The Kevin Show

by Mary Pilon

  He stood outside Grand Central, thinking of love and of Michael Jordan. The NBA player had just finished his first three-part finals win with the Chicago Bulls, and his star, fueled by Nike’s massive Air Jordan campaign, had taken his name and profile to a level never seen before for an athlete. A new way of thinking about sports marketing had arrived; Jordan was a modern global icon. One could travel anywhere in the world and find a red Chicago Bulls jersey with Jordan’s “23” on it, or people talking about Jordan’s coveted shoes, which had caused controversy, religious fervor, and even violence and death.

  Shoes as a means to battle poverty would be part of a great way of saving the world, Kevin thought. He looked down at his own Birkenstocks, then found a pay phone nearby. He “called” Birkenstock headquarters, hoping to secure permission to use footage of him in an advertisement for their “Air Jesus” campaign.116 He quickly “negotiated the deal,” then took his Birkenstocks off and left them behind, both to punctuate the phone call and to give the cameras a good shot of the product. A benevolent passerby noticed that Kevin had left his sandals behind and tried to hand them back to him, but Kevin wasn’t interested.

  The passerby confused him. Couldn’t the man, possibly an extra on The Show, see that the Birkenstocks were a living sculpture, meant to be dropped there and left for all time? Kevin told the man that a museum might want the sandals and that he trusted him to look after them.

  It was still early morning, well before the nine o’clock rush hour but well after sunrise, when Kevin retrieved his white Toyota truck117 and drove to Long Island in search of Amanda. He knew that she was taking some summer courses there and would understand. The weather was humid and thick, but maybe they could have a picnic and talk things through.118

  Kevin knew that Amanda was taking classes, but he wasn’t sure where the medical school campus was located. He found another college campus, figured that it must be right, parked, strolled around, sat in on a math class, and carried a picnic basket that he had purchased a short time earlier. As he roamed the grounds outside, someone asked him what he was doing there and Kevin became upset, hurling the contents of the basket onto the lawn, thinking that he was distributing the wealth. He didn’t understand why more people couldn’t see the virtues of sharing.

  Next he climbed to the top of a building, arousing the suspicions of a professor, who then called the police. Kevin had shed his shirt and shoes and appeared “disoriented,” according to the professor,119 who asked him what he was doing there.

  I’m here to see Amanda, Kevin said. In the health department.

  The professor and a supervisor began a search for Kevin’s vehicle. They found his white pickup parked in a walkway behind a building with its radio blaring and engine running.

  As the responders tried to assess the situation, they found a medical bracelet in the back of Kevin’s truck indicating that he had bipolar disorder. His family had persuaded him to get the bracelet at some point, but he hadn’t worn it for long. It felt like a heavy weight and was a conversation starter for a talk he never wanted to have.120

  The responders transported him to a nearby psychiatric facility121 for evaluation.

  This episode of The Show had concluded. At the hospital in Long Island, Kevin returned to drawing, one of the few things that made sense to him, as the meds kicked in. He drew a man and labeled one of his legs “crotch,” a reference to his relationship and desire for Amanda, one of the pillars of his life,122 sailing being the other. He wondered what he was without sailing and without Amanda.

  Crotch/Crutch

  Although most people would find commanding a complex vessel in front of a worldwide crowd to be incredibly stressful, Kevin was starting to realize that in some ways, sailing was a meditative act for him, something that brought him back to who he thought he was and kept him happily planted there. His stability on the waves was what he was known for, what had earned him attention from the time he was a child. Kevin tried to tell himself that he was not the sum of his sailing results, but the notion was so woven into his psyche that he still struggled to come to terms with it.

  •

  Even after Kevin dumped Amanda, the two had tried, briefly, to live together in Providence. Yet as they tried to reconcile, Kevin had learned that Amanda was dating some other guy that summer, someone she’d met when leading bike tours. She begged him to move back anyway and to give things another shot in spite of all of the drama, in spite of her having had a relationship with someone else at a time when Kevin thought she was with him.

  “Feels like a lot of pressure to swallow it all and be the Dali [sic] Lama,” Kevin wrote in his journal. “Especially what with the way it all went down and all, for the Relationship to essentially ride on the way I handle the pressure.”123

  The idea of dating seemed too overwhelming to think about. Kevin sat at coffee shops in Providence, staring at the array of ads, notices, and proposals stapled over one another on bulletin boards, and thought about how it was the perfect visual of the inside of his brain, a scattered tapestry of conflicting messages, missives being fired out into the world with no knowledge of their outcome. He ate cheap English muffins and let the food in his refrigerator spoil124 without throwing it out. For now, he was going to sulk, write poetry, and plan a trip across the Atlantic, far away from Amanda and the whole mess of it all.

  “I’ve ‘given up’ on the Future,” Kevin wrote, “(wife, the whole kids, Volvo, etc.).” He was on edge. Maybe he needed a “real job”? Sail in the afternoons and write at night?

  If life was a choice, Kevin felt less and less able to opt in. With his mind surrounded by pain and darkness so vast, so untouchable by comfort, suicide started to seem like the only way out. He detested himself as a person and wondered how he could ever be worthy of the love of his friends and family. If he ended it all and was not around, they could get on with their lives, he thought, even though this sentiment was quite literally the opposite of the regular string of encouragements and “I love yous” they sent his way. Yet suicide sometimes also felt like yet another thing that he could fail at.

  Leo Tolstoy, writing about his own thoughts of ending his own life said that even though he was a “fortunate man,” he walked from room to room of his home with a rope, contemplating hanging himself from a ceiling beam, and stopped hunting with a gun to rid himself of suicide’s lure. “I myself did not know what I wanted,” Tolstoy wrote. “I was afraid of life, I struggled to get rid of it, and yet I hoped for something from it.”125

  In addition to such thoughts of dissatisfaction like Tolstoy’s, Kevin thought about destiny, coincidence, synchronicity, and how there may be no final answer. He felt as though he had seen things no one else on the planet had, but didn’t know what to do with the knowledge. What’s worse, his attempts at trying to exist back on earth weren’t going too well. He wrote:

  Now we are faced with a difficult situation for a man who is displeased with his life—was it supposed to happen at all, like this, some other way, to someone else?… Am I responsible then or not? Can I ever be sure I have greater significance than a conglomeration of molecules which affect others, sometimes predictably, sometimes unpredictably, but most often violently?

  Someday, Kevin realized, everyone he knew would be dead, everyone would be forgotten. It all felt wildly pointless.

  One afternoon when Kevin was violently depressed, he went sailing, but he didn’t feel the water or hear the wind the way he normally did. All he could feel was how absent he was and he returned to the shore even more disappointed by the water’s failure to heal. In other, calmer moments, Kevin thought back to his episodes on The Show and reexamined their plots, themes, and possible hidden messages in the same way that a museumgoer stares at paintings, trying to find significance in the swirls, the use of paint and other materials, and the placement of colors and forms on a canvas. Like works of art, his delusions, however destructive, had motifs: saving the world, grandiosity, liberation. In his journal, he wrote a
bout television, “how the cable comes into your room like a tarantula who lost his bus fare and begs you to plug him back into the bathtub because that’s where all the cool short-circuits happen, and that means Post-Revolutionary leaps of paint and coffee onto different varieties of bruised apples.” What did it all mean?

  Kevin recognized that he could embark on a new beginning. “But I don’t know where the start line is,”126 he wrote. “I haven’t the foggiest idea what it looks like. I don’t know if I want to race/play/go anywhere.”

  He booked a flight to France, and shortly before getting on the plane, he wrote:

  Real life heroes live 24 hours127 a day, not just 2 hours in a football game

  Big Daddy Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

  And:

  I want to live like a hero, present, peaceful, graceful, and kind. I wish to spend time in a Buddhist monastery. I want to compose music, to understand and know and feel tone and rhythm. I wish to be loved.

  •

  Nestled along the French Riviera, Saint-Tropez is a jewel box of cottages and resort homes, a longtime mecca for the most elite of jetsetters. The beaches are postcard-perfect, with neatly arranged umbrellas shading tanned bodies on rows of lawn chairs. For most visitors, stress doesn’t get packed in their bags along with sunscreen and swimsuits, and if it does, the beach air whisks it away.

  But Kevin had followed Kevin to his destination. Despite his presence in a bright, exotic locale, he still felt low. As he watched white luxury vessels pass to and fro along the lapis water, he examined the scars from his surgeries and began to process that they were permanent, that he was mourning the biological children he knew he wouldn’t have. He ate stale croissants and went for swims in the fresh, open water. He wrote and spoke in French, swallowed his pills and tried to smile, all while grieving for the loss of his fertility and future with Amanda.128 “I feel a tremendous burden knowing I cannot live for my biological purpose on this earth, and so must serve some other purpose, or live for myself,” he wrote. “It should make me free, but I feel obligated to make a future that cannot rely on convention.”

  Kevin still hoped to find work on a boat, and he made his way to Antibes, another Riviera resort town, tucked between Cannes and Nice, with a skyline that resembled a castle of a bygone era. Kevin found the waters of Antibes and the constant twinkle of the fountains that lined its streets soothing. The entire city seemed like a museum piece, offering some sprinkles of optimism. “The awesome thing about water is that it is never exactly the same as it once was,” Kevin wrote in his journal. “And never will be … [Water] allows parts and whole to dance an ever reinvented, ever beautiful dance.”129

  He wondered if Amanda knew that two men were in love with her at once. He didn’t think it was by chance that he had met her—or that he had gotten cancer, or that he was on the beaches of France at that particular moment. He believed in destiny and still saw Amanda as part of his, even if the specifics weren’t making sense at present.

  Onward to Monterosso, Italy, where Kevin watched old fishermen, sat in an ice cream shop and wrote a letter to Amanda. When Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” came over the speakers, he cried. Then to Genoa, where the sight of children and infants made him weep,130 too. Deep in the net of melancholia, even the slightest thing could shoot Kevin further down a negativity spiral. The knowledge of that nonsensicalness to his triggers made his mind shoot down even more.

  His sailing job hunt was proving fruitless. One place after another said he was too qualified.

  Great, he thought. Another thing he had failed at.

  •

  Kevin flew home to the United States and upon landing in New York, he dreamed about meeting Amanda there and making up. In his fantasy, somehow they would reconcile, be stronger than ever. He loved her. In spite of his dumping her at his mother’s wedding, they were meant to be together.131 Being in her hometown made it painfully apparent that time and distance hadn’t healed his heartbreak; it had only festered.

  Kevin roamed around the city for a couple of days, writing poetry and watching people, before making his way to Providence. It didn’t go well there, as Amanda officially dumped Kevin. She told him that she had struggled with it all and needed some time to grow into her own person without him. She had agonized over it. But she was clear: it was over.

  Carrying his heartbreak from France with him back stateside, Kevin reconsidered his career and decided that he wanted to change the world and wondered if law school was the way to do it. It seemed like a relatively straight, sensible path, and he had a couple of friends from Brown who were on the legal track and seemingly doing well. For Kevin, law school still felt like a form of personal defeat. Lawyers weren’t the stars132 of big sneaker contracts or TV commercials, nor did they win gold medals.

  Kevin took the LSAT even as sailing still beckoned. He wondered if there was a way to train for the 1996 Olympic trials without investing all of his life’s meaning in it; “just be peaceful and steady about it,”133 he wrote. Slowly but surely, full-time careers in sailing were becoming possible, as races that paid athletes to participate were becoming more and more common. If that trend continued, Kevin thought, he might not only be able to use the money that he earned racing to subsidize his Olympic goals, but get some extra time on the water to boot.

  He had a plan. One that didn’t include Amanda.

  AMANDA

  She had made up her mind. She was going to call Kevin and tell him that she wanted to give it another try. She loved him and wanted to spend her life with him, build a family. It had been two years since they had officially been together, and she felt every one of them. Several exams and admissions applications later, Amanda had been admitted to Stony Brook Medical School on Long Island not far from where she had grown up.134 A prestigious research institution, it was housed in a sprawling complex of buildings, nestled near the calming waters and beaches of the Hamptons. She had heard some occasional buzz from mutual friends about what he was up to, but for the most part, his whereabouts (and relationship status) were a guess on her end.

  She picked up the phone and dialed his number in California, recalling that he had moved back there after leaving Providence a few years before. He picked up. It was good to hear his voice. They exchanged some small talk, which she hoped would escalate into medium and bigger talk.

  Then Kevin said that the timing of her call was funny because he had been about to reach out to her. He had big news.

  He was getting married.

  Amanda felt stunned. She had no idea who this woman was, what her relationship with Kevin was like, or even how Kevin felt about it.

  All she knew was that he wasn’t marrying her.

  KEVIN

  Anne shared Kevin’s passion for fitness, so it was no surprise that the two had met at the gym in California where Kevin worked out and where she was employed as a personal trainer. When she and Kevin were together, from the outside they looked like the quintessential California couple135: tan, fit, youthful.

  Kevin didn’t have the same kind of deep, intellectual connection with Anne that he had with Amanda, but they enjoyed each other’s company. Anne had been one of the first women he had met when he moved back to the West Coast, and it seemed perfectly fine to march ahead into matrimony.

  In December 1995, the two were married. Later, Kevin couldn’t remember whether he had even discussed his bipolar disorder diagnosis with Anne before the wedding, but if he had, it certainly hadn’t been at length—a far cry from the long, deep conversations he had had with Amanda about it and how it related to his views on being human. His wedding, too, was a blur in his mind. In hindsight, he felt oddly passive about it, as if he was just going through the motions.

  It had been three years since his last manic episode on The Show, and earlier that spring he had staged a remarkable comeback on the water.136 He had beaten forty-three other sailors to win the Laser title at the Alamitos Bay Yacht Club Olympic Classes Regatta. Then, on the hee
ls of that win, he had won the Laser North Americans, besting eighty-eight other boats. The timing was perfect—the Olympic trials were months away and he was ascending just in time to earn a berth to compete in Atlanta. Then, the U.S. Olympic festival.

  Sailing is, by nature, an escapist sport.137 For centuries, its practitioners have spoken of leaving their troubles on shore as they cast off, the bliss of the isolation of nature wrapped around them, the vastness of the sea. Kevin’s bipolar disorder now seemed to be under control, but he was becoming increasingly concerned about something else he wanted to escape, something that could directly affect his sailing future—his testosterone injections.

  In the 1990s, the World Anti-Doping Agency, the governing body that today oversees drug testing for the Olympics, had not yet been formally established. Nonetheless, testosterone had already been banned in Olympic sports because of its performance-enhancing qualities.

  In March 1995, Kevin reached out to the officials with the United States Olympic Committee and explained that he needed to inject himself with testosterone on a regular basis—not to give himself a competitive advantage, but to keep his testosterone levels normal, as his two testicles were gone. In the testicular cancer survivor community, the treatment was commonplace, but no athlete had ever challenged the IOC on its testosterone injection policy.

  Long before therapeutic use exemption waivers became a common practice (which gave some athletes permission to take drugs that were deemed medically necessary to their health but may otherwise have been on a banned substance list) Kevin wanted to get some sort of written agreement to ensure that should he make the Olympic team, he wouldn’t be rejected for using what for him was a lifesaving drug. If anything, in his position, he was at a disadvantage. Kevin pointed out to officials that even if he showed up at the opening ceremonies on the day he took a testosterone injection, most of the men around him would still have more of it in their blood than he would. (If he showed up at the end of his testosterone cycle, some of the women could, too.)