Joe Kay wants to be typical.
He doesn't want his name to be followed by the clause, "who suffered a stroke three years and three months ago after being trampled when Tucson High School fans stormed the basketball court."
At 21, he doesn't want to explain the effects of his stroke to everyone he meets in college. The brain injury resulted in his right side being partially paralyzed.
The golf cart that kept him from blending in for two years has been replaced by a silver bicycle. He learned to ride it while home this year for spring break, mastering the balancing act for the first time since the accident.
Now he can be just another face blurring past at Stanford, on the way to class.
"That's the reason I try to ride my golf cart as little as possible β I'm trying to be a normal student," Joe said. "I didn't want anything to bring up questions about my stroke.
"All the students ride bikes. I'm just like them."
Joe has always been extraordinary, and he is dealing with typical college issues: Like many students finishing their sophomore year, he has no idea what he wants to do with his life.
Joe is trying to find himself.
The days of being a volleyball and basketball star, a valedictorian and a saxophone savant are gone.
"I'm not an athlete. I'm not in the band β but I really don't mind that," Joe said. "But I still want something to grab onto. I'm still looking for that thing."
Joe's search
Joe has been extraordinary, it seems, his whole life.
He was 4 years old when he made the conscious decision to become a vegetarian.
Joe was riding in the back seat of his parents' car on the way to see his grandmother in Phoenix, munching on a McDonald's hamburger. He asked his mom, Suzanne Rabe, what he was eating.
Beef, she told him. He asked where it came from. Cows, she said.
"He said, 'Mom they didn't kill it for me?' " Rabe said. " 'Or was it already dead?'
"I said, 'No, they killed it for you.' "
Little Joe screamed, "No!"
Over the next 17 years, Joe has eaten meat maybe four or five times β "All by accident," he said.
Growing up, he was taller than the other kids. Joe shone in basketball and volleyball at Tucson High School, but was also a gifted saxophonist. He took the SAT only once, and aced his SAT IIs one morning in Reno, Nev., while on a high school trip with the jazz band.
He might have been a pre-med student. Or a lawyer. Or anything, really. You could open the class-selection catalog at the University of Arizona, like his mom did, and find every field of study was one Joe was capable of.
"They say he sounds like a typical sophomore, but there was nothing that was ever typical about him," said Rabe, a UA law school professor who will finish a sabbatical at Cal next month. "He was different from the moment his personality emerged. He never cared what people thought. You couldn't motivate him with stickers on a chart. He was completely self-motivated from a young age."
It makes Joe's current search out of character.
He wrote about men's volleyball for The Stanford Daily before being moved off the beat because he had a scholarship from the team. He has considered going into sports management when he graduates, or taking a year off to travel.
"I guess everybody at that age starts the wanderlust, the search," his father, Fred Kay, said.
The sports Joe used to play are gone, though he is taking a beach volleyball class this quarter. He tried to play the sax one-handed, but gave it up.
"I'm still trying to find an activity that interests me as much as those I did before," he said.
Moving forward
The right side of Kay's body has little feeling; he can't move his right ankle or wiggle his toes. He walks with a slight limp and can run, although he laughs that it's not pretty to watch.
Joe suffers from aphasia, an impairment of his ability to communicate. There's a slight glitch when it comes to symbols and language, but it does not affect his intellect. He gets decent grades at Stanford, and lives in a one-person dorm room. He has a better memory than either of his parents. He is sharp and witty.
But there are still scars.
Joe was once so sure of himself that he rarely cared what people thought of him. He wasn't a follower, but not a leader, either. He was himself.
"When I had my stroke, I guess my self-confidence sunk to the bottom and completely disappeared," he said. "I couldn't do math. I couldn't communicate. I was nervous when I got around people.
"That's something I'm trying to recover. I still have some serious confidence problems."
He is tired of talking about his injury.
"I'm getting along fine," he said. "The questions a lot of people ask me are the same β 'It's amazing where you are now and everything. You must be so proud.'
"I'm literally not that proud of myself. Anyone in my situation would recover just as much as I have.
"I feel like saying that there are lots of things that don't have to do with my injury that I'm really proud of." Like most college students, Joe is pleased with his friends, family and schoolwork.
In April 2006, Joe settled a lawsuit against the Tucson Unified School District and the two students who he claimed caused the injury.
The $3.5 million payout was placed in a tax-free annuity and will be paid off monthly over the course of his life, beginning in 2011. Six-hundred-thousand dollars came from the insurance policies of the two students' families.
Joe received some money early, and used it to put a down payment on a home in the Sam Hughes Neighborhood area, near the University of Arizona, as an investment.
And as much as Joe tries to stay even-tempered about the circumstances of his injury, an edginess seeps out at times.
It makes him human.
Joe, who says he never received a face-to-face apology from either student, saw one of them at a party recently.
"I think me seeing him there and not apologizing, that kinda got under my skin," he said. "If I saw these kids ever again, unless they apologized straight-up, I'd be kinda mad at them.
"But what's happened has happened. You can't go back in the past."
Seeking clarity
At Stanford, not being able to find a career path can be disconcerting. Especially when you're at the age where you wonder about the relationship between money and self-worth.
"Most of the kids come from pretty high-class families," Joe said. "I kinda have trouble understanding where they're coming from. They have millions of dollars in funds to their name, but they still want to do something with their lives. I don't know if I grew up that way, whether I'd feel the same."
The nice thing about the settlement, Joe says, is that money won't cloud his mind when he does decide what to do.
"I'm not worried about the money when I'm looking for a profession," he said. "I definitely want to do something that interests me."
This summer, the search will take him to Mexico.
Joe will move to Guadalajara in late June to take an immersion Spanish course. If he passes, the Spanish credit could allow him to go to study abroad in Santiago, Chile, in the fall.
"I'm still trying to kinda figure things out," he said. "My stroke really had an effect on who I am in my life. I'm still trying to settle down on the fact that I don't have use of my right side.
"I'm not the person I hoped I would be and I wish I would be β the normal college student.
"But I'm trying to get there."
Find the online version of this story to listen to Kay speak at the 2007 Senior Class Achievers award ceremony at www.azstarnet.com/dailystar
