Meeting Funk. The Second Four Months.
Mid-January 1978. I drove to my parent’s home in Florida for winter break and stayed for a month. When I returned to Salem, I let things cool between me and Funk. Ever since our first kiss last September, we hadn’t spent a day apart. And now that it was already the beginning of the second semester of school, I was afraid that if I became serious with someone this soon, I’d miss out on all the fun, youthful times that college life offers.
Plus, Funk hadn’t turned into a guitar playing hippie while I was away.
Never in my life did I plan on obtaining a higher education. In June of 1976, after I graduated high school, I left home and drove to Long Island to visit the friends I’d grown up with, and then went to see my brother Steve in West Virginia.
This was during the back-to-the-land movement.
Steve had just purchased 125 acres of land in a place called Brushy Fork. I was only supposed to stay a few days, but I loved being part of a community of like-minded people, so a few days turned into months of pure glory.
And while I was deliriously happy to be living in a rural mountainous setting, my mom made me feel guilty for staying there. She was having a difficult time coming to terms with her dwindling nest. With me gone, and her three older kids scattered across the country, the house felt too sad and lonely to her with just my younger brother living at home.
Of course, my mom didn’t say any of that.
Instead, she said I was wasting my life and wanted me to come home so I could find direction. I remained at Brushy for five months before the guilt got to me, returning to Florida on Christmas Eve 1976.
I was miserable there.
That’s when the idea of going to college surfaced for the first time in my life. It was the only thing I could think of doing to be able to leave my mom’s roof guilt-free. I figured my conscious wouldn’t get the better of me if I was leaving for a good reason—like a higher education—instead of just me having the time of my life stomping around the hills of Brushy Fork.
Sitting in my bedroom at my mother’s home, I applied to one college, which just happened to be 30 minutes away from my brother’s place in West Virginia.
Five months later, Salem College sent me an admittance letter, along with an assortment of grants, work study funds and student loans so I could attend. Thirty days after that, in June 1977, I fled Florida and drove my truck back to Brushy, staying until school began in September of that year.
With my very first class, I found that I loved college.
That said, since my parents had moved our family from Long Island to Arizona after I graduated 9th grade—and to different locations in Florida after that—all in all, I went to five different high schools. I didn’t learn anything more after leaving New York. Which meant, I had a lot of catching up to do in order to keep up with college assignments, so I spent a lot of time in Salem’s library.
One winter day, during our “cooling off period,” Funk walked into the building and it was as if I had a beacon on top of my head.
I had my books spread out on a table towards the back of the stacks, and yet his eyes immediately found mine. It was so strange. It seemed he had sparkles twinkling out of his eyes while looking at me. I turned my head back to my work, and before I knew it, Funk was beside me asking if I was avoiding him.
I was. But I said that I wasn’t, that I just had too much studying to do.
Days later, I was at a bar with friends listening to my brother’s band playing Grateful Dead tunes. As always, I went outside for a smoke—yes! cigarettes were my first love back then!—and one of Funk’s colleagues, Dave, came up and said hello.
I didn’t realize it was going to be a serious conversation.
In the most pleasant way, Dave said, “Gloria, why are you giving Funk the heave-ho? He’s been with dozens of women before you, but I’ve never seen him feel the same way about them that he does about you. It means nothing that he called his old girlfriend while you were away. Nothing happened, she …”
“What?! Are you frigging kidding me?! Funk tried to be with someone while I was away?!”
From the very beginning, Funk told me that he didn’t believe in monogamy or marriage, but I guess I didn’t believe him.
Dave said, “I’m sorry, I thought you knew! I assumed that’s why you were dodging him. Please give him another chance, he cares so much for you.”
“Dave, there’s no way I’ll be with a guy who does that. I mean, he couldn’t wait 30 days for me to return? And what about all those letters he wrote, and now I’m finding they were written while he was chasing someone else? Christ! And I believed them. What kind of fool am I?”
Apparently, Dave didn’t expect such a passionate outburst, because he suddenly remembered he had papers to grade.
February 1978. Soon enough, Funk and I hooked up again. I mean, teenage hormones really are a thing! This time, there were conditions. If he was with me, he was with me and no one else, period, or I was out of there for good.
Funk agreed, so I asked if I could borrow his beloved new truck—the royal blue one with the five golden lights on the roof and the four-on-the-floor stick shift. I didn’t tell him the real reason I needed it. Just said my truck was out of gas and I was out of money to fill it, which was also true.
Actually, the week before, my roommate and I were in the Administration Building where we spotted a roomful of bunk beds. My mind immediately started spinning. Our dorm room was so tiny. I knew if we replaced our bed frames with one of those bunks, we’d free up a whole lot of space. But who knew how long those beds would remain there. I couldn’t wait for money to arrive to gas up my truck—I needed to seize the moment if I wanted a more spacious dorm room.
Grabbing Funk’s vehicle from the employee parking lot, I snuck into the Administration Building and loaded the best-looking set into the back of his pick-up. It was a struggle loading them because the bed had a camper top covering it. But load them I did. And not wanting to be caught, I quickly shifted into reverse and bumped into a car that had just turned into the parking lot.
I raced from the truck and started profusely apologizing to the stunned older man who was sitting behind his car’s closed window.
He got out and said, “Isn’t this Professor Funkhouser’s truck?”
I said, yes, yes it was, and that I was just doing him a favor. The man handed me his business card and asked me to give it to Funk. Turns out, the man was the president of the college.
I got so lucky.
The president bought my story. And he didn’t look inside the camper and notice the stolen goods. Nor was his car damaged. Only Funk’s new truck had a slight dent in the rear bumper.
Try explaining that one to the guy you’re “dating.”
March 1978. Funk asked if I’d go with him to Morgantown to visit his grad-school buddies. It was so boring. I didn’t realize they’d be drinking beer and playing chess all day long, and that like Funk, his friends would be almost a decade older than me. I took my homework with me, but had long since caught up, and still Funk wasn’t ready to return to Salem. Back then, I hadn’t yet found my voice—whoo-boy, did I ever make up for that a few years later—so I just sat there in terrific boredom, yearning to go home.
It was pitch black when we headed out. And where I could plainly see that Funk was turning the wrong way onto a one-way street, apparently Funk’s beers that he supposedly never gets drunk on, made the sign go unnoticed to him. We were halfway up the road when some guy pulled onto the same street and came barreling towards us. Funk slammed on his brakes, got out, and started yelling at the guy for going the wrong way.
They were about to come to blows when I grabbed Funk’s cocked-arm and said, “Hey Buddy, you’re the one who was going the wrong way, not him, so knock it off.”
Funk glanced at the sign that I was pointing to and a bewildered look came over his face, but he didn’t apologize, just headed back to his truck still throwing insults at the man and then started reaching for the handle of the driver’s side door.
I said, “Oh no you don’t, I’m driving home.”
Funk said, “No you’re not, I never let anyone drive me.”
I said, “Well, now you do,” and elbowed him out of the way, hopped into the driver’s side, and started adjusting the seat and mirrors.
Funk went along with it, and before long, he was fast asleep, however, each bump in the road had him leaning ever closer to me. When he was so close that I was smashed up against the driver’s side door, I shoved him back so I could steer properly. Funk startled awake and grabbed for the wheel, thinking he was driving. I had to bat him away to keep us from careening off the highway, all the while thinking about my mother’s words to me, “What would a professor want with you?”
April 1978. My college friends were heading to Florida for Spring Break and wanted us to join them. Since my parents lived there, I figured why not, even if I hated the place. Funk and I started out in his truck during a late winter snow storm. Neither of us had much money so we were driving 1,100 miles straight through.
I had to study, so I opened my book, and to entertain himself, Funk started singing some old bluegrass and gospel songs. At one point, I looked up from my homework and realized how comfortable I was sitting in silence, him at the wheel, singing to himself.
I don’t think I’d ever not filled a space with talk before.
Finally, we were almost to my parent’s home. Halfway across the miles-long causeway that leads to their town, Funk said, “The truck is on empty; we’re gonna run out of gas before we get there.” I said, “No we won’t. There’s at least 50 miles left once the pointer hits “E.” For some reason, Funk thought I knew what I was talking about, and 30 minutes later, we were pulling into my parent’s driveway.
Said parents are New York Italians, so they came rushing outside to greet us with laughs and hugs and kisses before ushering us inside. My younger brother Santis and his girlfriend were sitting on the living room couch, so I said hello and introduced them to Funk. My mom went to the kitchen and immediately started grabbing things out from the fridge that she’d made for us and laid a spread of typical Italian food out on the dining room table.
Then, as with any guest, she called everyone to come sit down and started offering Funk everything available, all the while bombarding him with a thousand questions. Funk, not used to the food or the non-stop questions, and likely worried about how we’d get home with no money for gas, just sat there giving my mom one-word answers, and he didn’t even try to make chit chat with anyone at the table.
My parents gave me the maniac eyes that I knew so well. The eyes that said, WTF? Then my brother gave me the smirk that I also knew well. The smirk that said, “sucks to be you.” I was so embarrassed, but hadn’t yet learned how to smash Funk’s leg beneath the table to get him to start acting like a normal human being, so I just sat there mortified, not knowing what to do.
Later on, as I was showing Funk to the bedroom that my mother had prepared for him, Funk said, “What was all that arguing about?”
“Who was arguing?”
“Everyone at the table was screaming and yelling.”
“What are you talking about?! No one was screaming and yelling, they were just talking normally. Believe me, you’d know if there was an argument going down. It’d sort of be like when you were an animal to that guy who was coming down the right way on a one-way street.”
And there you have the initial meeting of a first-generation Italian American family and the hick from West Virginia their girl brought home.
I’ll be back soon with the next installment of Meeting Funk, The Third Four Months.
Here’s to you! If you also brought home a guy whom you weren’t quite sure of and introduced him to your parents—parents who let it be known that you were right, that you shouldn’t be sure of this guy, at least in the eyes of a working-class family of roofers—even if he is a big deal professor.
The Photo. Me and Funk, circa 2000, Moonstone Beach, California. We took the southern-route on an Amtrak train from Kansas City to LA with three of our children, rented a car and drove up Highway 101, and then took the northern route train back to KC. Traveling by rail is THE best way to view our beautiful nation.