***Spoiler Alert***
Alvey Kulina. The man, the myth, an enigma. You can love him, you can hate him, but you can’t deny his presence. A former fighter, owner of the Navy St. gym, coach, and father. He’s always clawing his way up and out, from either his own messes or someone else’s, refusing to drown. And not caring who he pushes down on his way out of the water.
Me? I kind of love the guy. He certainly does a lot of stupid things that make me want to slap him, but there’s something admirable under all of the swagger, the swearing, the perfected hair, the drinking. He’s a survivor, a fighter both by profession and by nature. Maybe it’s because he’s a New Yorker (as is the brilliant Frank Grillo, who inhabits Alvey to perfection), and that makes him feel familiar to me. And maybe its because I don’t find him intimidating at all, but rather like a caged street cat. And I love cats. Stay out of his way, admire from afar, and you’re cool. He’ll never be warm and cuddly, but he sure as fuck will fight to the death to survive.
And Alvey tries. The history between Alvey and Christina is fairly hazy through the first two seasons, with a bit of clarity coming in Season 3. Alvey feels immense guilt that Christina got hooked on heroin and left her kids behind. But both are adults, dysfunctional though responsible for their own actions, and Alvey sticking around in some fashion gives him a lot of points in my book. You can see it in his relationship with Nate, who trusts his father far more than he will ever really trust or depend on Christina. On some level, Alvey recognizes the major role that Jay plays in Nate’s life, his real caretaker, and from a young age. I think he sees repetitive actions from his own childhood, his attempt to avoid that for his own children failing. His guilt fuels a repetitive cycle of a never ending ring fight with Jay. Each looking over their shoulder for when the other will take a hit from behind. Two street cats, fighting to survive.
I love when a writer drops little breadcrumbs of character background throughout a story. When done well, the hints blend seamlessly into each scene, sometimes not becoming obvious until looking back on an episode or a rewatch. Byron Balasco does this so well with Alvey. His background is a mystery, the clues adding up to a rough childhood in New York and substance abuse, but also to an Alvey who was present in Jay’s young childhood. Trips to Japan, South America, to New York. You start to get a clearer vision of a time when Alvey’s career was at its height, and Jay was fully in Alvey’s world. You know somewhere deep inside, Alvey looks at Jay and sees the child he carried on a plane, who stood ringside at a fight, who went back East with him to visit Alvey’s mother. It’s a picture so clear, it hurts both of them to look at. Because there was a time when things were better, and right, and good.
Nate gives Alvey a second chance at the father/son relationship that will forever be strained with Jay. But in the end, Alvey understands Jay, and Jay comes to understand Alvey, to a depth that Nate can never reach. Because they are so similar. Raw nerves, open wounds, hands up and in defense all the time. Jay sees it too well, and Alvey not quite enough. But Alvey will get up and do another round with Jay, because he’s not leaving him behind. He might say it, but he’ll never really do it. He tries to be a parent, and it’s a relationship that Jay desperately needs. Like late in Season 2, when Jay moves into the hotel from hell with Ava, and shows up at Nate’s fight high and out of his mind. Alvey tells him to pull his shit together. Christina, on the flip side, can’t see past her own problems to tell Jay what he needs to hear – that she’s worried about him. She just tells him she can’t be around drugs in the house. And while its the truth, its not the truth he needs to hear to make better choices.
One of my favorite breadcrumb scenes is in episode 3×08. Alvey, Nate, and Jay are having dinner at Alvey’s mother’s house. Alvey reveals that its not the first time his mother tried to commit suicide, and that he’d found her after an attempt many years before, when he was a teenager. Something clicks in Jay’s mind, he recognizes the pain of a parent choosing to walk away. A mother choosing to leave her child behind. The same evening, he returns the bottle of morphine that he had stolen from Alvey’s house a few weeks earlier. An unspoken acknowledgement of Alvey’s pain, and Jay knowing how it feels.
The real truth, I think, is that Alvey has lived in the mask of his public fight persona too long, and has lost who he is without it, or maybe never knew at all. King Kulina. Take no prisoners, turn down no fight, rise from every knock out ready to take another punch. He’s built his gym on that reputation. But behind the mask, the man is crumbling, attending counseling as an attempt to appease Lisa. Acknowledging his faults and trials, but not really addressing them. Drinking enough alcohol to supply a small country for a century. His ego in his own way of not just confronting the demons inside, but vanquishing them. It’s kind of ironic. For a man who lives on the edge of survival day to day.
As Season 3 closes its final moments, I think we get a glimpse of the real Alvey. Guilt, pain, regret, balanced by a strong survival instinct. A blurring between the public persona and the private, the push every day to survive existing in both forms of himself. His body breaking down in an uncontrollable way. Will his mind be next?
“Kingdom”: The Arizona Episodes
“Kingdom” Season 2: The Tragedy of Jay Kulina
headphones are on 