Breaking the Surface (18 page)

Kevin was very comfortable with being gay. I never had to worry about him wanting to date women because he thought he should be straight. He went to gay pride marches. I didn’t feel that I could go, but I liked being with somebody who was comfortable enough to go. Also, Kevin’s parents knew, so it was very comfortable not having to worry about who knew and who didn’t. They always made me feel welcome.

As much as I wanted to be that open about being gay, I didn’t see how I could do it. From around the time I first got involved with Kevin, I was getting more and more press because of my diving and it didn’t seem possible to be open about my sexuality. That meant that most of the time Kevin didn’t go with me to my competitions. When I brought him home with me, I never told my parents that he was my boyfriend.

My feelings for Kevin reminded me of what I had felt for Daniel. But from the very start, our relationship was passionate in the best and worst ways. At its best we were completely devoted to each other and very affectionate; we always slept in each other’s arms. I hated being apart from him when I traveled to diving competitions.

Making love with Kevin was remarkable because it went so far beyond the physical experience. It was intense, deep love mixed together with overwhelming physical passion. I’d never experienced anything like it before, nor have I since.

Unfortunately, we also brought out the worst in each other, and things could get pretty nasty between us. We fought about everything from what to buy at the grocery store to what to watch on television. He’d get high on pot with his friends, and I didn’t like it and felt left out. I wasn’t exactly a saint myself at that time, because I was using cocaine—which probably contributed to the explosions.

I don’t know quite how we did it, but we successfully turned everything into an argument. We were both great at getting the other one angry, and we must have taken some kind of pleasure in it, because we did it a lot. Maybe it was that making up was so good.

Most of the time, when our arguments got physical, we would get into a wrestling match and it would end there. But on two or three occasions we threw punches at each other. The last time we got into that kind of fight, my ring caught him under his eye and I gave him a pretty good gash. I don’t think he ever forgave me for that, because it left him with a permanent scar. I felt terrible and apologized, but that didn’t help much. After that fight, Kevin disappeared for a few days, but he came back. A few times when he did things that got me really angry, I too disappeared for a few days.

I know this kind of relationship doesn’t sound very appealing, but in some ways I felt more alive than I ever had. You never knew what was going to happen. All of which helped fuel the physical passion we experienced.

At the time, I didn’t think the fights were anything out of the ordinary. From the start, we had trouble communicating verbally, and getting physical was a form of communication. We were just two guys working things out, and physically we were pretty well matched. It wasn’t like one or the other had the upper hand. It may not have been the ideal way to communicate, but we both got our point across.

Looking back now, of course, I realize that throwing punches was no way to work out problems. Hitting someone you’re in a relationship with is never okay unless it’s in self-defense, and if your relationship has reached that point, you need to get professional help.

The worst and last fight we ever had started as a pretty standard yelling and screaming fight. Things had begun to change in our relationship, and not for the better. We’d talked about going to a counselor to try to work things out, but again I was resistant, so Kevin went on his own. I found his therapy very threatening, and the longer he went, the more tense things got between us. I couldn’t handle it.

From that point on, when we got into disagreements, Kevin wanted to talk it out. I still had a lot of trouble being verbal. It was much easier for me to get angry and wrestle with him than it was to sit down and talk about what was going on. I didn’t like the fact that he seemed to be communicating more with his friends now than with me. I realized that Kevin was getting emotionally healthy, but that just scared me. I was afraid of the mere idea of exploring my life in that kind of formal setting. I wasn’t ready.

The longer this went on, the more defensive and nasty I got. By this point, in the spring of 1982, we were only communicating in shorthand with one- or two-word answers, expecting the other to understand what we meant. I felt like I was living out my parents’ relationship, which of course was exactly the case. Neither of them was ever up front about saying what they were feeling, because they didn’t want to rock the boat, my mother especially. She was always very cautious in what she said, because she was always walking on eggshells when it came to dealing with my dad. There was always the danger of an explosion.

With Kevin, the shorthand responses often led to even greater misunderstandings. For example, I would try to signal that I needed to be reassured, and when he didn’t respond, I’d get resentful and angry that he wasn’t able to figure out what I needed. I’d blame him for not reading my mind. The truth is, I was the one who was more responsible for the miscommunication, because he was really trying. I was being the stubborn child, standing my ground and refusing to bend.

So the tension built and built to the point where we got into an awful screaming match over his daily journal, which his therapist had suggested he keep. I thought if we were in a relationship that we should share everything, including the journal; otherwise, how could we be a couple? He considered my reading the diary an invasion of his privacy and refused to let me see it. So I went and read a part of it without his permission. I did this shortly before I left for the world championships in Ecuador in the fall of 1982.

To make it worse, I told Kevin what I’d done, and he accused me of not having any respect for him. He said that he didn’t have to share every part of his life with me. I was being incredibly stubborn, and I thought, “Okay, if I can’t have you, nobody can have you.” I was getting more and more out of control.

By this point, we were wrestling each other and Kevin was getting the upper hand. He was shorter than I, but he was strong and quick. While I was struggling to keep from being overpowered by him, I had a flash of getting beat up after school, when the other guy always had the upper hand. That made me even angrier, and I broke free of Kevin and ran into the kitchen. I grabbed a knife and threatened him with it. I was just a few feet from where he was standing, holding the knife as if I were going to stab him in his torso. I don’t think I’d ever been so angry before, and I don’t think he’d ever been so scared. I had no intention of using the knife, but Kevin had no way of knowing that.

When I saw the look of fear on Kevin’s face, I was shocked back into reality. I looked down at the knife and couldn’t believe what I was doing. I felt like a crazy person. I had to get out of there, and I ran. I don’t remember if I put the knife back in the kitchen or just dropped it, but I ran out of the house. I was afraid that if I stayed we’d wind up really hurting each other.

I showed up on Ron and Mary Jane’s doorstep—in tears, as usual—and told them what had happened and that I needed their help to move my things out. They got me calmed down. I also called my mom and told her that Kevin and I had had a big fight and that I had to move out. She asked me if I needed her help, and I said that I did. She could hear the panic in my voice.

The next day, we all drove over to the house in the team van. My mom was sitting up front with Ron, and I was in the back with Mary Jane. We were talking about what had happened, and I said, “Mom, I’ve got to tell you something. Kevin and I are more than just roommates.” Mom said, “That’s okay, honey.” She told me that she’d known for a long time and was glad I felt comfortable enough to share it with her. We talked a little while about it, and I asked her to tell Dad for me, which, it turns out, she never did. I was afraid he would throw a tantrum or lay on the guilt about nobody to carry on his name. But telling him was my responsibility, and I shouldn’t have asked my mom to do it for me.

I’d never discussed being gay with Ron or Mary Jane before, so this was something of a first with them, too. I wasn’t surprised when they said they’d already figured it out. It wasn’t as if I’d ever hidden it. Ron knew about Kevin, although I’d never said he was my boyfriend. But I’d talked about our fights before, and it was pretty obvious that these were not fights between two people who were just friends.

When Ron and I talked about it later that week, he told me that his feeling was that you don’t choose to be gay, just as you don’t choose to be heterosexual. He told me that he didn’t see it as a big issue other than how it affected me and how I felt about myself.

Before we got to the house, we joked a little about the possible scenarios and how we might be ambushed by Kevin, just like in the movies. But even without being ambushed it was still pretty dramatic. I’m really glad that Ron and Mary Jane and my mom were with me, because it was extremely tense with Kevin the whole time we were there.

Earlier that day I had called Kevin to apologize for pulling the knife. I told him that I was going to move out. He didn’t argue with me. I suggested that he not be there when I came to collect my things, but he insisted that he wanted to be home, because he was concerned that I would take some of his things. He especially wanted to make sure I didn’t leave with a painting he’d given to me for my birthday. It was a large-scale geometric painting of a sphere, a box, and a cone. The way he had painted it, the shapes popped out at you. Kevin was absolutely clear that I wasn’t going to leave the house with it, and I didn’t.

Once we were at the house, I didn’t even bring up the painting. For one thing, we couldn’t have fit it in the van. And also, I was so embarrassed about pulling the knife that I didn’t have the courage to ask for it. There was no argument over who got Maile. We both took care of her, but she was my dog.

I think in some ways we were lucky to have survived the relationship without killing each other. We were a volatile mix, and we somehow brought out the best kind of passion and worst kind of rage in each other. That’s what made it impossible for us to stay together.

I have a lot of regrets about my relationship with Kevin. We were very brutal to each other, and there’s nothing I can do to change that. Unfortunately, we never talked about what had happened. We spoke briefly in 1985, and then, in 1987, Kevin wrote to tell me that he had HIV. From the tone of his letter, I got the sense he was blaming me. In the letter, he stressed that I should get tested. I did, in 1988, and I was HIV-positive. Kevin had blamed me for infecting him, but it just as easily could have been the other way around.

We talked one more time in 1989, one year before he passed away, and I told him that I wanted to come see him. He was still angry with me, and I was afraid to push. Now he’s gone, and it’s too late to tell him anything.

Too late to say I’m sorry, and too late to say thank you for the love we shared.

A
FULL YEAR BEFORE
the ’84 Olympics in Los Angeles, the sports pages began heating up with predictions about my sweeping the gold in the springboard and platform competitions. They called me “the Baryshnikov of diving,” “the Superman of his sport,” and “the finest diver in the world today.” Just about every sportswriter crowned me the favorite to win.

I tried not to pay attention to the hype, but Ron and I both knew that if I dove as well as I normally did, I could win two gold medals. If I did, I would be only the third man in the history of the sport to do it. Peter Desjardins of the United States won both in 1928, and Albert White, also an American, did it in 1924.

Before I could even get to the Olympics, I had to make the Olympic team. The first big step came in July with the Olympic trials in Indianapolis. It’s a one-shot event—if you’re sick or you’re injured or if your legs just buckle and you fall in the water, you are out of the running. You never know, so you can’t count on winning. Fortunately, I nailed most of my dives at the trials, and I came in first on both springboard and platform.

I was disappointed by my springboard performance, because I trailed after the first four dives. With my fifth dive I took the lead and kept it through the eleventh dive, winning by about thirty points.

On platform, Bruce Kimball continued to be pretty stiff competition. He had beaten me in six of the last eleven national competitions. If it hadn’t been for my new tougher dives with the high degrees of difficulty, he might have won, especially because I missed my ninth dive and got only a 5.5 and 6s. That cut my lead to less than ten points. But on my last dive, which had a degree of difficulty of 3.4, I got 9s and 10s. Bruce’s last dive had a difficulty of 2.9 and he got 7s and 8s.

So I made the team, and a few weeks later, I was off to the Olympics, which were being held just up the road from where I lived. I tried to stay calm, but I was too excited. I’d been waiting since 1976 to compete in the Olympics again, and after training and competing for eight years, I couldn’t be more ready. But walking into the Olympic swim stadium for the first time, all I thought was, Could I finally win a gold? Would I win two?