Gamera vs. ICE
by Gamera, Guardian of the Universe, Friend to All Children
Hey, it’s me, everyone’s favorite plus-size fire-breathing turtle! It’s been a few months, right? You probably thought I was away on some far-off planet fighting bug creatures that disguise themselves as Japanese bikini models and snatch up children to harvest for food. Nope. I’ve been laying low, writing my one-turtle show, “Shell-Shocked.” We’re supposed to start try-outs in New Haven this fall, then if all goes well, it’s Broadway in 2026.
At least, that was the plan. Sad to say, you may never get to spend an intimate evening with a supersized prehistoric turtle who saved the world again and again but finally realized that he needed to save…himself. ‘Cuz while I’ve been digging deep under my vertebral shell to expose the tender soul of the chelonian within, a bunch of heavily-armed high school dropouts have been roaming the country looking for the enemy within, which apparently means anyone with dark skin who didn’t vote for your Glorious Leader.
I’ve said it before: I’m 70 million years old. I was here back when the biggest assholes on the planet were the Titanosaurs. Your political disagreements mean zilch to me. That said, some of you hairless apes can be seriously annoying – like the steroid-gobbling chowderheads who call themselves “ICE.” I gotta lotta problems with ICE, starting with the name. After being frozen in a block of ice for 69.9 million years, just the thought of the stuff makes my green blood boil. This is why I usually soak my tootsies in the balmy waters of the South Pacific. But since my producers are based in LA, I’ve been polishing my script at my buddy’s place in Carmel-by-the-Sea – just a short hop up the coast for a jet-powered turtle.
You may be wondering, who has a place big enough to accommodate my plus-size girth and a cooking staff capable of respecting my long list of food allergies? Look, I’m not a name-dropper, but I know a lot of celebs. My main gig may be “Guardian of the Universe,” but my side hustle is acting. And it’s gone pretty good for me. No brag, just fact: I am an actual movie star. Sure, it’s been a while since I’ve had my face up there on the big screen, but my agent assures me that I’m still “bankable.” The problem, she says, is that I’m mostly thought of as a children’s entertainer. Nothing wrong with that – I am a well-known friend to all children! – but my agent says I need to show my range. That’s how I got talked into doing this one-man one-turtle show. Nothing says “I am a serious actor” like theater.
But am I a serious actor? I dunno. I show up, I do a job, they pay me. Just like the guy who’s letting me crash at his place: Mr. William Bradley Pitt. Unlike a lot of your Hollywood stars, Brad’s not trying to pass himself off as a brooding method actor or a heavyweight thespian. If he has a passion for anything outside of getting paid truckloads of money for pretending to be a soldier or an astronaut or a stuntman or a spy or whatever manly role comes his way, it’s real estate. He likes that modernist stuff – glass walls and shaped concrete and all that jazz – but a few years ago he broke character and dropped $40 million on the D.L. James House, a hundred-year-old granite and sandstone mansion carved into a bluff overlooking the beach in Carmel, California. Sweet, sweet digs, but surprisingly traditional. Brad being Brad, though, he’s made a bunch of additions to Parada en Boxes, including a lap pool full of craft beer, a greenhouse devoted exclusively to the cultivation of Dutch tulips, five screening rooms modeled after the inner chambers of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, an exact reproduction of the 18-hole course at The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, a secret underground laboratory, and a giant freshwater lake filled with tropical fish imported from Lake Malawi and the Amazon basin. That artificial lake is where I found myself floating in June, dictating a monologue to my personal assistant and translator, Miho, while Brad was overseas pretending to be a race car driver.
Miho is an amazing woman. She speaks Japanese, Mandarin, English, French, Spanish, and Kaiju. I speak passable Japanese, and obviously Kaiju is my first language, but I just can’t get my beak-like mouth around the English tongue, and sometimes I have a hard time understanding it, particularly when it’s being screamed at me. Most of the time I just assume you humans are yelling something along the lines of “Run for your lives, it’s a giant fire-breathing turtle!” or “For the love of God, please don’t stomp on us!” or “I’m still making payments on that car!” But Miho is a master linguist. More than that, she gets me. She has no problem keeping up as I act out bits from my past.1
So, June 16, 2025, I’m reliving my epic underwater death match with Viras, the unimaginatively-named squid-like gestalt monster form of the mind-controlling alien Virasians. To dramatize the moment, I sink to the bottom of the lake, pretending to be seriously wounded and struggling to regain my fighting spirit. I end up sitting down there for a good while, overcome by the emotion of my memories. After a while, I start hearing muffled but strangely familiar noises – what sounds like helicopters and people yelling and screaming. I float up to the surface, and as my eye passes the waterline I see Miho and about thirty of the domestic staff being zip-tied and corralled into the sculpture garden by a bunch of masked muscleheads in full tactical gear. Naturally I assume an armed posse of criminals have somehow gotten past security. So I slowly step out of the lake and just stand there, looming above them, dripping water, strong, silent, and strikingly handsome.
The reaction, as usual, is a lot of yelling and screaming, and every gun in the place turns in my direction, but to my surprise these goons are so disciplined – or have so little free will – that they wait for orders from their commanding officer. The commander arrives in a blacked-out Chevy Suburban, plowing right through the exact reproduction of the Ryoan-ji dry rock meditation garden in Kyoto. Out steps a human female with an immovable plastic face, draped in designer combat fatigues, clutching a bullhorn. She screams something about how she’s Crispy from the Department of Homeland Security, and she’s on a mission from the President or God to “cast out the undesirables.” Then she goes off on a tangent about how it’s perfectly acceptable to shoot puppies if they’re lousy at pheasant hunting, which is unsettling on so many levels. Somewhere in the middle of Homicidal Barbie’s rant, I realize these masked homunculi are agents of ICE, a Federally-funded band of heavily-armed bigots that target the poor and powerless who come to America looking for a better life.
I try to explain to this dead-eyed apparatchik that I am more of a native of this country than she is because I was here back when the supercontinent was still breaking apart, so the way I see it, all of you are the invaders and I am the original gangsta. So get off my lawn. Or, you know, get off All-American movie star Brad Pitt’s lawn. But naturally Crispy doesn’t speak dinosaur or Japanese, so all she and her goons hear is “SCREEEEAAAAAAUUUURRRRRRRRRRR!!!!”
She may not understand the words, but Crispy gets the message: the force of my awesome roar blows back her normally immovable hair helmet, an event so traumatizing that she leaps into the back of the Suburban, screams “Fire at will!” and disappears in a dusty tornado. Then every gun in the place lights up – and there are a lot of guns here, because there is no such thing as “overkill” to ICE. Not that it makes any difference to me. Remember, you guys had to drop an atom bomb on my head to wake me from my eons-long slumber. Bullets just bounce off my shell…and artillery, and rockets, and whatever else you throw at me. If these creatine addicts had more than a single neuron between them, they might figure that out, but no…they bombard me with all the tactical ordnance at their disposal. Of course, I’m not hurt, but I am annoyed. Seriously annoyed. And when you annoy a very large nuclear-powered turtle, things get squashed. Armored personnel carriers get melted. There’s a lot of pissing in Kevlar underpants, as the puny humans who dared to arouse my fury realize they have met a giant turtle – a solid number two in the Peerage of Kaiju! – that they can’t push around.
After half an hour, these protein-powdered posers either run out of ammo or testosterone, and the shooting peters out. Now it’s stand-off time. As the smoke clears, I see the golf course is pockmarked with craters, the greenhouse is in ruins, and the Henry Moore, Donald Judd, and Thomas Houseago sculptures are piles of powdered marble. Worst of all, Brad’s warehouse-sized “pottery shed” has been pulverized, including the two-story kiln, which is really going to bum him out.
Suddenly, a sleek black chopper drops out of the pack of helicopters overhead and floats down to one of the few intact patches of ground. The passenger door opens, and out steps Mr. George Clooney. As usual, Clooney is in a bespoke Italian suit, Selima Optique Money 2 sunglasses on his perfectly tanned face, gleaming Omega De Ville wristwatch on his arm, not one salt-and-pepper hair out of place. Twenty seconds later the Suburban roars up, because Crispy isn’t going to miss a photo op with an A-lister, even if he’s a Democrat. Clooney tells her he was en route to Isola dell’acqua robotica, his fully autonomous seafaring island, but he diverted to his bestie Brad’s pad when he saw the live coverage on the news (“ICE Raids Pitt’s Pleasure Dome” “Green-Skinned Migrant Resists Arrest” “Toxic Turtle Terrorizes America”). He launches into a speech that’s about eight parts “Good Night and Good Luck” with bits of “Michael Clayton” and “Up in the Air” thrown in, and he’s really pouring himself into it, just oozing actorly charisma. The actual words don’t flow, because cinema’s most nipple-positive Batman is not a writer. After decades of playing doctors and lawyers, though, Clooney has convinced himself that he is a fully-qualified medical and legal professional. Tell him you’ve been feeling a little off lately and he’ll diagnose you with “Greene-Lewis-Ross Enzyme Deficiency.” Say you have a legal problem and he’ll tell you how the precedent of “United States vs. U.E. McGill” gives you immunity from prosecution. All bullshit, of course. Basically, Clooney is a human Chat GPT.2 Nonetheless, the dude’s star wattage is so high that Crispy agrees to compromise: ICE will take the gardeners but leave the cooks, maids, and Miho, on the condition that I immediately fly out to international waters and steer clear of the continental USA until the mid-term elections of 2026. A pretty raw deal for the gardeners, if you ask me, but I didn’t have much of a choice.
So, yeah, I said to hell with it and lit out for Monster Island, even though I swore I would never return after my ex-girlfriend ruined the annual kaiju Christmas party a few years back. (Whatta mess that was.) And now the media is casting me as a violent undocumented alien and possible member of MS-13 with an unhealthy interest in children. Not the first time I have been misunderstood or vilified by corporate tools and political hacks, but damn. How many times do I have to save the Earth before I get a little respect?
Mostly I feel bad for the workers who got carted off to God knows where, and for Brad, who’s going to lose it when he sees what my battle with these clowns did to his yard. But maybe he’ll appreciate that I kept the Feds from finding the entrance to his underground laboratory and discovering that cohort of German scientists he smuggled in to do whatever it is they do down there. Brad says they’re developing a new formula for “the ultimate craft beer.” Maybe that’s true, but it seems to involve an awful lot of plutonium.
You might ask how Brad and I communicate, given that he doesn’t speak dinosaur and knows just enough Japanese to do region-only product endorsements for the Nipponese market. All I can tell you is that we don’t need words. When a very special man meets a very special turtle, a kind of a telepathic bond forms between them.
He’s married to an actual lawyer. She must see something in him I don’t.
Gamera, a regular columnist for GREED, is a very large prehistoric turtle who fearlessly battles evil kaiju and is kind to children, no matter how shrill or annoying.