Marvin Blackshear

It was the only time I’d ever seen my father cry.

January 1994, St. Luke’s Hospital in Racine, WI, third floor mental health unit. A month or so before, I’d started a fire at school and not taken it very seriously when they interrogated me. A game of telephone started, and I quickly found myself involuntarily committed. Six weeks of intense inpatient treatment, alongside a motley collection of troubled kids ranging from age six to seventeen. Some of them had severe mental health problems, others were simply in the court system but hadn’t yet done anything bad enough to get sent to juvenile detention. Inpatient care for “behavioral problems” was a first step towards that more serious outcome.

No matter your reason for being there, you enter on 24-hour suicide watch. They took away my belt and shoelaces, and did hourly safety checks. A few times a day we all lined up at the nurse’s station for our medications. Days turned into weeks. I played a lot of chess and ping pong. I tried to explain it was a misunderstanding and I was not supposed to be there, but that’s exactly what someone who was supposed to be there would say.

But that’s not what this is about. This is a story about addiction, about generational trauma, about learning who someone really is when it’s too late.

I had mandatory daily therapy with my psychiatrist, and weekly family therapy with the doctor and both of my parents. I was letting him have it that afternoon, tearing into him for how his alcoholism affected our family. That is, how I thought it was affecting our family, from the perspective of a depressed, angry teenager.

Marvin Blackshear was the quintessential functional alcoholic. He was a professional drinker. He drank with frequency and severity. Like I said though, functional. Work was never a problem. He put in thirty-one years at Ocean Spray, never missing a day because he was drunk or hungover. There were multiple side hustles on top of his factory job: tree-removal, firewood sales with the resulting wood, basement clean-out, all sorts of odd jobs to bring home extra cash. His drinking was an ever-present part of our lives, destructive in most of the usual ways that alcohol abuse is known to be, but not when it came to being a provider.

J. Bavet brandy was his drink of choice, one half-pint at a time. Always being the analytical type, I constantly told him he should buy larger bottles for a better cost per ounce, but oh did he love those half-pint bottles. “Ass-pocket bottles” some people called them, due to the size and the rounded shape that fit perfectly in the back pocket of your jeans, the place he usually kept one. If you were to run your arm under the couch in his basement hideaway, at least half a dozen empties were down there at any given time. Sometimes there were a few not quite empty, but I learned very early on that hard liquor was not for me. A single instance of the unpleasant burning sensation was enough for me, though I may have occasionally combined a few near-empties to give to friends.

We were a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, via my paternal grandmother, Grandma Daisy. My father had stopped practicing as an adult, but when he met my mother, Grandma Daisy found an eager convert. Having grown up with the faith, I was a true believer. I thought I would live forever on a paradise earth along with all of the other Witnesses, or as we called them, “people who had the truth.” To a greater extent than other religions I’ve encountered, JWs truly believe theirs is the only possible way. They have “the truth,” and everyone else is going to die, and before they do they will realize that they made the wrong choice. Having some exposure to the teachings and not becoming a Witness, that’s one thing, but to have the truth and then willingly leave, there are not many worse sins. You’d be “disfellowshipped,” possibly considered an “apostate” if you actively tried to steer people away from the faith. That was not the case with my father; he was simply a lapsed Witness and not an enemy. But in the eyes of his true-believing son, there wasn’t much functional difference. How could you give this all away? The end is nigh, Armageddon could come tomorrow and you won’t be there in paradise with us, and it’s all your choice.

The drinking was a big part of that. While alcohol use was not forbidden, abuse of any substance certainly was. Jehovah’s Witnesses are young earth biblical literalists. Any verse about the body being a temple or similar ideas were applied to things like drinking, smoking, and drug abuse. Being a drunk while also rejecting the faith, he was actively choosing to accept death instead of living forever. It felt like our family was going to leave on a wonderful, eternal vacation and he was choosing to stay behind.

Back in the hospital, I am telling him all of this, with the rage of an angry 15-year-old who is locked up in a mental institution against his will. With the combination of standard-issue teenage angst, and being locked up in the loony bin and being gaslit every day about my need to be there, I was ready to explode. “I did something stupid,” I told him. “You are abandoning your family because all you want to do is drink! How can you question my behavior? I’m a straight-A student, I don’t get in trouble, I won all of the city math meets, I’m a good kid who made one mistake. You are killing yourself with booze and giving away the chance to live with us forever.”

I was angry and combative, and expected a similar response. That’s not what happened. He started crying. My father was a man’s man, a tough guy, he didn’t show emotions. I’d never seen anything even approaching sadness in him, and here he is standing in my hospital room bawling.

I don’t want to be like this. I want to be one of the guys. I want to grill some burgers and have a few beers in the backyard, I want to have a drink or two after work and be done, I want to be able to do it like everyone else, and I can’t. It’s not fair! If I’m not drinking, I want to be drinking, and once I’m drinking I can’t stop. It’s not even a choice anymore, I keep going until I’m passed out. You know how hard I’ve tried to not drink? You know how many times I’ve said I’ll just have a few and then I wake up the next morning not remembering what happened? Do you know how bad the craving gets when I try to stop? I’m too far gone, son, I can’t stop. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t just quit, I could die. I have to keep drinking and I don’t even like it anymore. Sometimes, that first drink, it feels good, I love it, but then it takes hold and I don’t want it anymore but I have to have it. You don’t understand, you just don’t understand. I hate my life and it’s not fair. I just want to be regular.

In the moment, I was too angry to hear this. It all sounded like an excuse to me, a cop-out. In some ways it only made things worse.

A few months later, Kurt Cobain put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I was a 13-year-old obsessed with punk and alternative music when Smells Like Teen Spirit was released. Nirvana was everything to me. But reading about Cobain’s heroin addiction and seeing how it affected him and the band, and then seeing him die a needless death so young, I’d turned on him a bit. I’m sure I was projecting some of my feelings about my father’s drinking, but I didn’t yet have the experience to understand and process this kind of addiction. I can still see the image in my head of that day in April when I came home from school and my sister appeared on the stairway to tell me. “Probably because of the stupid heroin,” I remember saying. Eventually I would read a biography of Cobain and soften my stance, but it didn’t carry over to my feelings about my father. That took something else. I had to experience it myself.

When I hit rock bottom, there was a special sting on top of the surface level effects. This wasn’t a surprise, I wasn’t naive, I knew my family history and I knew that I was a habitual, obsessive person prone to addictive behavior. I let myself get down this bad. I was fully in the throes of the same addiction I condemned in my father, and I was only 23. But it also felt beyond my control. I didn’t want to be like this. I wanted to be one of the guys. I wanted to play some records and have a few beers with my friends. It wasn’t fair.

I didn’t have faith anymore. I no longer thought I would live forever. I had no idea what would happen, but I didn’t fear death because the one belief I did cling to was that there was no heaven or hell, no afterlife, you just cease to exist. It sounded quite lovely to be honest, even if I was too chickenshit to bring it upon myself. That was the easy part of losing faith though. The hard part was having decades of time rush through my head in an instant, for the first time seeing my father as the person, Marvin Blackshear, not as a father refusing to accept paradise with his family.

Opening my eyes to the fact that I’d been raised in a cult–cut off from the rest of the world, forbidden to associate with non-JWs, taught that mere association could irreparably taint me and make me miss out on my chance at paradise–it was both infuriating and liberating. You feel stupid when you leave a cult. Like it was obvious all along and you got played like a sucker. And then because feelings are seldom absolute, you still have this scintilla of doubt, this second-guessing of yourself that you might be willingly abandoning paradise while outwardly confident about rejecting it. For me there was also a separate, secondary effect. I’d spent my youth demonizing my father for something I was now doing. The anger I felt at being brainwashed, he’d already escaped it and now I was throwing it back in his face. He grew up and got out himself, only to see his mother bring his wife and children into the cult. Not only was I throwing it back in his face, I was doing so by attacking his sickness, something a child certainly couldn’t understand, but one that now at age 23 and afflicted with the same sickness I certainly did.

What had I done? Who is this person really, the father that I never actually knew because the weight of two generations of brainwashing drove a wedge between us? He wasn’t perfect, I couldn’t veer too far in the other direction, but all of my anger and resentment was based on a lie. He probably should have sought treatment for alcoholism (and he did at various times throughout my childhood, but it never stuck), but not getting clean is a sin that countless people have made and will make. I was at rock bottom myself, who was I to judge? He provided for his family, he wasn’t abusive, he played basketball with me in the backyard, he included me on his side hustles, we did have a bond. Watching Sanford and Son in that smoky basement, sitting in the crook of his legs, those are some of my favorite memories. He was a good dad, just a drunk, non-religious one. I’d missed out on appreciating that, wrapped up in a delusion about paradise and living forever.

With my eyes opened and the blinders off, I was determined to learn more about who he was, to understand the person. I was working at Barnes and Noble, and I bought him some Vietnam history books and brought them down to Waukegan, IL where he was living at the time. I setup AOL on a computer for him and showed him how to get online. His first search was for John Lee Hooker, and the joy on his face when he found a few fan pages was a delight.

He was pretty far gone at this point. After 31 years at Ocean Spray they’d pushed him out, and plans to make the tree business full-time fell victim to the amount of drinking you can do when you no longer have a clock to punch. It took a couple years for the bank to take the house away, and my mother and little brother left before that happened. He eventually moved into Grandma Daisy’s old house in Waukegan, and got to work on drinking himself to death. When I visited he was a solid 20-30 lbs lighter than I’d ever seen him. He chain-smoked quite literally, usually lighting the next cigarette with the butt of the last one. He walked with a hand-made cane that lives in my garage today. Neither of us had the courage to bring up anything from the past, we were just two guys being dudes.

I was almost finished with college by this point, and he was so excited about graduation. No one in my family had ever gone to school, and in my late teen years it didn’t look like I would either. I’d failed out of high school after the stint in the mental hospital derailed things. But here I was, 25, on the brink of a college degree, one of the Blackshears finally doing something with their life.

My father was someone who would celebrate you and gas you up. I knew he was going to come to graduation in the most gaudy suit he could find, big leather pimp hat, cane, he was gonna have that shit on. “Please hold applause until the end”? Not happening, he was going to be hooting and hollering when I walked across that stage.

February 24, 2003. I was doing an internship in Milwaukee that last semester, and my boss had given me tickets to a Bucks game. Kevin Garnett put on a masterclass and held off a late Bucks rally. They were the best seats I’d ever had at a sporting event, and I’d brought my then-girlfriend now-wife. We had a wonderful night. On the way home, the call came from my mother. I told her I’d call her back, pulled over the car, and sobbed and sobbed in Katie’s lap for what felt like an hour.

Graduation was less than three months away. It was the only thing he had to look forward to. It was going to be the proudest moment of his life, and a culmination of the rekindling of our relationship. After 25 years we finally got to know each other without the baggage and the trauma and the anger of two consecutive lives spent fighting our beliefs and our illness.

The paramedics who found him said he had one leg in a pair of jeans, but they’d put the time of death in the middle of the night. We think when the heart attack happened he tried to get dressed to go to the hospital, but then it was over. He was 56 years old, too young to die, but you can’t abuse your body with alcohol that badly for 35 years and expect to live a long life.

He didn’t want to be like that. It wasn’t fair.