Funny Boy Takes on the Chit-Chatting Cheeses from Chattanooga (3 page)

The TV reporter bent down and put her microphone in the face of a mailman who was lying in a huge puddle of cheese. Melted cheese was dripping down his face.

“We have an exclusive interview with the unfortunate letter carrier right now. What happened, Mr. Gouda?”

“
Cheeeeeese
,” the man moaned groggily. He looked like he was in shock. “
Cheeeeeeese
.”

“Mr. Gouda doesn’t appear to be in any condition to talk right now. But we’ll have a live interview with him just as soon as he is coherent.”

“What does coherent mean?” I asked.

“Something you’ll never be,” Punch cracked.

“Back to our studio,” the reporter announced, “for the conclusion of ‘The History of Eggplant.’”

“Wait!” shouted a voice on TV.

“Who said that?” the reporter asked.

“Me.”

“Who’s me?”

“I did. The cheese.”

The reporter turned around, a puzzled, frightened look on her face. The camera panned down to the cheese. It was a horrifying sight. The cheese didn’t have a normal face. At least it didn’t have what
we
think of as a normal face. It had five eyes arranged like the Olympic rings. The mouth was a big, gaping hole. The face was floating around on the cheese. There was no nose.

“A t-talking cheese?” the reporter asked. “A living, breathing cheese?”

“This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen,” Bob Foster commented.

“How can a cheese talk?”

“This wouldn’t be a very interesting book if the cheese didn’t talk,” Punch quipped.

“Will you two be quiet?” I whispered. “She’s going to interview the cheese!”

“Greetings, people of Earth!” The cheese spoke cheerfully, in perfect English. “We come in piece. Ha-ha! Get it? Piece? Peace on Earth? Piece of cheese?”

“That cheese is pretty funny,” Bob Foster noted.

“For a cheese,” added Punch.

“Do you have a name?” the stunned reporter asked.

“Romano,” the cheese replied. “And behind me are my comrades, Mr. Fontina, Mr. Mozzarella, and our leader, Mr. Monterey Jack.”

“Y-you are all named after types of cheese?” the reporter asked warily. “Well, what else would we be named after?” Romano asked.

“Where are you from?” the reporter asked.

“Chattanooga.”

“Chattanooga, Tennessee?”

“No, the
planet
Chattanooga. It is in another galaxy, forty million light-years from Earth. We have come to rescue your planet.”

“Rescue us?” asked the reporter. “From what?”

“The cheese shortage, of course!” replied Fontina.

“Yes,” Mozzarella explained. “We understand there is an extreme shortage of cheese on your planet due to some uncooperative cows. We have the ability to clone ourselves and produce unlimited amounts of cheese. We will supply you with all the cheese you need.”

“And
that’s
why you came to Earth?”

“Well, also because you have cable TV.”

“So you’re not some evil aliens who want to take over the planet or anything like that?” asked the reporter.

“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” The cheeses all laughed nervously. “Nothing like that at all. We are
friendly
cheeses. Happy cheeses.”

“So this is good news for all of us!” bubbled the reporter.

“
Cheeeeeeeeese
,” moaned George Gouda.

“Well, good news for
most
of us. Reporting live from Appleton, Wisconsin, this is Pamela Lancashire. We take you back to ‘The History of Eggplant.’ It’s not an egg. It’s not a plant. What is it?”

It was late, and I had to get up for school in the morning. Bob Foster flipped off the TV set, a worried expression on his face.

“I don’t know why,” Bob Foster whispered, “but something tells me those are
not
normal cheeses.”

[Imagine scary music here.]

IF YOU’RE A BOY, THINK ABOUT SKIPPING THIS CHAPTER, BECAUSE IT’S ABOUT LOVE, LOVE, LOVE! YUCK, DISGUSTING!

It was a beautiful, sun-kissed day, with puffy white clouds hanging in the sky like gigantic cotton candy. But none of that had anything to do with this book, of course.

The news that four alien cheeses had landed in Wisconsin was not a big story at first. When I looked in the newspaper the next morning, the front page headline did not shout in huge letters ALIEN CHEESES LAND IN WISCONSIN! The headline read SCHOOL BOARD TO HIRE NEW CROSSING GUARDS. In fact, there wasn’t even an article anywhere in the paper about an alien landing.

You see, there’s something you need to know about the state of Wisconsin. It is the cheese capital of the world.

That’s no joke. My foster dad Bob Foster’s hobby is cheese, and he knows more about cheese than just about anybody in the world. Bob told me that Wisconsin produces more cheese than any state in America, and more cheese than most entire countries. You’ve seen those guys at Green Bay Packers football games wearing cheeses on their heads, right? Well,
everybody
in Wisconsin walks around like that.

People reading this book who live in Wisconsin can back me up on this. They produce so much cheese in Wisconsin that they don’t know what to do with it all. They eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They use it as doorstops and paperweights. They stuff it in their mattresses. Kids use it in place of Play-Doh.

In Wisconsin, they don’t even use paper money and coins to buy things. They use cheese. They carry the stuff with them in backpacks wherever they go.

It’s true, I say! The word
Wisconsin,
in fact, is an old Indian word that means “land of milk curds.”

Just to give you an idea of how important cheese is in Wisconsin, I have prepared the following overview of the state. You may want to clip out this page and use it for your next social studies report:

STATE PROFILE OF WISCONSIN

State slogan: America’s Dairyland

State animal: Cow

State food: Duh!

State color: Bleu

State bird: The Gorgonzola

Largest ethnic group: Kurds

Most popular TV show: The Muensters

Governor: Chuck E. Cheese

Because they have so much cheese in Wisconsin, it probably wasn’t such a big deal when those four giant cheese aliens arrived from outer space. But I live in Texas, and I was sure all the kids would be talking about it at school the next morning.

“It is time for current events,” my teacher Mrs. Wonderland announced. “Who has a news story for us today?”

I was the only one who raised a hand.

“Yes, Funny Boy?”

“I don’t have a clipping from the newspaper, but last night, four giant cheeses landed on a mailman in Wisconsin.”

The class burst out laughing. As I mentioned earlier, something in Earth’s atmosphere has made me unbelievably funny. People laugh when I say just about anything because of my super sense of humor.

“I see it’s joke time again,” Mrs. Wonderland muttered wearily as she rubbed her eyes.

“Joke time?” I said. “Okay, these two guys walk into a bar. You’d think the second one would have ducked.”

“Funny Boy,” Mrs. Wonderland hissed, “where did you come up with this ridiculous notion that cheeses came from outer space and landed in Wisconsin?”

“I was watching the Food Network—”

Some of the kids in the back of the room interrupted me with laughter.

“What a dork!” said Sal Monella, the biggest and dumbest kid in the class.

“That’s enough of that!” Mrs. Wonderland roared, clapping to get everybody’s attention. “Let’s move on to math. Yesterday we were working on multiplication. Let’s review. What is eight times seven?”

I raised my hand and Mrs. Wonderland pointed to me.

“Eight times seven what?” I asked.

“Eight times seven
anything,
” Mrs. Wonderland replied. “It’s simple. Eight ... times ... seven.”

“Well, it’s not as simple as it seems,” I pointed out. “For example, eight times seven pumpkins would be more than eight times seven apples, because pumpkins are bigger than apples. But if you made the apples into applesauce and scooped out the pumpkin seeds, you would probably have more applesauce than pumpkin seeds. See?”

Mrs. Wonderland stared at me for a long time.

“Go to Principal Werner’s office,” she instructed.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to go to Principal Werner’s office after all, because Principal Werner saw me coming down the hallway and told me to go jump in a lake. I could tell that physical fitness was very important to Principal Werner, because he was constantly telling me to jump in a lake.

Oddly, there was no lake on the school grounds, so I joined the rest of the class at recess in the playground. A group of the fourth-grade boys were hanging around near the swings, so I joined them.

“I hate girls,” Sal Monella told the boys.

“I hate girls, too,” one of the others agreed.

“Me, too.”

“Me, too.”

“Me, too.”