile, Jim-Jam’s Weaver-related tribulations became as nothing. The Biochemistry Rogue, Keeper of Cantilevered Storage Spaces and Most Junior Master of Deception returned home from school to find members of the local ASPCA aided by members of the local police department, all of whom were wearing hazmat suits overlaid with steel plating, carting away his Komodo dragons. A quick text to his 4-H friends revealed that his fostered lizards, too, had been rounded up.

* * *

A little while later, before Jim-Jam had time to recover, one Komodo nearly took a bite out of Mom. The largest of Jim-Jam’s pets, the one that had escaped from the precinct’s holding pen, and that had the unexpected intelligence, or random luck, made its way home.

The deputy sheriff, who was in charge of guarding those critters, had thought they were manifesting cage rage and, accordingly, repeatedly refilled their trough as a means of pacifying them. He had failed to realize that all along his prisoners were languishing from heartburn from eating too much dog food and from eating it too quickly. His actions had exacerbated their problems.

Even so, the ten-foot or more long fiends kept frightening their keeper into serving them additional dinner. During one refill, the biggest of them managed to escape. At least, after that lizard’s breakout, the deputy sheriff had managed to lock the rest of them in their cell before fainting outside of it.

It was that runaway, which was resting at the door to Jim-Jam’s research citadel, that had greeted Mom. Jim-Jam was serving detention with Weaver, and his little sister was at rifle practice, courtesy of their paternal grandmother’s cash. Mom had returned home, alone, from work.

The large Komodo, ever a survivalist, had chosen feeding herself over protecting her brood. In route to Jim-Jam’s hut, she had dug many feet in order to eat all of the research critters that had been located in Jim-Jam’s backyard pen. Still hungry, she had similarly devoured a neighbor’s yippy dog and an alley cat.

Counselor O’Neily, last season’s American Association of Smart Barrister’s Lawyer of the Year, had raised an eyebrow as well as her voice at the long, ugly, greyish thing camped on the threshold of her child’s outbuilding. That anomaly looked to be baser than any organized crime boss or than any perpetrator of domestic violence.

As Mom sized up the lizard, the lizard noticed Mom. The reptile comprehended the two-legged mammal as a fairly defenseless intruder.

Nonetheless, Mom answered the freak’s unhinged jaw with a spinning roundhouse kick, a defense taught to her, decades earlier, by a dojo sensei, who had deemed that his students needed to know what to do when faced with rabies-infected dogs. The “giant iguana,” however, was no inimitable canine; the lizard was annoyed but not deterred by Mom’s bob and wheel. She pursued Mom, amidst oncoming traffic, until Mom dove through a neighbor’s front door, slamming it, without regard, on the dragon’s snout.

That neighbor, Mrs. Preenberry, smiled at her bedraggled acquaintance, tut-tutting that it would have been nicer if Mom had made an effort to pull her outfit together before visiting. Mrs. Preenberry continued on, muttering about Mom’s undercooked casseroles, about the neighborhood’s overgrown dumpster cats, and about the area’s rapidly repopulating hedgehogs.

A loud crash startled Mrs. Preenberry out of her musing. She and Mom made haste to the bow window in Mrs. Preenberry’s living room.

Jim-Jam’s ugly, grey-brown quadruped was digging past Mrs. Preenberry’s petunias to the foundation of Mrs. Preenberry’s home. Except for the brief interlude when that large fiend was distracted while it severed and gulped down the body of a wiggling groundhog, it dug like a backhoe. That critter wanted to kill Mom, whom it could smell through Mrs. Preenberry’s external walls.

Mrs. Preenberry waxed with indignation. She had paid a large sum for an exterminator to do away with whistle-pigs. None should still be camping at her home’s footing, in general, or providing meals for unwelcomed visitors, more definitively.

As for Mom, she had involuntarily folded to her knees. Immediately thereafter, she met Mrs. Preenberry’s carpet face first.

To be continued...

Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg