The Green Monster
DUN DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNN
written by Lindy on November 29th, 2005

I find myself questioning everything that has ever happened to me.   Maybe I’m just a control freak and I don’t know how to react when something outside of my spectrum occurs.  Some questions are important, like “What am I going to do with my life” or “What am I going to eat for dinner?”  Others end up being silly and strange, like wondering what those toys were that used to dance when you played music.  I know there were Muppet Babies and Disney versions.  Fuck, I really wanted one of those when I was a kid, too.  I think I wanted the Miss Piggy one.

I ask myself a lot of questions about time.  I wonder about things that have happened to me in the past.  Did I get outside enough as a kid?  Should I have tried to play a sport instead of sitting at home reading a lot and watching cartoons and movies?

I think about the present.  What should I do after I finish writing this sentence?   Am I going to delete it along with all of the others that I wrote and start with a new idea?  Am I going to stop and turn in for the night?

And I think about the future a lot.  Should I write a book or at least a poem?   Should I try to get it published?  Will I be able to make it and graduate college?  What am I going to do when I move out?  Will apes be our masters?

Among my musings there is sometimes a memory or an idea that stands out and I try to write about it.  I guess that’s how my process works.  It works better than sitting in my basement in the middle of a pile of old toys I have deciding on whether or not I should write the “Hey remember View Master” article.  When I remember things as a kid, they don’t get linked up with anything in my adult life past “Oh, I used to like that”.  I guess I happened to grow out of a lot of my old favorites. 

Somewhere in my room I have a promotional pin that my friend gave to me.  She worked at the Cinemark, the biggest theater in my area of 24.  Since I’m a packrat and I like nostalgia and movies, she would sometimes give me old pins she would have to wear when she was at the snack counter so customers could see on the starched red vests which movies were being heavily promoted.  They had all of the big summer blockbusters plastered over posters, pins, stands, popcorn buckets, and soda cups.   In the summer of 98, the pin she gave me was one of a gigantic green lizard.   Or at least his foot.

I love movies.  I do.  I also love kitsch.  Painting soup cans and other pop art items is what made one of the members of my family famous.  For some reason, despite all of this, I had never seen a Godzilla movie.  I was familiar with the story and the idea through things like Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and the Muppet Babies.   So that summer, I got the chance to see this thing that I had always wanted to see on the big screen.  It had to be cool.  Look!  Matthew Broderick is starring.  That’s cool.  Brand new CGI graphics!  Wow!  I was excited.  I got together with my friends at the time.  We were all going to see it together and hang out afterwards.  I remember that I sat next to the boy that I liked enough to flirt with to make a friend of mine jealous, because I’m a bad person, but not enough to show any real interest in him.  The movie started and two hours later I sat unamused.

This was the movie creature I had anticipated seeing for years?  I felt like Kenpachiro Satsuma did.  There was no spirit or heart to the movie.  I understood the difference between the original Toho film and the American version despite never having seen the original.  The thing that made it worse was to hear my friends talk about how awesome the film was.  WHOA they smashed cars!  Godzilla looked real!

Fuck you and your shitty opinions.

Okay, I didn’t say that, but I thought something similar.  The next summer, I wasn’t talking to anyone I went to see that movie with.  There was no spirit or heart in our friendship.

This wasn’t the first time the big, green monster made an appearance in my life.

My and my sister are the only girls amongst our cousins.  I’m the elder of the two and am in the same age range as the largest cluster of boys.  It was me, Tim, Chris, Michael and Brendan whenever we were together.  Most of my tastes ended up being shaped by them.  I played Nintendo because they did and it gave me something to do with them.  I think only one of them would’ve played Barbies with me, and he would’ve been berated if he ever went through with it.  My cousins reminded me of Lord of the Flies.  If we went along with the eldest, everything was fine.  We existed on our own apart from our parents when they would visit.   Brendan was the piggy.  At nearly every family get together they’d ridicule him and make him cry.

I was always excited when they would come to visit.  I was 10 and hadn’t seen them since my 6th birthday party.  They were coming to celebrate Christmas with us.   That year my mother took antique ornaments from my grandmother’s house so she could decorate the tree special for her sisters.  My cousins brought their things and some of their NES cartridges so we could play games together.  All of my cousins stayed over at my house because we were going to be hanging out together the whole time.   That first morning I woke up at 6 a.m., came downstairs, and sat in the den where they were sleeping playing Super Mario Brothers until my cousin Chris woke up.  After that, we exploited Tim’s sleep talking and pulled out their copy of Godzilla to play while everyone else woke up. 

It wasn’t that good of a game, but I was playing it with Chris, so I enjoyed it.  When everyone was awake, they wanted to play around.   I wanted to sit and play Nintendo more with them, but since I didn’t see them that often, I obliged.  I remember they ran up and down the stairs a few times and when I went in the living room to meet them, I saw our Christmas tree wobble around and then fall flat.  I screamed because I was 10 and didn’t know what else I could do.  The day before Christmas and my tree was on the floor with most of the antique ornaments shattered underneath it.

Three years later, when they visited again on Christmas, I was an awkward teenager who wore a lot of black.  I became the new piggy.  I wanted to be myself and I was left alone because of it.

After seeing the terrible 1998 American version of Godzilla I was excited when a real Godzilla film from Toho came to American theaters.  I never got around to seeing Godzilla 2000 in the theater like I planned.  That was all right. 

Almost two years later I had a boyfriend who loved Godzilla.  And James Bond.  He was my first boyfriend and I was a freshman in college.  Things had been changing a lot for me.  My roommate was slowly becoming someone else and no longer the person I called a friend.  I was living away from home the first time and felt depressed because I wasn’t happy away or at home.

It was around Valentine’s Day when I had him sleep over.  He brought over a few movies and some games to play.  I wanted to be alone with him for the weekend.

I had often thought about losing my virginity.  I knew it wasn’t going to be special to me.  I had given up on the idea of staying a virgin until I was married when I lost my faith.  I more or less wanted to get it out of the way.  I knew I wasn’t going to be with him forever.  I put on a CD he made me of a band called "Nuclear Rabbit".  I kept the volume on low and we put on a movie.  I picked Godzilla 2000.  Halfway through the movie I became bored.  We started to kiss.  We went farther.  Twenty minutes later, he is on top of me on my bed.   It didn’t hurt.  A split-legged fall on a pool ladder at age 12 took care of that.  It didn’t feel good either.

I was bored with it.  This moment that so many build up to as being the holiest of holies, the moment that movies make silly wagers about or have romanticized shots of young male stars bare butts and I’m laying on my back wondering when it started.  By December of the next year and after being cheated on, I was bored with my boyfriend and broke up with him.

In October of this year I was in the city that never sleeps for the first time ever.   The bus ride into the city had me grinning.  When I was there at night I saw one star at night as opposed to the thousands and thousands I saw when B and I stopped in Maryland and took a look at the sky.  We came to New York City to meet up with Peter Holby and go and see who I was told was one of the four gods of Japanese puroresu.  I hadn’t watched wrestling for years.  I was the only girl in my grade school class who watched WWF.  I loved the female wrestlers.  I wanted to grow up and be like the Sensational Sherry.  Or even the Fabulous Moolah. I loved the male wrestlers.  Buried somewhere in my basement are my wrestling action figures.

I always wanted to go to see a live show.  I remember seeing the announcements and hoping that my mother would take me to Erie, PA to go to see my favorite wrestlers in person.  I would’ve died with happiness if one of the Bushwhackers rubbed my head in their armpits.  That never happened and around the time that Papa Shango showed up I lost interest in spending my Saturday mornings watching match recaps.   Years later, there I was at the New Yorker Hotel, excited to watch a federation that I knew nothing about.  I sat beside B, looking over the heads of the people in the front, watching Christopher Daniels doing moonsaults and Roderick Strong doing backbreakers.  I enjoyed myself, but only clapped politely or laughed.  I didn’t really get into any of the matches to the point of wild cheering.  Early in the show, I found out from B and Folby that the person to wrestle against Kenta Kobashi was Samoa Joe.  I had heard about him before.  I had seen pictures.  He was the only wrestler other than Kobashi I had heard about previous to their match.  With every other wrestler B would usually lean over to me and explain something about them, their names, things they had done previously, the ways the crowd would react or cheer.

The intermission passed, more matches happened, I began to get that combination of nervous and excited.  My feet moved back and forth restlessly before the announcer came into the ring and announce the main event.  The crowd began to rise to their feet.   The music cued.  It was the theme from the original Godzilla. 

They called his name, the curtains were flung back and there stood towering at 6’3” (ish) was Samoa Joe.  Hearing that music excited me, and then it broke into “Momma Said Knock You Out”.  I became more excited and cheered more before the event actually happened than I had to any other match so far because I had so much adrenaline running through me.  15 minutes later, I’m standing up and on my chair yelling and screaming and cheering.

I never thought I would have as much fun as I did that night.  I never thought that I was going to be able to speak to Kenta Kobashi afterwards and tell him that after I watched him wrestle, I loved wrestling again.  I went out into the street screaming practically because I couldn’t keep in my excitement.  Holy shit!  What a match!  What about that chop battle?  Did you see Joe’s chest?  Oh my god!  I shook Kenta Kobashi’s hand!  I still get excited when I think about it.  I go back and reread B’s article every now and then and get a smile on my face.

I still ask myself a lot of questions.  I don’t think I’ll ever stop doing that.  I’ve been wondering for a while why a movie with a man in a big rubber suit seems to influence so many moments in my life.  With so much change in my life, it seems to be the one of the only things that has had any sort of presence from childhood until adulthood.  Until this fall, I thought it was a negative influence.  Maybe it’s just something that has so saturated our culture that I’ll never be able to escape it.  I wonder if on my wedding day it will be someone’s kid who destroys my wedding cake with their Godzilla figurine, or if on the day I die there will be a Godzilla movie marathon on cable.

I suppose it could be worse. I could have the robot from Lost in Space show up or hear people do impressions of him at significant moments in my life. DANGER WILL ROBINSON DANGER DANGER arm wave arm wave.  At the very least I can continue to have more moments involving the big green guy.  Maybe when I’m 30 Gamera and Rodan will start to show up with him.

At least I always have something to look forward to.