by Mary Pilon
In most arenas, Kevin had always followed the rules, and soared under disciplined structures, but taking the medications had dulled him and disconnected him from his body in a way that felt nothing short of oppressive, on and off the water. At times, the pills made him feel as if he was trying to keep on a diet while surrounded by doughnuts, cookies, and cake. Not only that, it felt as thought everyone else could eat the sweets but him.83 It was hard not to feel mad at the world and mad at his body.
“I’m not really making myself very clear,” Kevin wrote to Amanda three weeks before Christmas. “Please hear: I Love You.”84
GORDON
Initially, after getting Susanne’s call and arriving at the Yacht Club, Gordon considered getting Kevin into the car a significant victory. Once he was behind the wheel and on the road, though, one concern begat another and Gordon began to worry about his son bolting. Kevin had already made a point of throwing one of his journals out of the window as the car was in motion, and Gordon was nervous that Kevin’s body might be the next thing to go.
As they drove, Kevin argued with his father about going to the hospital once again and cited the reasons why he didn’t think he needed to be admitted. His pleas were impassioned in tone and Gordon kept quiet, fearful that even the slightest thing out of his mouth could be misconstrued. There was no way to reason with Kevin when he was like this. The cliché of walking on eggshells came to mind, an expression that Gordon had often heard but not really internalized until he experienced parenting his son when he was manic. Gordon knew he just had to get Kevin under professional psychiatric care as soon as possible.
KRISTINA
When Kristina thought of psychiatric wards, the images of white walls, smocks, and austere nurses à la One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest came to mind. She knew with some certainty that lobotomies had fallen out of favor, but she couldn’t be sure whether she would see anyone, including her brother, in a straitjacket or other restraints, surrounded by attendants in bleach-white scrubs.
So when her parents told her that Kevin was once again in a mental institution of some sort, she didn’t know what to make of it. Once was a freak occurrence, twice strange, but three or more times made for a pattern. As a holiday gift and a gesture hinting at wanting to spend quality time together, her father had purchased passes for her and her brother at the California Speedway, but now the likelihood that the three of them would be bonding over driving race cars seemed unlikely. Her father had already mentioned to her his disappointment at Kevin possibly not being able to go racing because of the hospitalization, a reaction that struck Kristina as shortsighted. He seemed to be saying that he had spent money to do something special with his children but once again Kevin had screwed it up, which wasn’t the takeaway Kristina had from hearing her brother was in trouble.
Kristina didn’t want to go to the hospital empty-handed, so she brought a burrito and cigarettes, critical currencies in the hospital confines. In keeping with her rebellion against her doctor parents and Olympic-contender brother, she had taken up smoking casually years before, but it felt strange to now be sharing the habit with her athlete brother. What’s more, the only time she could remember Kevin ever mentioning even wanting a cigarette was when he was in the hospital. In a place of healing, her cancer survivor sibling, for whatever reason, was drawn to lethal tobacco.
When Kristina arrived and asked for her brother at the nurse’s station, they told her that he was in the lockdown ward. She didn’t know precisely what that meant, but it seemed severe and strange. Her brother, the king of the overachievers, in lockdown? It seemed implausible,85 or at the very least overkill. The message it sent to Kristina was clear: these people were not messing around.
She was led farther through the halls of the hospital, and a big, heavy metal door clanked shut behind her, a not-so-subtle reminder that those inside were not allowed to leave without permission.
Then, she saw Kevin. Or at least a pale, exhausted, loopy version of him, bathed in harsh artificial light. The downers had rendered him sluggish, incoherent, a match for his fellow patients, who roamed around in similar stages of confusion. The siblings fumbled their way through a visit, Kevin accepting the burrito, cigarettes, and conversation, as Kristina felt awkward and the need to mask her sadness and discomfort. It was one thing to have intellectualized Kevin’s mental illness, as she had during the past couple of years, but it was another to see it in front of her like this.
As she and her brother parted ways, she realized that she was wrong. Not only did Kevin belong in the institution, he belonged in lockdown.
What was even more befuddling was that her brother would talk in loops about the Olympics and the America’s Cup and his need to train for and compete in both. Many of the nurses and fellow patients brushed off his comments as manic jitter—they had heard it all many times before. Grandeur. Lofty goals. Worldwide media coverage. But Kristina knew that for Kevin, such visions were actually well within reality’s purview, not crazy at all.
KEVIN
Kevin picked up the phone and called Amanda. A letter wasn’t appropriate for what he needed to say and he needed to say it as soon as possible. It wasn’t related to sailing or bipolar disorder, but to a recent medical test. What should have been routine blood results came back anything but.
It was one thing to get cancer once, particularly as a spry young college athlete. To get it again seemed beyond unfair—and is statistically extremely rare, well below one percent of those who had it one time.86 This second round of surgery would be, even under the best of circumstances, very invasive and would pull him out of competitive sailing for months. This operation also presented far more complexities than the first one had, as it required an incision of his lymph nodes that would cross his chest like a sash of railroad tracks.
At Christmastime 1992, while everyone else was getting ready for the holidays, Kevin lay down on the operating table and doctors cut him from the sternum to the groin.87 After the operation, he felt intense pain, inside and out, and spent a week in the hospital recovering after he had been cut open, examined inside, then stitched up again. At first, doctors found that all of the nodes were negative and cancer-free. They sewed Kevin up and sent him on his way, everyone scratching their heads about what could have happened. But soon thereafter, Kevin’s second testicle hemorrhaged and he was diagnosed with a second primary tumor, exceedingly rare as it indicated that Kevin had essentially gotten cancer twice, not that his first one had spread from one place to another. With the second testicle gone, so too would go Kevin’s ability to have biological children.88
He felt betrayed by his body more deeply than ever before; a key physical manifestation of what many thought made a man a man had failed him. He wasn’t prone to victim psychology, but a part of him did wonder whether he was being punished, and if so, for what.
Now, Kevin thought, I’m a completely castrated, crazy man.
And one who wouldn’t be competing at the 1993 World Championships in any capacity, just as his performance on the water was peaking.89
The forced sailing hiatus was particularly devastating given his recent winning streak, and he and his family were worried that all of the external tumult would lead him into another bipolar descent.
“It is still very difficult for me to disassociate this pain from the doctors and the hospital,” Kevin said to his father. “Unfortunately, this includes you.”90 In the pages of his journal, he chronicled his feelings, writing a string of words and “FEAR” in all caps and drawing a doodle of a monster reaching out from the depths of the sea.
To everyone’s surprise, though, Kevin’s physical recovery from the extensive surgery was quick. The doctors monitoring his progress described it as nothing short of “miraculous.” He even played some tennis. But he had dropped a significant amount of weight, an inevitability the doctors had said would come, from a lack of appetite, and landed at 150 pounds in January 1993,91 a skeletal shadow of his former champion self.
&nbs
p; Some well-intentioned people tried to comfort Kevin by telling him to look on “the bright side,” a term he got sick of hearing. He failed to see what bright side there could possibly be when he had lost one testicle, then another, and missed some of the biggest sailing opportunities of his life. People also told him that he should feel lucky to be alive, but he didn’t feel lucky about much at all. His diagnosis had come long before Livestrong and other groups tried to change the image of cancer patients from one of pale faces in white hospital gowns to that of strong survivors who moved forward with robust lives. People aiming at the Olympics simply weren’t supposed to get cancer.92
This surgery also meant that Kevin would need to have biweekly injections of testosterone to replicate the testosterone levels he would have had if his second testicle had not been removed. Men who lose one testicle typically do not need injections, as the other testicle usually compensates for the loss, but men who lose two generally do. In the long term, low testosterone levels could lead to a decrease of bone marrow, putting Kevin at risk for anemia, osteoporosis, decreased sex drive, and loss of muscle mass.
Testosterone levels also can dramatically impact a person’s mood and energy levels, and from his first injection, Kevin could feel the flow of the chemical as it coursed through his body. Typically, he felt high shortly after the injection, and low by the time he reached the last four or five days of a cycle.93 Through trial and error, he found that he liked taking his shots on Wednesdays, so that he could feel his best the first Thursday through Saturday of the cycle, although the notion was depressing. Ideally, Kevin would have liked to feel consistently good on most days, nor was there much research or advice on the intersection of testosterone injections and psychiatric drugs.94
Even on Kevin’s good days, there would be moments when he was reminded that he was fundamentally different from the vast majority of other men, inside and out. “I feel like an empty, metal skeleton, a phony person,” Kevin wrote to Amanda in a letter. “I now have a life-long chemical dependence—Testosterone—just to keep my voice and beard. Sex? Well, yes, now that comes in a bottle, too, just like my thoughts and feelings.”
Kevin had made it clear to Amanda that now, he could not be a biological father. By the time they had discovered the cancer in his second testicle, he had chosen not to bank sperm, despite impassioned pleas. She had visited him in California where he was recovering and helped him lace up his girdle that helped prevent his fifty staples from popping and walked him down the driveway and past the neighbor’s house, and eventually, after a few days, down to the end of the block, a journey which had left Kevin winded and deflated. The two of them didn’t speak for a couple of weeks after that, Amanda joining her family on vacation in San Juan. They each needed some air after the gravity of it all. When they did reconnect, Kevin’s anguish and grief still weighed on both of them.95
“I don’t want to be a bitter, cynical, grudge-holding man,” he wrote to her. “I want to be free, to love and be loved, but I feel like the prison walls just got a lot closer. While I’m not exactly macho, it’s a rather enormous assault on my psyche to know that my ‘manhood’ (what’s left of it anyway) comes from a needle. Every two weeks. Just so I can get it up. Harsh.”
After the surgery, Kevin retreated to Aspen, Colorado.96 The fresh air and snow powder there had a calming effect, and he tried not to think of the staples that marked him, the weight he had lost, the regattas unsailed, the children unborn. The idea of sailing the Laser, a class that placed incredible demands on the abdominal muscles, was torturous. Even when Kevin was in good health, sailing that class felt like doing sit-ups for twenty excruciating minutes.
Increasingly, Kevin was being offered a greater array of antipsychotic drugs. A few months earlier, his doctors had changed his medication from lithium to Prozac, then to Depakote, Kevin being one of the countless patients for whom there is no one perfect drug, nor mix of them. In Aspen, he mostly took Depakote, and for the most part he found it effective in stabilizing his moods. Sometimes he would smoke some pot, relax in front of the fire, and imagine himself sailing, surrounded by birds and islands, sun and waves.
And after years of resistance, Kevin was starting to see a therapist regularly. As part of his treatment, he began reading the works of Carl Jung and became fascinated by Jung’s interest in the unconscious aspects of people, and of Jung’s focus on spirituality and creativity.97 The rethinking of his bipolar disorder through a Jungian framework proved helpful for Kevin, as it helped him probe further into his dreams and delusions, analyzing the content of them for what they could mean rather than merely dismissing them.98 This felt like a welcome contrast to what Kevin had perceived was the message that doctors had given him before: “Here’s a sick bipolar person who needs to be kept on the rails.”
Kevin’s quest to understand his brain through books lead him to reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, which instantly became one of Kevin’s defining works as a reader. A famously dense read, Ulysses (the title drawn from the Latinized name of the hero of Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey) tells the tale of Leopold Bloom, a man in Dublin on an ordinary day—June 16, 1904—over the span of eighteen episodes and roughly 265,000 words. Joyce captured the stream of consciousness that Kevin felt when he was in The Show and thus served as a sort of familiar spirit from another moment in time, a hand from the past reaching out to Kevin in the 1990s.99 In some ways, the book frightened him in its remarkable accuracy and understanding of his own story; he had never seen someone else’s mind spinning just like his on a page, such vivid access into another person’s inner world. What’s more, Joyce, like Kevin, believed deeply in the power of coincidences.100
For years, scholars have debated Joyce’s mental state when he wrote the book, as well as questioning how he could have come to understand his daughter Lucia’s schizophrenia so well. Jung himself had analyzed Joyce, his daughter, and his epic writing and concluded that Joyce and his daughter were two souls going to the bottom of a river, “one falling and the other diving.”101 Over the years, Kevin had read the work of other artists later deemed to have bipolar tendencies, including Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf, but they hadn’t resonated with him the same way that Joyce did. Kevin could read Joyce with the ease of most people tearing through a summer beach read, the author’s words vibrating in his head like a good piece of music, his feeling for the text transcending his need to explain it.
Meanwhile, he kept writing to Amanda.
“I’m fighting a war with my body. Please don’t take the stray bullets personally.”102
AMANDA
One day, Kevin showed up at Amanda’s dorm room at Brown and announced that the two of them were going to Boston,103 just an hour or so away on Interstate 95.
Sure, Amanda told him.
He seemed wound up as his sentences sputtered out with rapid speed and he briskly paced around her dorm room with alacrity. He told her he wanted to fly to Bermuda, that they deserved a vacation and a chance to get away from it all. They would drive to Boston’s Logan International Airport and buy a couple of plane tickets at the counter for the next flight out.
By now, Amanda could quickly spot the difference between “normal” Kevin and “not normal” Kevin. This was the latter, but the thought of calling 911 didn’t occur to her. She thought maybe a short drive, not necessarily one to the airport in Boston, might help him wind down.
For the last few days, Amanda had noticed a difference in Kevin’s routine. He had moved back to Providence to coach after leaving Aspen, and had seemed to handle the change well in some respects, but he had been talking more and sleeping less.104 He stayed up late writing and skateboarding, and told Amanda that he was using “alternative” treatment methods, but he didn’t specify what that meant.
The two of them hopped into Kevin’s white Toyota truck with Kevin behind the wheel and began their journey to Boston. Along the way, they stopped at a Dunkin Donuts where Kevin walked ahead of Amanda and plunged a $100 bill into the t
ip jar.
Amanda wondered what she should do. If she went back in to retrieve the money, she risked leaving Kevin alone with the car keys. She also worried about his doing something irrational, like trying to physically hurt himself or, God forbid, take his own life. But somehow, she was able to dart back inside and snag the cash, though not without embarrassment.
They got back into the car and Kevin brushed off Amanda’s offers to drive, leaving two tons of machinery navigated by a man who was rambling about a show of some sort. The Director wanted them to go to Bermuda and he would put them up somewhere that was really, really nice and secluded, a fantasy that was as pastoral as this moment wasn’t.
Kevin and Amanda arrived at the airport and walked to a ticket counter. Kevin asked what it would take to get to Bermuda as soon as possible. From the other side of the counter, the agent politely told them that there were no more flights to Bermuda that night, but she could book them on the first one out in the morning.
That’s great, Amanda thought. The flight delay provided her with a window in which she could lure Kevin to an airport hotel room and hopefully get him to relax. Maybe if he fell asleep, he would wake up with the mania having spun out of him somehow overnight. Then, the two of them could drive back to Providence and deal with the expense of the tickets once safely back home.
That’s not what happened.
Amanda and Kevin did find an airport hotel where Amanda tried to soothe him, but as the hours lumbered on, he only seemed to be getting more anxious, pacing, rambling, and fiddling around more mercilessly than he had in her dorm room. He indicated no interest in sleeping at all that night and spent some time lying in the bathtub, reading the hotel Bible, flipping through its tissue-paper pages105 with deep interest. He asked Amanda whether she was “with him” or not, a mixture of confusion and anxiety in his voice. She assured him that she was, but still remained confused by the ask.