I was raised in the 50s in a New York Italian home where girls didn’t get to have a voice. By the time 1978 rolled around, since I hadn’t yet found my voice, I remained a go-along, get-along gal.
To catch you up. I met my now husband Funk in Salem, West Virginia in September 1977. A mutual friend introduced us at college, where Funk was a professor and I was a student. I was 19 and he was 28. Within days, we starting dating—it was a tumultuous relationship from the start.
Fast forward to mid-August 1978, when the chancellor told Funk to choose his job or me. He chose me.
Soon after, Funk and I visited his friends in Tennessee. One of Funk’s pals worked in the State Auditor’s Office in Nashville and offered him a job. This solved Funk’s employment problem—no ultimatums for this guy! We had a month to move from West Virginia to Nashville. Since we were already in the south, Funk decided that we’d head over to Mississippi to visit his good friend Ed Wheat.
Ed and his friends were even older than Funk, and I felt totally out of place with the age difference. Plus, they were all intellectuals, whereas I didn’t know what the word meant. But I braved up so I could keep up, pretending to be older than I was and smarter than I felt.
We spent a few days at Ed’s home. After which, the group of us drove to New Orleans in Funk’s truck, his friends sitting beneath the camper top in the bed of the vehicle, me shotgun with my boyfriend.
No one warned me that the temperature in New Orleans would be 110 degrees in the shade. Still, trying to disguise my youth, I strolled throughout the French Quarter all afternoon, keeping it under wraps that I was in distress from the blistering heat and humidity.
Towards eveningtime, we stopped at some famous place to get beignets. While we were waiting to be served an order of what I soon determined were glorified donuts, I lit up a cigarette and instantly went down. Down meaning, I couldn’t take a drag of my smoke because I suddenly felt horribly sick.
I was terrified. And I had no idea what was wrong. My face was beat red and burning hot, yet I wasn’t sweating. Then my cutoffs felt too tight and I couldn’t take a deep breath. No one noticed that I had heat stroke, not even me, because I didn’t know the condition existed.
Since I still hadn’t discovered my voice, I sat in miserable silence, unable to smoke, unable to eat, and barely able to breathe. Funk and his friends were having the time of their lives stuffing their faces with beignets and washing them down with beer, while I feared for my life.
When darkness came, someone asked if I would drive everyone home so they could carry on with their party. I said yes, and they piled into the back of the truck along with a few sixpacks of beer, and mercifully, I drove the un-airconditioned vehicle 132 miles back to Ed’s place in Mississippi.
It was a relief to stop pretending that I was okay.
And I can’t even begin to tell you what a comfort it was to have the Grateful Dead cranked to the max to console me, not to mention the 70 mile an hour wind blowing on my body from the open windows. Before long, I started cooling down, and the moment I was able to take a deep breathe, I started calming down. By this point, it was pitch black outside and I was soothed further by the shadowed pine barrens I was traveling through.
Hours later, I pulled into Ed’s driveway, exited the truck, and everyone else crawled out from the bed and proceeded to yell at me, asking why I didn’t pull over so they could take a piss. It seems they’d been banging on the camper window for a good hour or more and I never heard a thing. All these older, brainy people, and not one of them realized there was a 6-inch gap between the bed of the truck and the interior cab.
Luckily, my Italian New Yorker poked through and I no longer gave two shits what any of them thought of me.
As we sat around Ed’s dining room table, I got to hear how my hick-boyfriend couldn’t hold it in any longer, so he ingeniously got on his knees and peed out the back camper window. Apparently, no one realized what Funk was doing so they all started cheering for the cool mist that suddenly caressed their sweating bodies. Chagrined, Funk confessed, and once his friends got over the fact that they were covered in urine, instead of staying horrified, they started fanning themselves, thankful for the relief from the intense heat.
Funk and I headed back to West Virginia the next morning. The whole way there, all I could think of was how much I didn’t want to move.
Nashville would be my fourth unwanted relocation in as many years—not a good situation for a homebody. The first move occurred the summer before I started 10th grade, when my parents ripped us from my childhood home on Long Island and moved the family to Arizona. Nine months later, we moved to Florida, and six months after that, to a different location in the state.
In 1976, as soon as I graduated high school, since I couldn’t stand Florida, I drove my truck 1,100 miles to visit my older brother who was homesteading in Brushy Fork, West Virgina. I fell in love with Brushy and the lifestyle. Having attended four different high schools, it was a joy to find a community of like-minded friends again. By the end of that summer, I decided to make a life there.
But nope.
Because the college wouldn’t allow Funk and I to be together, there went my dream of living back-to-the-land. In September 1978, I sold my truck, packed up my belongings and we loaded everything into Funk’s truck and moved to Nashville, where I once again didn’t know a soul. It was too late to enroll in college, so I had to take a job as a receptionist in a food stamp office.
I was friendless and beyond lonely, just like in high school. Of course, I had Funk, but life for me has always felt more secure when I am encircled with a group of people to laugh and have fun with.
My first few months in Nashville dragged by. But come December 1978, an awful Sunday rolled around that completely rocked my foundation. Funk and I were taking an afternoon nap—his idea, I’ve always hated naps—and I awoke in the pitch dark to the phone ringing. I answered and my mother yelled into the receiver, “Gloria! Laurie Rooney died!”
What a way to receive such horrible news.
Laurie was my best friend since I was two years old. Upon hearing that she’d crashed her car into a tree and instantly perished, my normally anxious state from having grown up in a weird-ass family turned into a debilitating 4-year bout of anxiety. At the time, I was still terribly afraid of ghosts, likely because I saw a spirit in my bedroom when I was little. And now that my friend was on the other side, I was choked with fear that I’d see her image.
Hanging up from my mom, Funk left me trembling in the bedroom and returned with a book of poetry by Edna Saint Vincent Millay. Trying to comfort me, he read a lyric about a dead body beneath the ground, its eyes and brains being eaten by maggots. It did not calm me down. I ran from the room screaming.
A few weeks later, as Funk and I pulled into our apartment complex after a trip to the grocery store—since I was severely lacking in sleep from fear, and since Funk was the head person he remains today, and since he’d just responded to something I’d just said with something completely off topic, my patience with the guy had finally reached a boiling point.
To let him know that he’d messed up yet again, I got out of the car and slammed the door!
I know. Pretty dumb.
Looking back, if you’ve been married for almost 50 years like I have, you’ll understand when I say that when Funk peered at me through the windshield and gave me that dumbfounded “What did I do?!” look that wives gaggingly know all too well, it exasperated me even further. Being only 20, I shot him a look back that said, “If you don’t know what you did wrong, I’m not telling you!”
Thus was the beginning of me finding my voice.
Here’s to you! if you also entered a significant relationship with absolutely zero skills in the resolving-conflicts-department. Funk and I had to seek marriage counseling to learn how to express ourselves. Throughout the years, many people have looked at our relationship and concluded that either Funk is a pushover because he’s nice to me, or that I’m a tyrant because I know how to use my words. But as Funk always says, he’s never met another couple who he’d trade places with. And so far, neither have I.
The Photo. Funk’s good friend, Ed Wheat. This was a Thanksgiving Day Run in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Funk was in the race too.