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

by Channie Greenberg

Table of Contents

Chapter Eighteen: Avoiding Interest

Doris’ grandma, Billy Lou’s mom, had been less fortunate than Billy Lou. She had lived out her final tens of her years in the insane asylum at Upper Buckwheat Hospital. There, she was ever foaming at the mouth and struggling against the strips of cloth that restrained her. Unlike her children, Billy Lou Giskin and Bobby Leonard Giskin, Grandma’s pain was not rooted in psychosis but in the facial diplegia she experienced from Guillain-Barré syndrome.

In spite of that fact, the more that she protested that her twitching and paralysis were physically based, the more the medicos drugged and restricted her. When Doris’ grandma died from starvation because her mask had made chewing nearly impossible, the county coroner merely closed her casket’s lid without completing his investigation. In those days, it was politically ill-advised for appointed spokespersons to advertise the death of demented patients.

Like Billy Lou, Doris lacked the academic acumen to appreciate the racemic nature of the clopentixol which Billy Lou swallowed three times a day. She would have been upset to learn that he ground up half of each of those doses and fed the resulting powder to his brooders to make them submissive. It was not so much that he minded having to trim their beaks as it was that he wanted to have enough time to play with his belly button lint.

That his practice of drugging his hens resulted in their having atypically high levels of prolactin was indiscernible to him. Billy Lou simply reckoned himself masterful at husbandry and prided himself that his girls’ laying rates were higher than average. It was obvious to him that Swill and Bales Farm was the best source for turkey meat and turkey eggs in the entire state.

Whereas his poultry were popular and provided a source of pride for his family, no relative knew about Billy Lou’s other business. As adorable as was his niece Doris, she, like the rest of their kin, would glean no information about Billy Lou’s import/export sideline.

* * *

A former rail-riding friend of Billy Lou’s had helped Billy Lou enter another trade. That man had been framed by some up-and-coming girl lawyer, a woman who dared to live in Upper Buckwheat County.

Not caring about his consociate’s legal troubles, Billy-Lou had shrugged and had scratched his backside when the other hobo had initially tried to rope him in. Billy Lou was more steer than bull and as such was uninterested in stories about unlovable female chemists or about hot waitresses at homeless shelters. That breadline stander caught Billy Lou’s interest only when he began to talk money.

That bum told Billy Lou that he had worked as a security agency employee before he took to the road. In his role as a bomb appraisal officer, he had used methodical processes for checking and determining whether or not a hazard existed. Along the way, he had also acquired means of collecting kickback.

Billy Lou had stopped scratching his butt. He liked what the other fellow was telling him. That itinerant, noticing the change in Billy Lou’s expression, continued. He insisted that he knew someone who knew someone who had successfully paid down a mortgage, bought a custom fursuit, and then had posed as the Presidential candidate because of his success with the hobo’s scam. All that the turkey farmer had to do to enjoy equivalent wealth was to act as a vehicle, that is, to represent the hobo’s products to the hobo’s customers. In return, Billy Lou would receive a per cent of the earnings.

The products offered were as varied as flowers in a springtime meadow. Billy Lou flaked the dandruff off of each of his eyebrows and chewed the insides of both of his cheeks before he could cogitate enough to understand that allusion. As he watched his white bits of eyebrow skin, caused most likely by a fungus infection, drop onto his shirt, he asked his friend to describe more accurately the sort of goods that were getting fenced.

The deadbeat smiled and exclaimed that he offered everything from pruning shears to radioactive ore.

Billy Lou was so happy with the abundance of dead skin that he had culled that he decided to scratch his hairline to replicate the snowfall. He wondered why George was offering him a cut. He asked about the fate of the man who had campaigned for President.

The scrounger shook his head and tried to look away from Billy Lou’s self-archeology. George’s former pal had learned that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had been sniffing around the airport to which that pal had sometimes shipped merchandise. The former Presidential candidate had fled to Banff.

George told Billy Lou that he had grilled other itinerants about the disappeared candidate. A few claimed that that he had bought himself long johns, a used set of cross-country skis and poles, and a one-bedroom condominium. Others said that he had sold that condo to tourists for a great profit and had reinvented himself as a carpenter specializing in restoring wilderness lean-tos. One man had piped up, whispering hoarsely, that the former trafficker’s work with wooden bivvies had made him popular with young ruffians and that the man would never return to the United States.

Billy Lou shrugged, reached dirty fingernails into one of his armpits, a complex maneuver in view of the evidence that he was wearing a long-sleeved sweater. While he hunted for treasures, he announced that he’d be willing to help his old friend.

* * *

Noticing that her uncle was mentally elsewhere, Doris shook her head from east to west. She slipped her ear buds back in and rocked slowly on her chair, all the while taking in the views from her relative’s covered porch. Sometimes, Uncle Billy Lou could be transfixed for long minutes. She’d have to content herself with listening to tunes from her playlist before she could tell him that Jim-Jam O’Neily, not Ralph Dupas, was squiring her to the hoedown scheduled for the end of her senior year.

* * *

Nearby, Jim-Jam O’Neily waved his hand over a keyboard to link himself to several of his collaborators. He failed to notice a flashing icon on the bottom right hand corner of his screen and, consequently, failed to realize that his firewall had, again, been breached.

Because he did not discover that malicious activity, Jim-Jam did not sign off. He did not make sure that his security software was running. As a result, his websites, applications, and archives all were compromised.

Rather than discern his security crisis, Jim-Jam’s eyes lit on the paper umbrella, which he had stuck in the glass of iced tea that had been gifted to him by Doris Giskin. Earlier that day, Doris had overheard Jim-Jam talking to Mr. Weaver about slush monkeys and had mistaken those gatekeepers, disliked by James Jackson, for the little, plastic creatures designed to adorn sticks stuck in shaved-ice drinks.

Doris lacked Lima’s brilliance, Mrs. Preenberry’s challenging nature, and Mrs. Jones’ unadulterated authority. She was not at all fierce. On the flip side, she was useful. Like a terrier, she was protective in her loyalty.

Young O’Neily smiled as he recalled that it had been Doris who had forewarned him about Mr. Weaver’s maniacal intentions and about Lima Quinn’s less-than-innocent nature. Into the bargain, when most of the school’s fashionistas were glomming to Lima’s line of hats, Doris was still parading Jim-Jam’s creations. Moreover, she wiped off any meatballs or undercooked eggs thrown at her by unappreciative peers whenever she modeled Jim-Jam’s work.

Jim-Jam was glad that he had aided Doris in becoming Harvest Festival Queen. He was additionally pleased that she had agreed to attend the year’s final dance with him. In his fantasies, though, he turned her and all his neighborhood’s yippy puppies into Komodo fodder.

* * *

Jim-Jam appreciated Mr. Weaver, the Social Studies teacher, and Ms. Spencer, Raymond Charles’s Principal, even less. Those two, who had been aided in their discovery of Jim-Jam’s wrongdoings by electronic trail markers provided by a source with the appellation “L. Q., Queen of the Web,” had chosen to count Jim-Jam’s electronic recreations of students’ grades as proof that he was no longer a “juvenile delinquent” but an adult thug. They planned to charge him in an adult court.

Earlier that month, Mr. Weaver had declared, in large letters written on his smartboard, that there would be no cooperating among term-paper writers. That is to say, he was going to carefully check whether or not the papers his students submitted were entirely their own.

Weaver neither knew nor cared that James Jackson O’Neily had moved his financial ambitions to the other side of the universe or that O’Neily and Quinn were having increasingly vicious software battles. Weaver remained clueless, furthermore, that one of the members of his AP class, Lima Quinn, had friends “in places” who could toss their intellectual hardhats into all sorts of vital software, and who could take Weaver, Upper Buckwheat County School District, and, if need be, parts of the federal government, for a wild ride.

More precisely, Weaver was absorbed with shutting down the O’Neily brat for “dallying with copying.” The Social Studies teacher cared about that misdeed only because he had learned that beyond altering students’ grades, James Jackson Ariel O’Neily had tampered with faculty promotion documents.

What had outraged Mr. Weaver most was that he had been told that his petition for a permanent slot had been turned down because of suspicious activities, the likes of which were transferred from Mr. Atkins’ record to his. Mr. Weaver was an educator, not an insurgent fired up by dated Revolutionary War Era pamphlets. Weaver believed that Raymond Charles High School would have changed his status from that of a temp to that of a permanent employee had O’Neily not interfered.

Accordingly, Weaver’s posted notice and loud rhetoric were just meant to frighten those few of his students who were borderline goodniks. He had as much interest in running all of their papers through antiplagiarism software and in then having to deal with subsequently identified bad apples as he had in encouraging an ingrown toenail.

Ms. Spenser, too, was very angry at Jim-Jam O’Neily. She had learned that her two-inch thick request for a salary increase had gone unread. The rationale she had been given by the school board was that she had not submitted her forms in triplicate. The school board was correct; Spenser had submitted four copies of each of the requisite papers. It was audacious that a student had dared to meddle with her much-needed income.

As a result of those particular offenses, Jim-Jam was given a lengthy suspension followed by a home-based detention. The school did not formally expel him, but neither did it welcome him back to its corridors. In addition to being disciplined, Jim-Jam was being sued by the school district.

* * *

Mom told Jim-Jam that she might not be able to fix all of his legal entanglements. She had shared with him the nature and number of his pending suits. In addition to those stumbling blocks, for all intents and purposes, the local authorities had made Jim-Jam their newest poster boy for teens gone rotten.

Their tussle with Jim-Jam’s Komodo dragons remained foremost in their collective memory. Those officers readily recalled having to capture and guard those large lizards. They easily summoned to their shared mind the cost in kibble and in mental health professionals’ billable hours that had resulted from that incident.

They harked back, too, to the many provocations they had weathered from Counselor O’Neily. That uppity woman had glared at them whenever they had called her and had had the pluck to threaten the precinct several times for harassment. That she had brandished a tape recorder as well as a camera made the local police love her even less. With seeming delight, they repeatedly arrested, fingerprinted, and released her child and then sneered at her that she had produced a bad seed.

It had been the school board who had gotten the police involved in Jim-Jam’s academic illegalities. The elected officials had assumed correctly that the law enforcers had more power to discipline Jim-Jam than did they. The bonus to the board, in letting the police department prosecute the kid, was that the police were more able than the board to get O’Neily judged as an adult.

* * *

Not only did Jim-Jam have legal hassles, but he had money problems, too. He needed dosh. In his latest electronic communications on Raymond Charles High School’s faculty listserv, Jim-Jam eliminated semantic obfuscations, even going so far as to state unambiguously that he could no longer extend credit for Khitty Khleen millinery or for Trigonometry II and Advanced Latin tutoring. He wrote that, going forward, he would only accept cash or soft-point bullets as payment. No other varieties of payment in kind, in wit, in compassion, or in compliance would be accepted save for a bandolier.

Back in his lair, Jim-Jam cried. Even faithful Doris was reporting that the kids at school saw his latest woes as his karma catching up to him. The other teens had begun to avoid all electronic contact with him. It no longer mattered that he had upheld many young fashionistas’ allure or that he had supplied them with exclusive, handcrafted goods. Jim-Jam’s acquaintances wanted to get into college and their parents had warned them that any further associations with O’Neily might cause them to be rejected altogether rather than having to accept a place on a waiting list.

After blubbering for a while, the Bright Bulb quieted. Jim-Jam couldn’t figure out where he had erred. He had always been fastidious about cleaning up his electronic footprints. Sure, he had blackmailed some people, but like other computer security experts who sometimes violated laws, he had been willing to receive bribes in fair coin. The Synchronously-Smart-and-Able Teen Scientist had yet to discover that infectious malware was eating up his disk drive. It never occurred to him that his security systems had been compromised.

Proceed to Chapter 19...

Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg