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

by Channie Greenberg

Table of Contents

Chapter Five: Higher-Than-Normal-Intensity Laser Cannons

Jim-Jam would have been content to observe other people trying to control his atomic spin centers had he not been consumed with his Komodo hatchlings’ appetites. Getting gigantic, lethal lizards mailed to him had proved to be very easy. Feeding them, though, had proved to be difficult. He could barely fold enough origami critters, develop enough proofs for the questions found in the third section of his district’s Algebra II workbooks, or synthesize enough alcohol-free brew to pay down his debt to junior 4H farmers. Bartering for six piglets or for eighteen fat hens, monthly, was impoverishing him of both time and money.

The exceptionally intelligent, innovatively clever and, in other respects, precocious teen was experiencing tight spots at school, too. Mr. Emanuel Atkins, Raymond Charles High’s incomparable Social Studies instructor, had ordered a week of detention for Jim-Jam The-One-and-Only Ariel O’Neily. An experiment of Jim-Jam’s, which had involved transistors, had created an electromagnetic foul-up in Mr. Atkins’ saboteur plans. More concisely, O’Neily had tinkered with a radio at a time that was unfavorable for his teacher, inadvertently ruining Atkins’ beautiful, directed-energy instrument, that is, ruining Atkins’ attempt to kill some folks.

Atkins’ potentially vile act had been prompted by two decades’ worth of Atkins’ having to respond to thousands of adolescents’ papers. While those reports had provided him with unsolicited knowledge about the correct temperature at which to grill wild boar meat, the correct way to convert surfboards to snowboards, and mirrored sentiments about the only “correct” perspective on the connection between mass media and social dominance, those assignments, simultaneously, had catalyzed Atkins into attending night school in pursuit of a master’s degree with which he might be able to land a teaching position at a junior college. For his as yet incomplete master’s thesis, Atkins had investigated the deeds of Edmund Kalikst Eugeniusz Charaszkiewicz, a European intelligence officer, who had specialized in clandestine affairs.

To wit, Atkins understood plainly that players like himself, who are intent on carrying out acts of subversion requiring lasers, ought to stay clear of juvenile delinquents, like O’Neily, who are intent on hoisting TR-1s. The teacher had grasped that O’Neily’s interloping had caused the teacher’s laser cannon to compress its energy, to dampen, and then to attenuate beyond any useful or recognizable oscillation, such as nullifying the enemy. What’s more, when Atkins’ beam had leaked, it had left him with permanent sunburn. The entire bridge of the man’s nose had become discolored; his conk was redder than any reindeer’s.

It had been bad enough when, earlier, O’Neily’s listserv comments had disputed Atkins’. The teacher’s listserv comments had been regularly read by announcers at radio station WHYU as part of that station’s Smile Hour. It remained imperative to Atkins that the world learn about the evils of commercial broadcasts.

Atkins had never anticipated that a teenage lout might open an amplified signal that would cut off Atkins’ communication with Atkins’ lethal device. O’Neily had prevented Atkins from firing through the window of an apartment opposite the WHYU studio at the heads of two acoustics technicians, a producer, a broadcaster, and an intern whose nose rings diminished her otherwise exemplary panache.

Although most of WHYU was housed in a brick bunker four stories beneath the ground, its broadcast studio, out of necessity, was located at street level. Atkins had meant to blow that entire business to Kingdom Come given WHYU’s media treachery. He had had his finger on his gun’s trigger after sighting WHYU staff members through an aperture one of them had opened to let in some air.

Never before, and, likely, never again would that master allow a gangly MENSA hooligan, a jerk, a youngster, thwart him by tweaking the current of induction coils in audio transformers such that the signals emitted from Atkins’ output coupler and state selector got confused. The teacher would safeguard all of his future killing machines.

Only an auteur, like himself, could perform the sort of defusal that would remove all traces of Station WHYU, especially its traitorous tools and toadies. Only an astute being, like himself, would have thought to use a second mortgage, carefully hidden from his wife, to insure that select government officials would become instantly friendly towards him to the extent that they had helped him obtain both a license for a war-caliber maser and the instrument itself.

Atkins was so smart that he had bought a weapon made in New Zealand, but fenced through Moldova. He was so keen that his laser cannon, when not functioning as a source of death and destruction, masqueraded as a stand-in for a Zippo lighter.

It was only proper, as payback, that the guilty young cretin be bound to Atkins’ service unreservedly and to the Greater Republic secretly. A week of detentions ought to be enough for Smarty Pants O’Neily to solve the mystery of the many anchovy pizzas that had, as of late, been delivered to the playground space beneath Atkins’ classroom window and to help Atkins write a semester’s worth of lectures.

* * *

Being detained by Atkins alarmed Jim-Jam O’Neily far less than did his dwindling options for feeding his fauna. He assessed the functional worth of taking advantage of a local kindergarten’s spillage against seeking the aid of a homeless man, whom he had just met at the community library.

The idea of culling preschoolers for lizard food did not make Jim-Jam anxious. His paternal grandmother had preached that getting comfortable with necessity’s demands leads to survival. That tobacco-spitting, rye drinking, drawn-threadwork creating gal was gangbusters about any modality that kept her Adirondack cabin filled with firewood, dead moose, and the occasional muskrat pelt. She would, her descendant imagined, fight for Jim-Jam’s more creative attempts to rise above his financial red line.

Then again, Gran had sided with Dad when Dad had divorced Mom. Also, Gran would be hard to reach; she had no phone and no computer. She even chose to forgo a mailbox at the closest post office, which was three hours’ walk from her home. That elder relied on carrier pigeons.

It followed that the man-child known for the bricolage of kitchen products, software capable of generating papers about Shakespeare’s sonnets or about the social contentions of Thoreau, and wacky, yet efficient, crystallization techniques, was left with only one option. He would have to connive with his acquaintance of no permanent address. Admittedly, if only marginally, the slaying of little misters and misses seemed barbaric.

Per the displaced person, that one-eared, blue-eyed, chronically unemployed flyboy, who wore his goggles perched atop of his noggin, who sat for long hours pouring over spools of microreproductions about the mid-nineteenth century goings-on of Morgantown’s Ordinance Works, of Uravan’s Vanadium Corporation, and of analogously dated activities of Trail’s Cominco, when not fiddling with the community library’s lone microfilm reader, immersed himself in materials manufacturing books which described, respectively, Malawi’s, Brazil’s and Canada’s methods for extracting triuranium oxide ore from tin, tungsten and molybdenum. Jim-Jam guessed that the man intended to obtain ricin and lewisite.

* * *

Jim-Jam had to wait to corroborate his suspicions about the unsettled adult, though, for Mr. Atkins was not the only grownup who had decided to indenture Jim-Jam. Mom had drafted her son for babysitting.

That smart legal potato of a parent had deduced that her older child, the one responsible for crashing her computer when attempting, concurrently, to translate into Sanskrit and into Russian many web pages on low-temperature spin relaxation in nanomagnets and on the dental hygiene of large, Indonesian lizards; transforming her dishwasher into a latter-day Cuisinart for poaching salmon and eggs; and videotaping all of her parent-child negotiations, was broken.

Although Mom had yet to be acquainted with the reptiles guilty of savoring both of Mrs. Preenberry’s dogs, creating chaos from her own tidy garbage bins, or the decrease in the population of neighborhood alley cats, she had noticed that her child was once more routing his underwear through the washing machine and that, recently, he had been vetting his sandwich crusts through the family’s dehydrator in order to sell them, as nouveau breadcrumbs, at pigeon-infested parks.

Plus, Mom was not so obtuse as to have missed Jim-Jam’s eagerness to sherpa their family’s recyclables to the town center. She had noted, too, her child’s newfound willingness to mow their neighbors’ lawns and to investigate the requirements for minors becoming paid blood donors at the municipal hospital. Believing her child was ordering more chemicals for his bench and more paper for his origami, the arbiter, a woman who endured court paperwork in triplicate at least twice weekly, sent Jim-Jam, along with five of his smaller cousins, to Lake Mercurial Amusement Park. She’d help him earn money.

* * *

As young O’Neily shepherded his charges onto the city bus, he imagined the yield he could enjoy by contacting his Internet pal, the professor from Montana Great Falls College of Technology. For twenty dollars per child, Jim-Jam could sell stop-motion depictions of his cousins’ fun at the local collection of rides and sundry entertainments. Researchers at the College of Technology were reputed to be studying the fundamental dangers of the park’s new gigacoaster.

Lake Mercurial’s public relations department had resolved that their new thriller was bringing bad press because its highest hill top was curved more narrowly than a parabola, thus forcing its patrons to feel so many negative G’s that their lap bars could barely contain them, not to mention that those straps seemed entirely ineffective for children under five feet tall. Given that two of Jim-Jam’s cousin barely stood four feet high, the College of Technology’s researcher would have been happy to induct Jim-Jam’s coterie of young relatives into the study and even happier to have technically precise films showing those innocents falling out of the ride.

Such a negotiation would have profited Jim-Jam. He could have left his cousins screaming and puking on the coaster while he idled at a nearby picnic table thinking over means for making atomic current loops out of neodymium and samarium flakes. If the College of Technology paid in a timely fashion, Jim-Jam would have, withal, been able to feed his scaly pets for another week, thus further freeing him to devote time to understanding the molecular magnetic microstructure of communications devices such as those owned by Mr. Atkins.

Jim-Jam continued to let his imagination skip and dip. Mom’s brother’s children played musical chairs in four rows of bus seats. The bright child revisited the trepidation he had begun to feel when he had calculated, earlier that morning, that he had had only three days left to come up with meat for his critters. After that span, his Komodos would be too hungry for him to handle, and Mom would begin fussing, with consequences, over any missing neighborhood basset hounds and about the rapidly decreasing contents of the O’Neilys’ fridge.

* * *

Jim-Jam, however, had not had to expose his cousins to severe danger. Conveniently, prostitutes, trashout teams, and rhetoric professors have one thing in common; philandering husbands. Namely, Mr. Atkins’ wife, who taught public speaking at the region’s Community College, and who had no idea why her husband’s extracurricular activities would make good coffee table book fodder or why they would make a great theme for a WHYU’s talk show, had been the recipient of Jim-Jam’s largess.

Mr. Atkins, it turned out, had felt that his campaign against the media would necessitate his integrating another warm body into his designs. In seeking co-conspirators, Atkins had bought a small ad, which he had placed at the bottom of an electronic newsletter for compost enthusiasts. Atkins had received four hundred and twenty-three replies.

Among those who responded were an eighty-year old baroness who had offered her fortune for time in his bed, a twenty-some who had jingled about mingling her juices with his as long as she could post selfies of their activities on Facebook and then forward them to casting directors, and a dress-wearing fellow from Cincinnati who had insisted that his twin sister, who he argued was better-looking than he, be chosen for Atkins’ intimate honors. In substance, it was not the Social Studies teacher’s strobing death ray that received hands-on assistance, but another of his higher-than-normal-intensity laser cannons.

Granted, Atkins had used a pseudonym online and had forced himself to write as though he were skilled only in droll witticisms that were barely enhanced with sarcasm. Yet, he had neglected to hide his identity when he had rented out the tenement space across from the radio station and when he had invested the remnants of his second mortgage in gift cards to All Things Shiny Boutique and to Love, Love, Love Saloon.

Jim-Jam O’Neily, who had been surfing the web as part of his quest to retaliate for his detentions, had found electronic trails that led to unambiguous accounts of Atkins’ doings. No immature script-kiddie but a young man whose prowess equaled Jeffrey Lee Parson’s and Michael Calce’s threatened Atkins.

Unless the Social Studies teacher delivered to the O’Neily house, in thirty-six hours’ time, a truckload of live turkeys, plumages and beaks attached, Jim-Jam would post intelligence about the liberties that Mr. Atkins had taken with other men’s wives, on the social media pages to which Mrs. Atkins subscribed. Unbeknownst to Mr. Atkins, Jim-Jam told on him, anyway.

Proceed to Chapter 6...

Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg