The Kevin Show Read online

  He darted off toward it, climbing up its metal beltway intended for displaying and moving baggage, and while dodging oncoming luggage, wrestled his way outside onto the tarmac on the other side. The asphalt expanse was abuzz with aircrafts slowly moving to and fro, small carts sputtering around, air traffic controllers waving their orange wands as Kevin ran toward the biggest plane he could find. He was underneath it when the police encircled him.

  GORDON

  It was a strange feeling, Gordon thought, to be at work as an emergency room doctor and receive a call that there was an urgent crisis in his own family.

  It was around midnight when the phone rang and on the other end came the voice of Kevin’s sailing coach in Japan. Far away and across the Pacific Ocean, Kevin had been roaming the Tokyo streets at night and the police had surrounded him on the airport tarmac, the coach told him. The rest of the team needed to head home to the States, but someone had to come to Japan and pick up Kevin.

  Gordon needed no further explanation. Panicked and frustrated, he arranged for another doctor to cover his shifts and drove straight to Los Angeles International Airport to catch the first flight out to Tokyo that morning. Gordon had taken a post in Ridgecrest, California,65 a Navy town of twenty-seven thousand in south central California, where he was living with his second wife, Meimei. While the small size and quaintness usually made him happy to wake up there every day, now it just felt inconveniently far from where a crisis was brewing with his son.

  Upon arriving in Japan, Gordon found Kevin wound up, manic, and talking fast, with ideas pulsing out like fireworks every which way. Again, somehow he had avoided any formal charges or legal fallout for storming the tarmac. Still, he seemed willing to travel back home with his father. Gordon booked two tickets, hoping that Kevin’s agreeability would continue.

  As they waited for their plane home to California, Kevin demanded a Coca-Cola, and Gordon was torn between what would be worse: the risk of giving Kevin caffeine which could further trigger his mania, or that denying Kevin what he wanted could make him erupt even more. Since Boston, Gordon had given up on trying to predict what was going on in Kevin’s head. He met Kevin’s demand and anxiously watched as his son balanced the red-and-white can on his head and muttered something about sponsorships.66

  They boarded and took their seats with the other passengers, Gordon’s nerves even on edge now that he and Kevin were sealed in with strangers, leaving him with no viable exit options. As the engines roared and the wheels lifted for takeoff, Kevin seemed calm. He told his father he needed to go to the restroom, and Gordon let him go on his own. They were seated near the lavatory.

  A few minutes passed. Kevin had not returned.

  Then ten minutes passed, then fifteen. Gordon rose from his seat to investigate.

  He found his son up front in the cockpit, mingling with the pilots, his eyes “wide and spaced out,” he remembered later. Politely, he asked Kevin to come back to his seat, and he breathed a sigh of relief when Kevin complied.

  Once they reached the airport, Gordon called around and was able to have Kevin admitted into Las Encinas, a well-regarded hospital in Pasadena.67 Shaded by a lush green canopy, surrounded by a blanket of green lawn, the facility could have been mistaken for a swanky resort. A mainstay in the community, it specializes in chemical dependency issues and psychiatric disorders. Despite the hospital’s inviting façade, Kevin seemed irritated at the very notion of being there.

  Gordon explained that whether his son liked it or not, he would have to stay at the hospital for several days. He remembered the debilitating depression that Kevin had suffered through after the Boston episode—his shuffling around the house, his complete lack of interest in everything—and knew that he would not be able to help him on his own.

  KEVIN

  The forlornness that Kevin felt after coming down from The Show wasn’t due just to the problems and guilt associated with the aftermath of his episodes—the credit card bills, the explanations and apologies to friends and family, the hospitalization, the guilt of knowing that he had a very privileged support system that many others with bipolar disorder did not. It was also due to grief over the loss of The Show itself and the bruising realization that he didn’t have a mission to save the world after all. During The Show, he had felt so close to bringing about world peace, but after the episodes, he was not only thrust back into the harsh throes of reality, he felt more depressed than the people around him.

  Some people with bipolar disorder have persecutory delusions, but Kevin’s first visions were euphoric,68 sometimes even Jesus- or Buddha-themed, though he had never considered himself particularly spiritual or religious before. They also had overtones of dystopian science fiction, as in Kevin’s mind, saving the world would require an army of powerful and well-connected individuals from a variety of backgrounds. According to the backstory being orchestrated by the Director, a small group of “old money” people who had survived the Great Depression and the Second World War and would join with Kevin to devote themselves to the prevention of another global conflict.69 Another group, the Council, which had already dictated some of his movements in Tokyo, would be a control center that governed key functions, such as funding, and mapped out experiments containing math puzzles and codes to be unlocked by the select few, including Kevin. The Director, of course, knew the solutions and was observing Kevin as he tried to unravel it all before an audience.

  Delusions may be a way for the rational brain to try to come to terms with strange events,70 the psychologist Brandon Maher wrote in 1974. They’re a person’s way of trying to sort through the chaos of the mind, he wrote, an explosive reaction to a crisis or trauma. Similarly, Kevin’s delusions may have been serving to help him sort through life’s complexities.71 For the delusions to seem real, Maher also theorized, they had to be grandiose, so that no one could refute them easily. Yet to serve its psychological function, a delusion had to feel tangible to the person having it.

  In his journals, Kevin had compared some elements of The Show with lyrics from the band Styx.72 The song “Grand Illusion” spoke of getting tickets to “The Show,” a stage being set, a band playing, the secret desire to be a star. The lyrics also urged people not to be tricked by pop culture messaging that indicates how someone is supposed to be, that it merely represented someone else’s fantasy, a farce. “Cause you never really win the game,” Kevin repeated in his notebook. “DEEP INSIDE WE’RE ALL THE SAME.”

  Kevin couldn’t pinpoint exactly how The Show and its backstory had come to him, or the why of his own grand illusion. Yet when he was in it, he was determined to hold on to it as if it were true, even if in his clearer moments it felt nuts.

  When Kevin was in The Show, it couldn’t have felt more real.

  KRISTINA

  The role reversal felt strange. Her brother was capable of sailing a boat better than anyone else in the country, or the world, and yet her parents still felt that Kevin needed his little sister to accompany him as he drove home from Rhode Island to California, where he would be coaching Olympians. They didn’t trust his ability to be by himself behind the wheel for long stretches of time, a notion that Kristina couldn’t help but think was an overreaction. Still, she didn’t have anything better to do, so the two met up at a Motel 6 in Texas, a halfway point between California and the Northeast, hopped into his car, and headed west.

  Amanda had traveled with Kevin from Rhode Island to Texas and then flown back east to finish her studies. Kevin had been sullen on that first half of the trip, and for the first time he began to see and understand the sadness Amanda felt when he was down. It pained him to know that his hurt, in its own way, was contagious, particularly to someone he cared so much about, and that only served to make him feel worse.

  As Kevin and Kristina took off for California, beige, sienna, and blue skies fanning out before them on all sides, interrupted only by the occasional McDonald’s or gas station, Kevin began to tell his sister in detail about what had happene
d in Tokyo. He also told her about what it had been like to be institutionalized, the details of which her parents had hidden from her. Kevin’s descriptions of mania fascinated Kristina, as they didn’t seem that different from her own hallucinogenic, drug-induced experiences.73 All this time she had been focusing on being the opposite of her brother, yet now it seemed that they might have more in common than she thought, even if they arrived there by completely different paths.

  In conversation with his open-minded sister, Kevin still had a hard time explaining what it felt like to be on The Show. He couldn’t even really describe it to himself. The only portrayal that came close was to compare the Director to a character out of a science fiction book or movie set in the near future. He also told Kristina that sometimes The Show wasn’t 100 percent on, that there were flickers or small moments when he questioned which parts of life in The Show were being set up and which were not.

  In The Show, Kevin went on, he felt the need to give the people, the audience, what they wanted74—i.e., entertainment. So why not ham things up a little bit? The walks in Boston and Tokyo had been almost like breakdances, a rethinking of the mundane act of getting from Point A to Point B. Everything he did in episodes felt laced with a grander meaning.

  As Kevin kept talking, Kristina marveled at one particular inverse connection. She took drugs to feel as if she were in a different reality. Kevin took drugs not to.

  KEVIN

  In order for Kevin to remain in California and train for the Olympics, he needed to find a steady source of income. A job as a sailing coach would provide some money, but what he really wanted was to land a well-paying gig as a professional sailor—a fantasy, it seemed. At the time, even those fortunate enough to get paying jobs on the America’s Cup boats earned very little money; sometimes they even packed their own lunches.75

  With Amanda still studying at Brown, Kevin moved back to his mother’s house in Ventura and worked a prestigious job as a downwind specialist coaching Julia Trotman, a sailor who had qualified for the 1992 Games in Barcelona. She was based, along with many other sailors, at the Alamitos Bay Yacht Club, a fertile networking ground for an athlete like Kevin trying to get exposure to the Olympic training regime.76

  Around the same time, Kevin’s own performance on the water was garnering attention. At age twenty-one, he sailed one of the best races of his entire career in August 1991 when he won the North American Laser Championship by a staggering 50-point margin in a fleet of 200, putting him squarely in contention for making the U.S. Olympic team, although the Laser was not an Olympic class at the time. The Laser is a smaller boat, a single-handed dinghy that is a delight to watch in action. Sailing can pose challenges for spectators, who are usually at a distance from the action, but Laser sailing still offers a dynamic dance for the eye. The sailors must carve their boats across the waves, finding a route that is fast and just on the edge, without capsizing. At times, their bodies can careen far over the edges of the small boats, as they try to maneuver the vessels, a strange and nerve-wracking sight as they look on the verge of falling over into the water.

  SUSANNE

  Susanne heard the whoosh of the toilet as Kevin flushed his pills away.

  Years of medical school, years of working with patients, and it all seemed to be failing her now. There were pills to help her son, but they were of little use if he wasn’t interested in taking them. She wondered at how and when Kevin had become so difficult, and at how helpless she felt. She also worried about external events possibly triggering his mania: a loss on the water—anything, really.

  Kevin went on The Show again, this time, again, at the Alamitos Bay Yacht Club. Susanne was less aware that Kevin had his thesis on Marguerite Duras in hand and a penchant for writing with fountain pens. At one point, he spread the ink and several pages out on the table. When he lifted up one page, Kevin saw the word l’amour, French for “love,” glowing like burning coal, which was not only the last word of his thesis, but part of the world-saving mission of The Show. The impression stuck with him, and it felt completely strange. He struggled to brush it off. Susanne had agreed to drive him there for his coaching gig, but soon realized Kevin was not safe to head out on the water. Covering his face in zinc ointment, he climbed up and down a mast and into the back of a boat, quoting Herman Melville.77 He found a cooler full of lukewarm cans of Coca-Cola and began chugging one after another because Coca-Cola was a regular sponsor of The Show. The cameras were rolling and product placement made sense, especially since Coca-Cola was a longtime Olympic sponsor, too.

  The episode had come about in part because of the constant push and pull Kevin felt between wanting to please his family by taking his medication and not wanting to feel dead, like a robot, away from being in his own body or feeling like a human being with real emotions. What did his Western-medicine-trained doctors with all their pills really know, anyway? The world’s knowledge of psychiatric medicine was still in its infancy, and much was still unknown about using drugs to treat mental illness. The idea that popping a pill alone could “cure” Kevin seemed overly simplistic. As the author Andrew Solomon has noted,

  If you improved on Depakote,78 you must have had bipolar illness. If Zyprexa made you all better, you were probably schizophrenic. Useful though these agents are, however, work on them is still inconsistent, tangled on unproven theories, preoccupied with neurotransmitters that play an opaque role in illness. Reductive thinking about the nature of mental illness—the suggestion that it can be fully described by chemistry—satisfies those who fund research, and that research may help sufferers. It is also dishonest.

  Kevin also refused the recommendation that he should see a therapist, not sure what the benefit could possibly be. The schism between believers in psychotherapy and adherents of pharmacology, the author William Styron wrote, “resembles the medical quarrels of the eighteenth century (to bleed or not to bleed) and almost defines in itself the inexplicable nature of depression and the difficulty of its treatment.”79

  Susanne didn’t know what was going on in Kevin’s mind, only what was happening on the outside, the swirl of the toilet and the face of a man who seemed to be someone other than her son. Unsure of what to do, she called Kevin’s father.

  KEVIN

  In April 1992, at the U.S. trials for the Finn class, Kevin finished in eighth place, missing an Olympic berth. That result was disappointing for him, but at age twenty-three, he knew that he still had time. Sailing is the rare sport that rewards longevity and experience, at least to a point. The Fijian sailors Colin Philp Sr. and his son Tony Philp competed at the 1984 and 1988 Olympics and qualified for Barcelona in 1992, and it wasn’t unheard of for sailors to compete into their thirties or even forties. Additionally, racing in the trials gave Kevin some experience in competing in an Olympic environment, a process that would hopefully demystify the Games for him and increase his confidence in his ability to compete with peers there.

  “I feel a part of it again,” Kevin wrote in a letter to Amanda that September. He told her of watching the sunrise, writing, “I can imagine myself flying into it and going home. This week out east was very good for me. I go home feeling loved, respected, liked, and needed—as well as confident with myself and excited about the future.”80

  Following the Olympic trials, Amanda wrote him a thoughtful card.

  “This should be a great time in my life,” Kevin wrote back. “It’s up to me.”

  AMANDA

  He was in California, she was still living in the Northeast and still at school, but they wrote to each other and spoke on the phone all the time. Kevin wrote to her about the Grape Nuts with peaches81 that he ate for breakfast. He asked about her schoolwork and he told her about the dreams he had of becoming a skipper in the America’s Cup, of winning an Olympic gold medal, and of their life together. While a long-distance relationship was not ideal, the romance they cultivated at Brown translated to their letters and phone calls, Amanda feeling more connected to Kevin than ever.
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br />   Following the 1992 Olympic trials, Kevin embarked on a strong winning streak, a sure sign that he might be finally securing a good rhythm with elite racing beyond Brown, going undefeated in the Laser for nearly two years. Considering the differences in skills and techniques between collegiate and professional sailing, which still lacked a viable professional circuit, Kevin’s accomplishment was significant. He was recruited to represent the United States at the upcoming January 1993 World Championships in Auckland. Even better news for Kevin: the Laser, his best and favorite sailing class, had been added to the Olympic roster, starting with the 1996 Atlanta Games.

  “I am finding a self I haven’t known for a long time here at home,” Kevin wrote to Amanda. “I know the weather is really good for me, the exercise, but I think it has to do with being able to hope and dream. When I’m out alone on the ocean, no other boats to be seen—just the birds and seals and sun and me, life gets so simple and free. I don’t have to be anywhere, buy anything, prove anything, or think too much. I think part of my recent difficulties have had something to do with thinking too much.”

  He also wrote to Amanda about a “false alarm” with The Show that had really disturbed him. “I feel like God’s dog, and his son keeps teasing me with a piece of juicy, red carefree confidence. Just as I think he will finally let me have it, he pulls it away again, laughing. It’s an eerie, piercing laugh that sounds as old as time.”

  “I guess the key,” Amanda wrote back, “is learning to differentiate between dreams and expectations.”82

  Amanda was one of the few people Kevin could talk to about his dilemma over whether to take his medications. A common cycle that befalls many who have bipolar disorder is that they will stop taking, or reduce the dosage of, their medication when they feel better, as they see their improvement as a sign that they no longer need it. What’s more, they may do so suddenly, and without professional guidance, which can give their system a dramatic jolt. (In some cases, people on medications who intended to curb their symptoms of mania or depression reported feeling worse.)