“I’m a big G-FEST fan and native.” Larry loves cats and football, and has the best eyebrows of us all. “Hi, I’m Larry Prout Jr.,” my youngest brother said. “Larry Prout Sr., G-FEST veteran and enthusiast.” I turned on my recorder and made everyone introduce themselves to me as a test run. My mom, who opted for a rare weekend alone instead of coming to the convention, floated in our inflatable pool.
My dad drove the Godzilla head, along with two of his sons, a six-pack of diet Mountain Dew, a quart of half-and-half, and a PS2, across one time zone and two state lines. Meticulously sculpted from a three-foot-by-three-foot block of Styrofoam, it sat kingly in its own hotel chair, looking me over with a baleful, milky eye. We’re 21 years apart: “It’s cool,” he likes to say, “that we’re going to be old people together.” Behind him I spied the gigantic Godzilla head my dad won in a raffle in 2003 after attending G-FEST X. He has brown hair that likes to puff up in humidity and gray-green eyes the color of a forest floor. It’s a powerful feeling, to come back to the salty, atomic waters that birthed you. Through the elevator glass, I could see thousands of green pothos plants trailing the railings that crisscrossed the open-air design of the hotel. Hedorah: A Belated 50th Birthday” and “Godzilla and the Japanese National Spirit”). Two other passengers, themselves strangers until this moment, happily dished about the panels they wanted to see (“Godzilla vs.
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Rodan and Ultraman, two other kaijus (giant monsters from Japanese TV or film), peeked out from a crinkling plastic bag in the boy’s hand, sure booty from the convention’s hallowed Dealer’s Room. Inside the elevator, a mother stood proudly next to her prepubescent son, each wearing T-shirts featuring the snubbed face of Godzilla in the 60s, when filmmakers began to portray him as the good guy in an effort to draw in kids. Walking through the doors of the Hyatt Regency O’Hare Hotel in Rosemont, a suburb just outside Chicago, and stepping into a round glass elevator with half a dozen strangers, I felt the words I hadn’t spoken in over a decade bloom rapidly, uncannily, on my tongue. Underneath that font, enough space to write in our names. G-FEST XXVII, announced our rectangular yellow badges, returning after a two-year hiatus that included a pandemic, a rebellion, an insurrection. In July, I was one of 4,000 attendees at the largest Godzilla convention in the world. Once there, they linger before continuing their journey to space, and briefly form the outline of a rose. As the viewer, you’re certain she is dying, until you realize that what first appeared to be sparks flaring off of her body are actually spores, dissolving and floating in the sky.
The camera lingers on Biollante, by now an enormous, pulsating being of green vines, fearsome jaws, and human spirit, as she burns. In the film, after a terrific battle, Godzilla appears to immolate his sister with his legendary atomic breath. I was mesmerized and more than a little afraid. Midway on the van’s ceiling was a shelf: on that shelf, a tiny TV/VCR combo. The van’s interior was a deep, velvety purple that blurred the boundaries between us and the night, giving the impression that I was in some ancient, warm, ever-expanding cave. I remember the first time I saw Biollante onscreen, cocooned with my brothers in the dry air of our GMC van, idling somewhere in the winter dark. The result is a monster-sister forever fighting those from whence she came.
After the resulting human-rose is nearly destroyed, the scientist melds her with Godzilla cells he’s stolen from a lab. Biollante (1989), a grieving scientist grafts rose cells to cells he’s salvaged from his dead human daughter.
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