Many many incidents peeled back the layers of my dad but i think think the final layer being peeled back was in college.I call it the Grey Goose incident. My father has been an functioning drug addict and alcoholic my whole life but seeing him function made it seem not as real.
Let me preface this with my dads drink of choice is beer.. i have seen him down a case of beer in a day and still be extremely functional.. Well when my uncle and him first got here to visit me they bought 2 HUGE bottles of grey goose because they knew that what I liked and wanted to drink with me. We only finished one bottle.
My father came to visit me when I was in college and he bought my favorite uncle on that side of family. My dad had lived in the state a few years previous to him and my moms divorce so he knew they didn't sell alcohol on Sunday. He even would make jokes about it on phone calls with me. Well its Sunday and I'm in his hotel room and he is just fucking MOODY like being over the top begging me and my uncle to go to a bar (he didn't have a license and my uncle had the rental). He starts going on rants about not being able to buy beer. Well we split up because I couldn't take his attitude so I said we would meet up in a few hours.
I meet him at my moms because they are civil and get along. I pull up and he is in the drive way huge bottle of Grey Goose in his hand visibly HAMMERED, yelling at my car and just making a scene in the drive way. I am trying to usher him in the house because its my moms house and I know the neighbors and I don't want them to get the wrong impression but he is just enraged about not having beer and the states liquor laws he is full on freaking the fuck out on me and just in general.
The anger and down right drunken entitlement in him made me see him so different. It made everything my mom had told me for years seem so much more real. I had never seen my dad be such a pathetic man in my life but it drove home everything everyone had ever told me about his alcoholism and who he really is as a person.