My Life as a Belching Baboon with Bad Breath

by Bill Myers

  My Life As a

  Belching Baboon . . .

  with Bad Breath

  Tommy Nelson® Books by Bill Myers

  Series

  SECRET AGENT DINGLEDORF

  . . . and his trusty dog, SPLAT

  The Case of the . . .

  Giggling Geeks • Chewable Worms

  • Flying Toenails • Drooling Dinosaurs •

  Hiccupping Ears • Yodeling Turtles

  The Incredible Worlds of Wally McDoogle

  My Life As . . .

  a Smashed Burrito with Extra Hot Sauce • Alien Monster Bait

  • a Broken Bungee Cord • Crocodile Junk Food •

  Dinosaur Dental Floss • a Torpedo Test Target

  • a Human Hockey Puck • an Afterthought Astronaut •

  Reindeer Road Kill • a Toasted Time Traveler

  • Polluted Pond Scum • a Bigfoot Breath Mint •

  a Blundering Ballerina • a Screaming Skydiver

  • a Human Hairball • a Walrus Whoopee Cushion •

  a Computer Cockroach (Mixed-Up Millennium Bug)

  • a Beat-Up Basketball Backboard • a Cowboy Cowpie •

  Invisible Intestines with Intense Indigestion

  • a Skysurfing Skateboarder • a Tarantula Toe Tickler •

  a Prickly Porcupine from Pluto • a Splatted-Flat Quarterback

  The Portal • The Experiment • The Whirlwind • The Tablet

  Picture Book

  Baseball for Breakfast

  www.Billmyers.com

  the incredible worlds of

  WallyMcDoogle

  BILL MYERS

  Illustrations by Jeff Mangiat

  MY LIFE AS A BELCHING BABOON . . . WITH BAD BREATH

  Copyright © 2005 by Bill Myers.

  Illustrations by Jeff Mangiat.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts in reviews.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Tommy Nelson®, a Division of Thomas Nelson, Inc. Visit us on the Web at www.tommynelson.com.

  Tommy Nelson® books may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please email SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

  Scripture quotations in this book are from the International Children’s Bible®, New Century Version®, © 1986, 1988, 1999 by Tommy Nelson®, a Division of Thomas Nelson, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Myers, Bill, 1953–

  My life as a belching baboon . . . with bad breath / Bill Myers ; illustrations by Jeff

  Mangiat.

  p. cm.— (The incredible worlds of Wally McDoogle ; 25)

  ISBN 1-4003-0634-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  05 06 07 08 09 WRZ 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Heinz Fussle:

  Who knows where real joy lies.

  “It is more blessed to give

  than to receive.”

  —Acts 20:35

  Contents

  1. Just for Starters

  2. Going Upppp

  3. Going Doooown

  4. Follow the Bouncing Wally

  5. The Kid

  6. A Not-So-Super Supper

  7. Sleep Tight. Don’t Let the Bedbugs

  (OR TARANTULAS!) Bite

  8. A Midnight Swim

  9. How to Stop a Rhino from Charging

  10. Wrapping Up

  Chapter 1

  Just For Starters

  Celebrating Christmas at my home is like throwing raw meat into a shark tank. We’ve definitely given a new definition to the term . . . FEEDING FRENZY.

  It’s like when we come down the stairs at 6:00 a.m. on Christmas morning, everything is neat and pretty with a zillion packages under the tree. By 6:01 paper is flying, boxes are ripping, and kids are pushing, screaming, and crawling over one another to get to the goodies.

  All this is accompanied by the warm season’s greetings of my brothers and sister:

  “Get your hands off my present before I break them!”

  “Five bucks? That’s all Grandma sent me, five lousy bucks?!”

  “A used shirt? You gave me another one of your used shirts?!”

  “Hey, at least this time I washed it.”

  Then there’s Dad. He’s usually sitting off to the side watching with a sick smile on his face—while all the time calculating costs and mumbling, “All these gifts . . . how am I going to pay for all of these gifts . . .”

  Finally, there’s Mom. She takes so many flash pictures you’d think we’re having a lightning storm . . . while all the time shouting, “Save the bows!” “Oh, that is soooo precious!” “Brock, stop stomping on your brother and just ask him to pass your presents.”

  “Ah, Mom . . .”

  “I’m serious, you step on Wally’s face one more time and you’re going to your room!”

  Yes sir, for my family, Christmas is definitely the season to be greedy.

  Until this year . . .

  Now, I’m no great detective, but this year I suspected things were going to be just a little bit different. My first clue was that by Christmas Eve, there still wasn’t a single gift under the tree. Come to think of it, THERE WASN’T EVEN A TREE!

  (Sorry, didn’t mean to shout.)

  But Christmas without a tree (or 1.3 gazillion gifts under that tree) is like a surfer without an ocean, a pilot without a plane, or me going to school without tumbling down the stairs, blowing up science labs, or any of the thousand other things required for me to hold the national title of All-School Walking Disaster Area.

  I tell you, if I hadn’t made a scene a few weeks earlier about buying some cargo pants and my new $150 pair of tennis shoes, the entire month of December would have been a bust.

  Even at that, things were not looking good. Not good at all . . .

  “What do you think is going on?” my little sister Carrie asked that Christmas Eve as we headed up the stairs for bed.

  “I don’t know,” I grumbled.

  “Do you think . . .” She gave a brave little swallow. “Do you think maybe they forgot?”

  “Forgot? How could they forget?” shouted Burt, one of my superjock twin brothers, from the sofa where they were watching a football game. (They’re always watching football games.) “How could anyone forget? Stores have had their displays up since the Fourth of July.”

  He had a point. Of course, also there were our Christmas stockings.

  “And look,” I said as I motioned to them hanging over the fireplace, “they remembered to put up our stockings.”

  “Did anybody check them?” Carrie asked.

  Brock, my other superjock brother and Burt’s twin, nodded. “Nothing but these stupid bottles of sunscreen.” He pulled a bottle of sunscreen from his pocket.

  “Sunscreen?” Carrie sighed. “Why would we need sunscreen in the winter?”

  “Skiers and snowboarders always use sunscreen,” Brock explained.

  “But we’ve never skied or snowboarded in our lives,” Burt replied.

  “We haven’t?” Brock asked.

  Carrie and I exchanged nervous looks. (Being a superjock doesn’t always make you super-smart.)

  We continued up the stairs.

  “I just don’t know what Mom and Dad are thinking,” Carrie said.

  “Maybe they’re not.” I muttered.

  Suddenly, she looked very frightened. “You mean they’re becoming like the twins?”

  I shook my head, trying to comfort her. “Relax. Not using you
r brain is different from not having one.”

  “Hey,” Brock shouted, “I resemble that comment.” At least that’s what I thought he said. It was hard to tell for certain by the way he was gulping down the sunscreen.

  Carrie and I stopped, not believing our eyes.

  He paused a moment to catch his breath and make a face. “I tell you, this is the worst sunscreen I’ve ever tasted.”

  “Uh, Brock?” I asked.

  “BELCH?” he belched.

  “I think that’s supposed to go on the outside of your body, not the inside.”

  “The outside?” He scowled, then looked at the bottle for directions. “How do you know? It doesn’t say.”

  I shrugged and started back up the stairs. “Just a lucky guess.”

  Unfortunately, by the next morning, our luck had run out. . . .

  “Africa!” I cried. “We’re going to Africa?!”

  “That’s right,” Dad said. He pulled the car to a stop outside a giant airplane hangar at the airport.

  Mom unfastened her seat belt and explained. “We’re spending a week working with a relief agency.”

  “A week!” we all shouted in four-part harmony (which sounded a lot like four-part misery).

  “That’s right.” As she opened the door, she gave a sweet smile that suddenly succeeded in successfully stimulating all my suspiciousness.

  Translation: Mom and Dad were up to something . . . and it didn’t sound good.

  “Where are our suitcases?” Carrie asked.

  “I packed you an overnight bag.”

  “An overnight bag for a whole week?!”

  “Don’t worry, you’ll have enough underwear to get by.”

  “Underwear?? What about the rest of my clothes?!”

  “You’re wearing them.”

  “I’M WHAT?!”

  But that wasn’t the only surprise.

  “What about the football games?” Burt asked as we climbed out of the car.

  “Yeah,” Brock said. “Did you make sure the hotel has satellite and big-screen TVs so we can watch them?”

  “They have no satellite or big-screen TVs where we’re going,” Dad replied.

  “How do we watch the games?!”

  “They have no games, either.”

  “No games!!”

  Dad shrugged. “It’s hard to play games when they’re busy starving to death.”

  I was definitely not liking the sound of this. Nervously, I reached for Ol’ Betsy, my laptop computer, then asked, “But the hotel, it has Internet, right?”

  Dad nodded. “I suppose.”

  I felt a wave of relief.

  “But we won’t be staying in a hotel.”

  My wave of relief turned into a storm of panic.

  “Where are we going to be staying?!” Carrie cried.

  Before Dad could answer, someone shouted to him from inside the hangar. “Hey, Herb! We’re in here, dude!”

  We turned to see this cool-looking guy with a blond ponytail motioning for us to come inside and join him.

  “You’re just in time to start loading the plane,” he shouted.

  “We have to load our own luggage?” Carrie whined as we headed toward the hangar.

  “No, Sweetheart.” Mom smiled. “He’s talking about our bringing food on the plane.”

  “We’re expected to bring our own meals?!” Brock complained.

  “Not exactly,” Dad said as we entered the hangar and a cargo plane the size of Detroit came into view. “We’re expected to load the plane with the food we’re taking to feed the starving.”

  The good news was, we weren’t the only ones who had to load the plane. Besides the guy with the ponytail (his name was Diggers), there were two or three other workers.

  The bad news was, besides the two or three other workers, there were two or three thousand pounds of food! All stacked in boxes. All waiting to be loaded.

  “Shouldn’t take more than a few hours,” Diggers said. He gave me a hand dolly, and we walked up a ramp toward stacks and stacks of boxes.

  “What type of food is in there?” I asked.

  “Just the basics for survival.”

  “You mean chips, soda pop, and candy?”

  “Uh, no. More like dried biscuits, dried jerky, and powdered protein mix.”

  I scowled. “Sounds pretty boring.”

  “They don’t think so.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked as we arrived at the boxes.

  “Struggling to survive is anything but boring,” he answered.

  I nodded. At least this was something I understood. As the Master of Disaster, I’m always struggling to survive. Especially when folks give me dangerous objects to play with like hand dollies and boxes.

  And how are hand dollies and boxes dangerous? (You just had to ask, didn’t you?)

  In the hands of mere mortals, they aren’t dangerous. But in the hands of someone with my incredible skills, it’s a whole other matter.

  “Go ahead and start loading these onto the plane,” Diggers said.

  I nodded and began:

  FIRST—I slipped the dolly under the stack of boxes. No sweat, no worries.

  SECOND—I tipped the stack of boxes back onto the dolly. They were heavier than they looked, which called for plenty of:

  “ERGs,” “ARGHs,” and “UMPHs!”

  (Lots of sweat, but still no worries.)

  THIRD—I rolled the stack down the steep ramp, trying unsuccessfully to keep it under control.

  “AUGHHHHHHH . . .”

  (Now might be a good time for that worrying!)

  Before I knew it, I was zipping down the ramp faster and faster . . . and faster some more.

  No problem, except for—

  “LOOK OUT!” I shouted at Brock, who was pushing his own stack just ahead of me.

  K-BAMB

  Well, he had been pushing his own stack just ahead of me. Now he and his stack were scattered all over the floor behind me.

  “COMING THROUGH!” I shouted at Burt. He was pushing his empty dolly back up the ramp in front of me until

  K-SLAM

  “WALLLLLLLYY . . .”

  he was sailing high into the air above me.

  I finally reached the bottom of the ramp, traveling at 1.2 bazillion miles an hour.

  The good news was, there was a stack of the boxes looming just ahead like a gigantic wall.

  The bad news was, gigantic walls of boxes aren’t always the softest to

  K-SMASH

  into headfirst.

  The badder news was, when you K-SMASH into gigantic walls of boxes headfirst, you tend to

  sta gg er-sta gge r -stagg er

  around until you finally

  K-Thud

  onto the floor totally unconscious in an I’ll-just-lie-here-till-someone-finds-a-doctor kind of way.

  Chapter 2

  Going Upppp

  The good news was, I didn’t stay unconscious forever.

  The bad news was, I didn’t stay unconscious long enough.

  When I woke up the plane was loaded and everyone was ready to go.

  Mom and Dad had already called our family doctor—the one who waits by the phone 24/7 for just such McDoogle mishaps. Granted, it costs a bundle for him to be on standby, but he’s not nearly as expensive as the extra emergency room the hospital built for my frequent visits.

  He came to the airport and did his usual check-Wally-out routine,

  —which, of course, meant I begged him to

  find something wrong,

  —which, of course, meant he didn’t,

  —which, of course, meant my luck was as bad as ever.

  Before I knew it, we were on a plane flying for twenty-two hours to some country in Africa. Not, of course, without a few comments from my brothers and sister:

  “Where’s the in-flight movie?” Burt demanded.

  “Where are the peanuts?” Brock complained.

  “How come there’s only one bathroom?” Ca
rrie asked.

  Diggers patiently explained, “We need as much room on the plane as possible to bring in as much food as possible.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why don’t these people just get a job and buy food like everyone else?”

  “Because there is no food for them to buy.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  He shook his head. “Every day in the world, 24,000 people die from starvation.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “That’s 1,000 people every hour.”

  “You’re not kidding.”

  “In fact, in the time it takes me to say this one sentence, someone else has just died from starvation.”

  “Is that why Mom and Dad are taking us?” Carrie asked. “So we can help?”

  “That’s part of it,” he said.

  “Is there more?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Like what?”

  “Like getting you to experience the joy that comes from helping folks in terrible need.”

  I was about to reply when the plane suddenly gave a violent lurch and I

  K-thudded

  to the floor and

  roll . . . roll . . . rolled

  back until I hit a wall of boxes.

  I’d barely gotten to my feet before there was another lurch, followed by another mandatory

  K-thud

  and my

  roll . . . roll . . . rolling

  to the front.

  “Wally,” Diggers shouted, racing to me, “are you all right?”