| 10 June 2009
#1 Jake Funterbick
I was tempted to actually use Jake’s full name and a current picture I was able to find of him for the site, but I decided that would be a little bit too far, so instead I pulled a photo I thought was appropriate given his pretentious, arrogant and snarky demeanor. I actually didn’t mind living with him too much. I was twenty and I didn’t expect much from the roommates I shared an apartment with while I was studying journalism at Emerson College and I’m sure they didn’t expect much from me. Jake could be a fun roommate, but within a week or two of living with him, I realized he had his head stuffed so far up his ass it was hard to relate with him. Jake was from San Francisco, the first Bay Area native I really got to know. And believe you me, he made it his job–along with talking about jazz, smoking cigarettes from a case and getting high–to let anyone and everyone know that he was from San Francisco. Everything with this guy seemed to go back to San Francisco. He was well-traveled, the kind of kid whose parents put him on a plane for Europe and Israel many times in his formative years, which is all good.
The problem was, to Jake, the world was not an oyster but a poorly informed rube in need of class and culture, the kind only a San Franciscan could provide. Watching South Park’s “Smug Alert” episode years later, I realized exactly the type of person I had shared space with. I had lived with something of a stereotype. Smug, self-indulgent and with a strong sense of entitlement, the world was beneath Funderbick. To him, his tastes were refined and everyone else’s was questionable. I never saw Jake as a particularly bright person, but at the time, nursing my own self-confidence problems in a big college town, I admired his ability to have fun, despite the consequences. That was until I realized that sometimes his form of letting loose was merely unleashing an entirely too big ego upon others. He fashioned himself as a gonzo style observer of life and often tape recorded conversations with people without their even knowing it. Still, he had fun, which is always commendable. If there’s one thing Jake did bring to me, it was the knowledge that one has to take the good with the bad. He wasn’t a bad person, but he wasn’t exactly cool either. Just sorta thought he was and for a while, he had me fooled.
The funniest thing about living with this guy was the fact that he had no real knowledge of how incredibly vacuous he came across. Jake subscribed to the New York Times and the New Yorker, the first of which usually stayed on our stoop for a day or two before being thrown out, the second of which collected on top of our coffee table as the weeks passed. Another roommate used to pick up the New Yorker from our table and look at the cartoons amazed that anyone would even pretend to like the publication. I must admit, nobody read the thing, ever. Funderbick also claimed to like jazz very much. I think that in my time living with him, I only once heard him listening to jazz and it was unlistenable, the kind that is discordant, without melody and organization. Just crap. Crap made for folks who don’t really like music all that much but want others to know they liked it. To Funderbick, I was probably an unsophisticated dumb hick, which given his worldview was certainly correct. Roommate’s like that are tolerable until they creep into your space. My only truly negative memory of him was one that spoke to his Bay Area sense of entitlement, when he moved the furniture in my room around so has to be more pleasant for his TV watching. At the time my uncle had passed away and my cousin–who moved to San Francisco some years before–needed help around his mother’s house. I asked him about the incident and he assured me it was a part of the San Francisco culture, to be a bit insensitive without even knowing or meaning it. It was an interesting lesson. I’m not too sure what Jake Funterbick does these days. The last I’d heard he was making a documentary films. I wonder if he still listens to jazz…Well, sorta listens.
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