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

by Channie Greenberg

Table of Contents

Chapter Fifteen: Mindless Rhetorical Onslaughts

Someone, particularly Lynnie Lola’s mother, had been texting Jim-Jam since dawn. The woman was frantic; her daughter, Lynnie Lola, Raymond Charles’ former Empress of Culture, was slipping into mental countries uncharted by any care provider. Suddenly, the beauty found herself not only phobic of creepy-crawlies, but also unable to cross her arms or to slit her eyes.

Mrs. Jones wanted Jim-Jam O’Neily to make Lynnie Lola new, pettable hats. The tactile sensations produced by the majority of Jim-Jam’s crafts were singular in their ability — head dressings made from Khitty Khleen litter bags excepted — to pull Lynnie Lola, for at least five to ten minutes at a time, away from her need to stroke the ankle-length outer garments worn by other people. More to the point, those head coverings, alone, had the power to bring the Jones’s girl provisionally back to linens, cottons, and synthetics.

Bereft of O’Neily millinery creations, even during hot afternoons, and even when taking a bath, Lynnie Lola could not cope. Poor substitutes for his hats included sealskin sandals, tote bags featuring dangling foxtails, and sweaters with coyote collars. On balance, though, she was not appeased by running well-manicured hands over the taxidermied voles, moles, and mice, with which her mother had absconded from Jim-Jam’s place of work. By the same token, she refused to be mollified by the rabbit’s-foot keychains, hair ornaments crafted from raccoon dogs, or Mongolian lamb-covered clutches brought to her by her inner circle.

Grasping fur exclusively made Lynnie Lola content. O’Neily’s work, among other relatively inexpensive items available to the Jones Family, was the girl’s favorite solace, not counting her granddame’s mink stole.

So, Mrs. Jones indefatigably rang up Jim-Jam that morning, hoping that he would eventually answer and that he could craft another two or five toppers that might summon her daughter briefly back. Mrs. Jones continued to be skeptical of the effect of the O’Neily Treatment, but given Lynnie Lola’s rapid erosion, that is, her quick departure to places unknown, Mrs. Jones wanted new hats.

For two days, Jim-Jam put aside his designs for missile-catalyzing keychains to scrabble with glazed thread, with flower wreaths, and with velvet grape clusters. He attempted to make attractive combinations out of silk leaf sprays and flocked poppy pods for both a vintage-styled bubble-brim and a fashionable plunge, too. Likewise, he integrated items from his ever-growing collection of turkey neck bones into some of his designs.

While fussing with that batch of headwear, threading veiling ornamented with rhinestones over felt made from rabbit wool, acrylic, and alpaca fibers, and intertwining raffia braiding with dotted horsehair ribbons, Jim-Jam experienced a strong hankering. He wanted to make a hat out of sinamay. He didn’t indulge himself in that way, however, because that textile lacked the sur la forme of any animal and as such could not be sold to Lynnie Lola’s mom. Mrs. Jones had warned Jim-Jam that she was not paying for anything, not even at a deeply discounted price, that failed to aid her daughter. To use time to make such a hat was foolhardy since Jim-Jam was already far behind in meeting other deadlines.

Sighing, Jim-Jam returned to Mrs. Jones’ order. He ignored Lima’s newest attempts to breach his freshly reinforced software and disregarded her threats to identify him as masterminding her kidnapping. Until he finished and sold his keychains, he needed all of the money he could glean from hat sales to the Joneses.

* * *

As it were, Jim-Jam did take a break from his millenary pursuits a few afternoons later, when an enigmatic scientist texted him with an offer of a significant sum of money as payment for Jim-Jam’s creating “medical documents.” The lad’s wannabe employer wrote that he fancied himself pinging phishing bullies and that he wanted to force them to cancel their email accounts or to buy multiple bottles of his nutritional supplements, whichever came first.

That mysterious boss claimed, to Jim-Jam, that product contamination was less of a worry to him than was Jim-Jam’s producing identifiers that would show the man’s rivals’ goods as having debatable purity, strength, and composition. The anonymous fellow wanted not only to prove that his competitors were cyberbullies, but also that they were selling faulty merchandise to unsuspecting individuals.

A couple of keystrokes later, many bits of bobbin lace, scraps of taffeta, and clusters of knitted almond blossoms fell to the floor of Jim-Jam’s science shelter. The Usually Never Obsequious Boy embraced a new money-making scheme. Mrs. Jones and, by extension, Lynnie Lola, could wait. Inauspiciously, so would his college applications and his weapon of mass destruction keychain project. Making money had to come first.

After a bit of digging, Jim-Jam verified that his benefactor’s Internet Protocol address was not Lima’s. He then reverse-checked the sender’s email and came up with an academic office on the other side of the world. The Ordinarily Not Sycophantic Youth also trawled to see if the sender was using a virtual private network. Satisfied that his new commander was not his annoying classmate or any sort of felon, Jim-Jam wrote back that he would accept the assignment.

A few days into his efforts, Jim-Jam’s mysterious sponsor tasked him with a second job. Beyond fabricating medical experts’ testimony against the products of his ghostly supervisor’s competitors, Jim-Jam had, additionally, to authenticate, via actual lab results, the accuracy of his those claims. His cryptic funder wrote that he expected Jim-Jam to be able to access a state of the art lab to complete that work.

As long as the usual force of Earth’s gravitational pull impacted his ability to stand upright, and as long as the values that undergird entertainment authorities’ behavioral prescriptions, i.e. their choices for road shows, remained a possible vehicle to explain his career’s essential meaning, Jim-Jam was inclined to comply. His unseen backer seemed to understand him.

* * *

So, O’Neily made haste to the public library, where George had resumed his station. Jim-Jam remembered that the wanderer had recently boasted about reacquiring bench privileges at Upper Buckwheat University.

Jim-Jam poked the drifter, who was salivating in his sleep over a copy of Radioanalytical Chemistry in Field Mice and asked him if he could help Jim-Jam with some work on nutritional genomics. He told George that he needed to know how to use multiparameter bead-based fluorescent methods and cellular assays in order to assemble files about proteomes. Jim-Jam also told George that he still meant to prove himself to be one of the world’s top scholars of eukaryote plastids.

George coughed out a hairball, the tang of last night’s liver and onions at Home Away, and a bit of mucus. He rubbed an encrusted hand against an encrusted lid and eyeballed Jim-Jam. It was a pity that a man of his footing had to genuflect to such a punk. Maybe, rather than continue to make nice-nice to that young idiot, he could get Barbra to design a device scaled to fit a keychain.

Raymond Charles High School’s Science Ace stared back. He ought not to be trucking with a street person. The guy seemed both smart and resourceful, but he was, contemporaneously, the sort of person against whom Mom had always warned Jim-Jam. In spite of that caution, George was a “somewhat disposable.”

If Jim-Jam’s nameless employer failed to pay up, he needed another source of funds. If, in pursuing the military as a provider, Jim-Jam got caught in tax office crosshairs for developing missile-guiding keychains without properly tithing his profits, he could blame George, that no-name townie and legal adult. While George dealt with the financial consequences of partnering with O’Neily, the latter could help him extend his research on the peptidoglycan layer of glaucophytes, more distantly, on the SAR supergroup.

Unlike Lima Quinn, who was as slippery as a hydroxyl radical in her business dealings, Jim-Jam O’Neily made sure that his associates had some idea, fabricated or not, about the activities into which they were delving. His axiology would always be on higher grounds than hers.

* * *

At the same time as Jim-Jam was determining how to play George, Lima Quinn was mentally revising her “to do” list and her notes for a forthcoming Social Studies test. The former kept her thick with vlog groupies, while the latter would supposedly get her noticed by the nation’s top schools.

Lima guffawed; math and language skills, logic, and computational ability were the makings of Ivy League admissions. Only AP teachers like Mr. Weaver, who were desperate to earn overtime pay, urged their students to invest crazy numbers of hours studying notable human affairs.

The Bright Girl and Expert Flack picked at the vestiges of her beef lo mein and simmering rice. On the other side of the table, her mother spouted about some adventure of hers among Furries.

Barbra had detected Lima’s frown, but could not infer its source. Now and then, Barbra cared enough about her daughter to want to distract that child from any cruelty that child was braving. Dr. Quinn held herself back from attempting outright rescues, since the parenting books, to which she glommed, suggested different strategies. According to those authors, only episodes that might be deemed “dangerous” or “destructive” ought to be subjected to meddling.

Reflecting on her own adolescence, Barbra believed that it was more likely that the parents of Lima’s friends, not Lima’s friends, per se, were to blame for Lima’s darkened countenance. Grownups were more villainous than children. People Barbra’s age had never hesitated to point out awkward significances, like the absence of Lima’s father, to Lima.

Maybe, considered Barbra, her thinking was topsy-turvy; maybe there were no bullying adults in Lima’s life and Lima had undergone an infatuation from which she had been rebuffed. Barbra knew that men are devils. Chasity belts ought to have been worn by them, not by women.

Hence, wishing to put her daughter at ease, Barbra had begun to tell stories. She “confided” to her lone offspring that she had once had a tryst with a banker, who had posed as a lizard, and who had encouraged Barbra to join him in additional Furmeet dalliances.

* * *

Lima frowned. Barbra often tried to give over Fursuit stories as a means of “cheering up” Lima, when she could have, preferably, told Lima tales about her romance with Lima’s father. Lima suspected that her mother had shared more than intimacy with that man.

Barbra prattled some more about grownups engrossed in an expensive, albeit imaginary, world. Lima wondered if her male progenitor had been someone Barbra had met during one such instance of that pastime. Had he dressed as a donkey? As a peacock? As a snake?

Lima consoled herself with her knowledge that her mother was an untidy housekeeper. Her classified documents, especially those caches that she stored in her datebook, in her purse-sized phone directory, and in her drawers full of index cards, were accessible to anyone who cared to find them. Lima cared. She might yet be able to identify and eventually to meet her father.

* * *

A few blocks away, Mom snatched the shovel that had been leaning against Jim-Jam’s science retreat. She breathed loudly. If only her dear son had spent his senior year abroad, or had taken early admission to a far-away university, she might have been able to keep him from harm’s research. Whereas extant family members did not seem fatigued by Jim-Jam’s parade of titular breaches, by his specious divide between “public” and “private,” by his ongoing scamming of neighborhood teenagers, or by his continued nastiness to his younger sister, those inexcusable acts weighed nominally alongside of his having harbored Komodo dragons.

For a long moment, Mom regretted that she had mated for genes and not for love. Perhaps, if her children’s father had been a dearheart, rather than a genius, he would still be around to help corral their son.

In spite of her increasingly wilding inner tempest, Mom’s gut heaved at the thought of abandoning Jim-Jam to “natural consequences.” Her son was in major moo poo. Mom’s colleagues would have to argue non-recognition of full faith and credit, predicated on lack of conclusiveness or on conflict with another final and conclusive judgment, to exonerate him. A surplus of phone calls, emails, tweets, and texts had surfaced. All of them documented her child’s disreputable choices. Her co-workers were running out of ideas of how to protect him.

Mom and her associates had been wrestling with Letters of Request delivered on behalf of certain ships’ captains and on behalf of a particular ecology society. Increasingly large numbers of complaints were being filed in national and in international venues against Jim-Jam, too, and indications of cybercrimes were also rapidly showing up in a docket devoted to him.

More dreadful than his personal, problematic choices was the news of the destabilizing acts of Jim-Jam’s vagrant companion, “George.” George confounded Counselor O’Neily in ways that serial killers and child abusers never did. If Jim-Jam had merely mixed it up with senior scientists and industry giants or had merely joined with political yahoos and with neighbors that took the law into their own hands, like Mrs. Preenberry, Mom’s team might have been able to steer Jim-Jam back to legal equilibrium.

Rather, Mom’s teammates had unearthed that George had failed to resolve a matter of property damage with Upper Buckwheat University, and that George had been cited, many times, for trespassing and other acts of vagrancy. An employee at Home-Way had also filed a harassment suit against him, but that litigation was still pending.

Counselor O’Neily closed her eyes to shelter herself from the stupidity of the rhetorical onslaughts of which her child was the object. There had to be a way for her team to help him receive a favorable result in arbitration, even though existing judicial strictures made it seem unlikely that any judge would assess Jim-Jam’s actions in a good light.

Whereas it was not Mom’s place to proffer axiologies or to assess others’ adherence to the values they professed to possess, some of the exchanges between the government and her office had proceeded poorly. Neither the potential risks of her squad’s appeal nor the potential complications related to that process’s outcomes frightened her, but the prosecution’s emotional appeals, dressed in the guise of logic, were terrifying. At least, the judge ought to have insisted that Jim-Jam be treated as being fully sane.

Proceed to Chapter 16...

Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg