Free Lizard Music by Daniel Pinkwater

someone like her eating a pizza, because she’s always in pain after the first bite.
    Roger Mudd was talking about the President—he had a cold, and had decided to stay indoors. I went to test my pizza. It seemed okay. Roger said that they were going to bring back the two-dollar bill. A poor news day, obviously. Sometimes they really have to stretch to fill up a half hour. Walter is really good at that. I remember when those guys went to the moon, Walter could talk for half an hour about nothing. I really miss him sometimes when he’s on vacation.
    The news ended. I ate my pizza and watched a game show. It was the one where people get all dressed up in funny costumes and make fools of themselves. The ones in the funniest costumes get to be on the program and get asked easy questions, which half of them miss.
    I rummaged around in the kitchen for some twine and a garbage bag. I found the things I needed and put them in a paper bag, along with some peanut butter sandwiches, and put the bag on the table near the front door, next to the stack of phony letters to Mom and Dad.
    I got through another evening of prime-time television. I don’t know why all the good stuff isn’t on until late at night. I finished my model—all but the painting—and cleaned up the newspapers and stuff. I always paint models in the basement, because Mom says the smell of the paint lingers for days. I think it smells pretty good. I felt sort of bored and restless. I wanted the evening to be over so it would be night. I wanted it to be tomorrow so I could go with Charlie, wherever it was we were going.
    Invasion of the Fat Men
was a good movie. In the movie, some scientists notice thousands of round things like meteorites descending to the earth, only they descend very slowly. People are watching through telescopes. As the round things get closer, people can see that they are not meteorites—they are fat men in sport coats, with checked trousers and two-tone shoes with rubber soles, and knitted neckties—and they are floating down to earth like big round snowflakes. There is a worldwide panic. It takes days for the fat men to float down.
    When the fat men start alighting on earth, everyone has been a nervous wreck for days. Each fat man weighs about six hundred pounds, and there are millions and millions of them, so there’s no point in trying to resist them if they are unfriendly. The governments of the various countries just hope they can negotiate with them. All the presidents and kings and so forth are waiting for leaders of the fat men to contact them. They never do. They just start looking around for places to eat. They especially like hamburger stands and pizzerias and places like that. Most of the fat men from space go to California and New Jersey, because they have the most driveins, but the fat men are all over the world and still descending. It’s like a blizzard of fat men from space. No airplanes can fly because of the ones floating down, and no cars or trains or buses can go very far without getting snarled up in crowds of fat men from space strolling along eating Twinkies and chocolate Mallomars. The whole planet is covered with pizza crusts and hamburger wrappers. It is almost impossible to walk in the streets of the cities because of all the empty Dixie cups and crowds of fat men. The earth people can get nothing to eat but fruits and vegetables, lean meats and rye toast—the only things the fat men from space don’t eat. Civilization as we know it is coming to an end.
    In the Rocky Mountains, in a secret underground laboratory, scientists bake a huge jelly doughnut. They use the last fifty million tons of sugar on earth that the fat men have not taken control of. Then they catapult the jelly doughnut into outer space, beyond the earth’s gravitational pull. The fat men notice the jelly doughnut and take off after it. The last scene is Newark, New Jersey, covered with popsicle sticks and empty cellophane wrappers from Devil