Masters of the Universe

by Nathan Kraft '01

I. I first met Chipper Gleason when I was 5 or 6, when my mother was working with Chipper's mother Sue teaching music lessons in town. The He- Man connection must have been what initially tipped our parents off that we would be good friends. I remember my mom asking me if I wanted to play with this kid who had Castle Greyskull, a large green molded castle that He- Man lived inside of with the other Masters of the Universe. The answer was, of course, "Yes!" and we met one afternoon while both my mom and Sue taught lessons at the Unitarian Church in town. We played that first afternoon on the sloping hill in front of the church, on the opposite side of Main Street from the library. Chipper was a small, wirey boy with bright blue eyes and light brown hair cut in a kind of bowl. Later we figured out that even though we were the same height, Chipper's skinny legs were longer than mine, and that my birthday was before his (so I was older). There was not much to play with in the common in front of the church. There were a few swings and things, but mostly we played along the rail fences that bordered the common, climbing up on them and using them as platforms for our action figures. We both had a great time that day, and before long we met every time that our moms were teaching. One day my dad asked me if I wanted to invite Chipper over to play. A book I made in school in the fall of first grade laid it all out: "I like to read at school. I don't like butterscotch. I like Chipper, my best friend." Looking back on our relationship, my parents often wondered what exactly it was that we spent so much time talking about. Chipper was pretty shy around most adults except his mother, so they only really caught glimpses of us talking from the backyard or over a game. Without fail we would become involved in some elaborate fantasy game involving our toys, and it was our capacity to match each other elaboration for elaboration that made us such good friends. I could not see Chipper every day, in part because he lived the next town over. But whenever I could convince my parents to drive me, we were off, down the long hill out of town to the west in the family car, over the river in West Groton, and along the winding, rising and falling road to his house that always seemed to drag on forever. Chipper's house, on Squannacook Road in Shirley, was a place that was both fascinating and at times repulsive. The small, white, New England farmhouse was crowded up to the side of the road, with almost no space between the front door and the street. It always seemed to sneak up on me as we came around the last curve in the car, as if I had been waiting and waiting and then all of a sudden, there it was. The house made up for its tiny front yard with an expansive back yard that wrapped around the back of the house. Beyond the mowed back yard a large unkempt field stretched back to a line of trees in the distance. My favorite part of his yard was a big old willow tree that sent protective, fuzzy- green branches down to the lawn. When we pulled into his house, we usually parked at the top of a short gravel driveway that led to a large single car garage, the first garage that I had ever seen. The back of the garage was converted into a dog pen for two large, noisy wolfhounds that I seldom saw but always heard gruffing and banging on the walls of the pen whenever I went near there. My family had cats, and those dogs were something entirely foreign to me. I could imagine them breaking out of the pens and ripping us all limb from limb like the wolves I saw in movies. When it was nice out we spent time out in that big back yard, oftentimes bringing action figures out to set up story lines. One day we set up on the action figure sized mountain of rock that a small boulder pile provided. I asked Chipper "So who do you want to have save Battle Cat from Skeletor?" "I dunno... How about Man- at- Arms?," he said, referring to He- Man's sidekick. "Ahh... not him. He looks like a squished monkey face." I said, grimacing to emphasize my point. "Ok, well then here comes Buzz- Off!" he cried as he unfolded the yellow bee- like wings of another action figure and raced around the willow tree and back, swooping low to save Battle Cat from his prison among the boulders. "Off to Castle Greyskuuuull!" he yelled triumphantly, half skipping away with rescuer and ex- captive. Later Chester, Chipper's father, hung a tire swing from the willow. We would play on it for hours. I remember the high that came from that brief moment of free fall as the tire reached the end of its swing and began to plummet to the ground again. My parents would have to fairly rip me away to bring me home. When it rained we played in the large back room that was half filled with a big old mattress. Sometimes we would jump onto it from the short staircase to the kitchen or sometimes we would use as a battlefield for the eternal, epic clashes between good and evil. When it really got raining the room would start to stink like old animal urine, I think, from some of the many cats and dogs they kept. One rainy day we sat on the mattress opening up the package containing Stinkor, an enemy of He- Man. The figure was skunk striped and smelled like the rotting compost pile in our back yard out of the package, although nothing as bad as the real skunks that sometimes got our cats. "Chipper, do you think Stinkor's smell will ever go away?" I asked, concerned. "I hope not... he wouldn't be as powerful if it went away," Chipper replied, matter- of- factly. "Maybe you could just leave it here, under the mattress, and he would get his smell back," I offered helpfully, thinking of the stinky animal smell in the room. "That's not funny!" he snapped back, ending the conversation. On one of those warm early summer days that makes the pollen haze over the fields behind people's yards seem soupy, Chipper and I set off on an epic journey. We wandered beyond the confines of the mowed back yard and traveled through the unkempt tall grass towards the line of trees we could see from the house. The grass was well above out heads and partially blocked our vision, adding to the sense of adventure and danger. At last we came to the wooded embankment, and, after consulting, we scrambled up it, using saplings and rocks to move over the crumbly, loose dirt. At the top we found ourselves on the edge of a large filthy gash in the landscape, a quarry or gravel pit of some sort, that stretched on at least as far as we had come. Whatever game we had been playing was forgotten and we sat for some time, looking out on the new frontier far beyond the known safety of his house and yard, throwing rocks into depths below. By the time we made our way home, Sue was worried sick in her quiet, loving way, and began to check us over for ticks. Ticks, I learned that day, like to live in tall grass, a fact I would have appreciated knowing before we had planned our adventure. Chipper whined and fussed to Sue about how gross they were. I could not imagine anything more disgusting as she pulled the little black wiggly things off of Chipper's legs and dropped them, one by one, into a Mason jar half filled with water and the bloated bodies of ticks from the dogs. But I was even more repulsed to find the ticks on me, and I spent the car ride home that evening in near terror, picking them off as they crawled out from under my socks and behind my neck. It was not until after I was in bed that night, after a warm hot shower and a thorough inspection, with my dad reading to me from the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis and the rhythmic whirl of the oscillating fan in the background, that I was able to feel safe enough again to fall asleep. One of those first summers with Chipper my family spent a week or so in rural New Hampshire at the home of our friends the Steins, at a place called Boulder Farm. Chipper came along for the week, a big deal because he rarely went far from home. One day we found the croquet set and played all afternoon on the huge front lawn that sloped down from the old red farmhouse, making up the rules as we went along. A photograph shows Chipper on top of the enormous boulder by the driveway that gave the farm its name, as I climbed the side of it with my dad, with his long hair and beard, right behind me, ready to catch me if I slipped. My favorite photograph shows Chipper and me on the long couches inside the front porch, laughing hysterically at my little brother Damon's jack in the box. We both sit sprawled on the couch, Chipper in a E.T. movie tee shirt and me in a blue Adidias shirt, eyes sparkling, legs covered in bug bites. Neither I nor my parents can remember what for the life of me was so funny about that toy, only that it kept us occupied for hours. *** II. While my family would return to Boulder Farm the next few summers, Chipper would not come with us. One day the next fall, as Chipper and I raced around my front yard throwing GI Joe figures on tiny parachutes (He- Man was not cool anymore) up into the air, Sue pulled up in her blue Ford Escort to take Chipper to see Dr. Staub. I knew the reason Chipper was going in but I didn't really believe it. Chipper's dad Chester said that supposedly Chipper was starting to get bruises really easily- like when he bumped into the bed- and that's what made them take him in for testing. But I never really believed that because Chipper was my best friend and I had never noticed that, and besides, I didn't really trust Chester that much. Chester was big and had a bald spot on his head and a big beard like some happy monk from the paintings in my dad's office. He walked around in pajama bottoms a lot during the day with his belly hanging over the top and would call out to his wife "Suzie!!!" in a round, full voice. He was a veterinarian and ran a clinic ("the clinic" to us) in Ayer, but he always seemed to be at home sleeping so we couldn't use the TV in their bedroom. Chipper was actually named Chester too, just like his dad, but he didn't like that very much and always seemed to prefer Chipper. Several days later, Sue called my mother with the verdict from the testing. My parents sat me down. They explained, as best they could, that Chipper had leukemia (what a funny- sounding name!) that was a kind of cancer that attacks the blood. Sometimes people die from it, but sometimes they don't. And there are lots of different ways to treat it. My parents also gave me the option of spending less time with Chipper- probably to protect me from the stress of the whole situation- but I would have none of it. Chipper was my friend, that was that. Years later my parents told me that many of their friends were secretly furious with my folks for allowing us to still play together because he might die. But as far as I could tell, leukemia initially did not change much about Chipper or our playtime. We still hung out, we still played the same sorts of games. If anything, things got more fun at his house. Sue would make more batches of cookie dough and leave the batter out for us to pick at. Toys materialized seemingly out of thin air. I had always been pretty amazed at the amount of toys that Chipper's parents bought for him compared to my parents (my mom is a Quaker and my dad a Unitarian minister), but things really changed after that fall. Chester worked at an animal clinic in Ayer right down the street from Gepetto's Workshop, an amazing place packed with racks and racks of dimly lit toys and action figures, and he would frequently pick up a toy for Chipper on the way home from work. I remember at one point realizing how the system worked, and I began to encourage Chipper one day to ask for the toys that I wanted to play with, starting first with a playset that encased unwitting action figures in a blob of green slime. Our fantasy worlds grew bigger and more elaborate as our plastic legions were stoked with reinforcements, and my mother recalls us spending hours on end, face to face, lying on our bellies with both of our collections spread out between us, spinning off scenarios and scenes. As Chipper progressed in his treatments, something that they called "chemo," I began to spend more and more time at his house because he was more vulnerable to getting sick. A second trip to Boulder Farm with us that summer was out of the question. I had to spend the next summer up there with my stupid cousin Jennifer who stole all my candy and always got away with breaking the rules. Chipper also had lots of medicines to take. I remember waiting in his kitchen, with its old dark wooden paneling and faux- stone linoleum, as Sue mixed up some syrup in a glass of Polar Grape soda, Chipper's favorite. Something about the whole process made me uncomfortable, so as she mixed I moved over to the side of the refrigerator to play with the magnetic alphabet, waiting until we could return to the battle scenes we had set out. Looking back on the photographs from my eight and ninth birthday parties, I am shocked at the drastic change in Chipper's appearance in just one year. At my ninth birthday party Chipper is bald, and his skin is pale and blotchy in places. He smiles in all the pictures as we eat cake and play "pin the nose on Yoda" (my dad's brilliant adaptation of the classic donkey- tail game), but he really stands out against the ruddy, exuberant complexion of me and David DeMoranville and Stacey Poulter and all of my other friends from school. Chipper's least favorite part of the whole affair was his shunt, a piece of plastic surgical tubing that was stuck though a hole in his chest into an artery. It was used with some of the chemo treatments (to bypass smaller arteries and veins that would literally have been burned up by the chemicals, I learned later). Chipper absolutely hated it. He would fuss and whine when Sue had to flush it out daily, to prevent infection. I always tried to avoid seeing the shunt when it was freed from the cap and bandage that covered it normally, that strange piece of plastic sticking out his chest like a straw. I completely forgot about it until one day fifteen years later as I stared at a silver injection plate and catheter in the chest of a cadaver in an anatomy lab in college, trying to figure out why, of all the other disturbing aspects of the lab, the tube was so terrifying. But the shunt was not in forever. After several long rounds of chemo, one of Chipper's visits with the doctor in Boston revealed that he was in remission, that his T cells, which I learned were good for him, had grown in number. And the shunt could come out. After some time, the T cell counts and the cancer cells, the up and the down, the good guys and bad guys, worked there way into our games and imagination. As Chipper's cancer began to return, Chester and Sue spoiled Chipper once again with a Commodore 64 computer. One day Chipper and I sat playing one of our favorite games, "Beamrider," in the messy sprawl of his parents' bedroom. The game was very simple: the player controlled a small white ship at the bottom of the screen that traveled through deeper and deeper into an endless number of sectors on a scrolling grid of beams, blasting alien ships and saving stranded comrades. It was much more fun than the other educational games like "Math Blaster" that were the "real" reason Chipper got the computer, but I suspect that was just the way that Sue and Chester justified (to themselves) the purchase of yet another fantastic toy. As we munched on Doritos and chocolate pudding cups, watching each other play, a thought occurred to me. "Hey Chipper, what do cancer cells look like?" "I dunno... probably like normal cells but a little different," he replied as he blasted away at the aliens. I tried to picture what a normal cell looked like. "Hey!! Lets pretend that we're in your blood!" I had just seen previews for the movie Inner Space where a guy got shrunk down and put into someone's body. "The aliens could be the cancer cells!" The game, which was beginning to get a little bit old, was quickly transformed into something incredibly fun and exciting. We took turns pretending that we were piloting a little ship into ChipperŐs blood stream, nuking the hordes of cancer cells, cleaning out each level until the speed and number of alien ships got the best of us. Neither of us really believed that what we were doing was real, but I half- believed, half- hoped with all of my heart that the game could be real, that it could be that easy. For that afternoon I felt like I had the power to help Chipper with something that before was far beyond either of our control. *** III. One day over dinner at Chipper's, in a rare occasion when all of his family (including his big sister Dara) were around, I learned that Chipper was going to have a bone marrow transplant. As we ate Kraft Mac and Cheese, Chester, in his booming voice, told me that Chipper's T cell counts were down. The doctors wanted to try to remove all of the marrow from Chipper's body and replace it with some from a clean donor. I didn't even know that bones had marrow, except for those Marrow Bone dog treats they had ads for on TV. I remember Dara, who I usually only saw as she flew in or out of the house after some spat with Chester over Juan, her boyfriend from the local army base, being very quiet that night. She was going to be the donor, she told me. I had an image in my head of the two of them on silver stretchers with clean white linens over them, with some big pipe running between them transferring marrow, straight out of a mad scientist movie. As Sue drove me home that night alone, my head was spinning. Dara who had sex! Dara who had smoked a cigarette! Dara who had no time for us! Dara who gave Chipper bone marrow? It was confusing. That was the last I remember seeing Chipper for a long time. It was then the winter of third grade. My parents got me a new kitten from the neighbors across the street, "because Billy (our older cat) died," they told me. Billy had died the summer before. I named the new kitten Bandit and brought her in to show and tell in a box labeled "fresh young turkey" (a family joke ever since). My life was busy, and I don't remember thinking about Chipper that much after a while. He was off in some far away city for the operation for several months. I learned later that they first gave Chipper some sort of treatment to kill off all of his own bone marrow. After he had recovered from that, they performed the transplant, and then they had to wait to see if it worked. By spring, he was moved back to Boston for his final recovery. After a few weeks, he was healthy enough for me to come and visit him. My mom drove me in to Boston to see him. As I sat in the back seat of our Subaru and stared out the window at the green, budding trees passing by on Memorial Drive, I ran through all the warnings that my mom had peppered me with. "He's on a lot of steroids for his recovery so he might look a little different. Maybe a little puffy." "Chipper might get tired really easily because his body is weaker now. He might not want to play very long, but it's not because he doesn't want to see you." "Nathan, its OK if you donŐt want to stay long. It's been a long time and it might be a little scary at first. You just let me know and we can come back later. Whenever you want." At last we pulled into the place he was staying, a place confusingly called Ronald McDonald House. "I thought he only made hamburgers!" I said. The beautifully laid out complex had a cobble drive, big walls around the outside, and lots of little apartments where children and their families lived. The receptionist led us to Chipper's bungalow, and Sue met us at the door. "Hi Nathan, so good to see you!" Sue bent down to give me a hug, squishing her large half tinted glasses against my head. "Chipper's right inside!" I stepped into the apartment and took it all in with a sweep of my eyes: high ceilings, incessant off- white walls, ceilings and carpets, lots of high windows, the stench of sterilizing cleaners. I turned left and walked into Chipper's room. "Hi." "Hi." I stood in shock, taking in the new Chipper. His head was covered in short black fuzzy hair, and he looked like he had gained a lot of weight. His cheeks were all puffy. He had an army cap pulled low on his face. I thought about the Staypuff Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters for an instant, then tried to banish the thought from my head. I stood digging my toe in the rug, my mom with her hands on my shoulders behind me. "Wanna see my new Silverhawks?" Chipper asked, and the spell of silence was broken. "Yeah. Sure!" He gave me the grand tour. He showed off his Thundercats and Silverhawks, two new series of toys. I marveled at the TV and VCR, complete with a complimentary movie selection. We sniffed each other out, in our own ways, like two dogs meeting. He seemed pretty normal underneath the new bulky skin, maybe a little quieter. I noticed the bulge on one side of his chest, under his shirt, and figured the shunt was back in. I didn't want to ask. I stayed the afternoon, and we watched Howard the Duck while mom and Sue talked. We laughed at the goofy combat scenes, and looked the other way when Howard and the female lead got romantic. Someone brought us soft serve ice cream, the kind they serve at McDonald's, from the reception area. It was good, and it was free whenever the office was open. "Chipper is pretty lucky," I remember thinking. The doctors decided that the house on Squannacook Road, with all its old building materials and dust and animal urine was not the best place for Chipper to go to. He needed someplace relatively sterile, someplace that was easy to clean. They moved him into a two- room apartment in Littleton, part of a large complex with big brick facades and big grassy courtyards. The place was close enough to their home in Shirley that Sue and Chester could drive back and forth in a few minutes. Chipper had the only real room in the apartment; the other space was filled with a kitchen and a living room that had a futon for Sue. Chester usually stopped by after work. We quickly returned to our old patterns as soon as he was moved in. While he had less energy to play and I usually had to leave by dinner, I still spent hours and hours over there with him, playing computer games, setting up toy battles, and, for the first time really, just talking. One day we started talking about my grandma Charlotte, who had just died. "Have you ever thought about dying, Chipper?" I asked him after a while. "Sometimes," he replied. "If I died I'd want you to have all of my toys." "Really? What about the computer?" "I think that Dara should have that. She could use it for school." "Oh... OK." "D'you think your parents would do that, if you died?" I asked. "I don't know. I could tell them... But maybe I should just make a will." "That way they'd have to do whatever you wrote in it," I said, remembering from some TV show. "OK." Chipper took a piece of graph paper from out of his desk, and after talking about it with me for a minute, began to write it out. I would get all his toys. Dara would receive the Commodore 64 computer. His parents would get all of his savings. He seemed satisfied with the balance of it all. We signed it at the bottom, tucked it away in the drawer, and went back to trying to figure out how to beat the fourth floor boss in the video game Kung Fu. To this day I do not really know what prompted the will writing, but it seemed like we finally acknowledged something important, something that had been in the way before. It made me feel at ease with him again, in a way that I had not felt since his operation. That fall I moved on to a new school, a private school in Concord. I had to wear a collared shirt, and Chipper thought that was hilarious. He had pretty much stopped going to school since the operation, but he did assignments at home. I was secretly jealous because he got to play video games so often during the day and had so little class. At my new school, kids didn't really play with toys anymore. Everyone was talking about The Simpsons. Cameron brought in a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. Everyone played sports games at recess. I was gone more during the day because of the commute in the dreaded carpool. I could only really see Chipper on weekends and Friday afternoons. I still enjoyed the toys and games that Chipper was so devoted to, but I marked the difference between what he wanted to do and the other kids at school were in to. We went to the arcade in Fitchburg one day and I remember for the first time feeling like we were two kids who were somehow out of place in the world around us, but somehow it just did not matter. On the way home Sue kept talking about the "big one- ohh," the "double digit" birthday that was coming up for both of us. We were proud. One Friday afternoon after school, my dad and I pulled up in the lot of the apartment. The October light was fading early through the brightly colored maples by the lot. No one had answered the phone when we called to confirm our play date earlier in the day. "Maybe they just stepped out for a minute," my dad said. We walked up the steps to the second floor apartment. My dad knocked on the door. No answer. He knocked again. Nothing. My dad had little to say as we walked out to the car. I knew, somehow, that something had gone very wrong. The call came later that night from Sue. Chipper was back in the hospital. I didn't need my parents to tell me that things were not looking good. He was very sickÉ something about "complications." No one seems to remember just how long he was in the hospital. I do remember that on Monday in school, Mrs. Finney, with her prim British accent, had us all say a prayer for my "little friend." Someone must have called in to tell her. I remember being embarrassed... why did all these people who did not know him have to pray for him? I never said prayers, anyway. There were long days of waiting in my house. Everyone always looking at me, talking to me about things, asking if I understood. Friends stopped by, my Grandma Betty (who lived next door) tried to get me involved in puzzles and other projects. I felt like everyone was expecting me to react in a certain way, in a way I did not want to. One afternoon, I was sitting outside on the porch in the afternoon, alone. It was warm for October. A feeling came over me, and I understood things were different then. My parents came out again to ask me if I wanted to talk about Chipper some more. I turned to them and said, "No... he just died." The months that followed are a mismash of memories. My father, a minister, did his funeral. Sue wanted us all to sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," because it was a song that she thought Chipper had loved. I didn't think so, but I went up front to sing it with my dad anyway, looking out on a church filled with people I barely knew, dressed in one of my stupid collared shirts I had for my new school, tears streaming down everyone's face. I couldnŐt stand to hear that song for a long time afterwards. I remember looking across the aisle later in the service at all of the kids from Chipper's grade in school who had brought books and cards, and I started to realize then that he had been friends with other kids as well. Sue kept her end of the will, and I got as much of the hordes of plastic toys as I wanted, which I kept carefully organized and out of the hands of my five year old brother, the terror. She even gave me the games for the Commodore 64 (which technically now belonged to Dara), to play on my own computer that I got for my tenth birthday that November. That spring, as I sat playing Kung Fu on the computer in my parent's room, I had a revelation. I raced outside to our big, wandering back yard and started talking. I had to tell Chipper somethingÉ he had to know! I was sure that he could hear me. "Chipper," I said, half under my breath because I was afraid the neighbors would see me talking to myself and think that I was crazy, "I figured it out! I figured out how to beat the forth- floor boss in Kung Fu! All you have to do is squat and punch... it's so easy! It's so easy." Somehow, of all the things to say, that was the most important.