Normal Gets You Nowhere

by Kelly Cutrone

  8. If you’re not getting fucked by midnight, go home. Recently, one of my friends was in Paris producing fashion shows when she met a famous French deejay. Apparently they really hit it off, because he told her he’d be coming to New York in a few weeks and asked if he could stay with her. Excited, she agreed. She didn’t realize that she’d soon be in the process of changing apartments. So she booked a hotel room for herself and the deejay.

  I don’t know about you, but if I’m invited to stay in a guy’s hotel room for more than three days and he’s footing the bill, I infer that sex will probably be in the mix, unless he’s a relative or religious figure. (As I said before, if you don’t want to be in a situation like this, leave.) But after three or four days of total confusion, my friend called to tell me it wasn’t happening with the French deejay. I immediately told her she needed to throw down and be honest. “Tell him, ‘If we are not going to have a sexual relationship, or at least an emotional relationship that’s going to lead to a sexual relationship, then you need to leave, because your Frenchness is bumming me out.’ ”

  When I returned to my office the next morning, my friend was there, hanging out with one of my publicists, still shocked and devastated by this guy’s behavior. “I want you to go in my office,” I said. “Find those photos of me when I was your age, the ones that no longer look like me. I want you to know that even when I looked like that, I thought I was defective—that I was the problem! You have to accept the fact that if this were meant to be, he would have jumped on top of you long ago.”

  The point is, we can put these situations on Freud, or we can put them on cultural differences, but we should not put them on our hotel bill.

  9. If you’re sleeping with a married man, you’re helping him stay married. A married man will never leave his wife for you. If you had asked me twenty years ago whether men or women end most relationships, I definitely would have said, “Men.” And in my two marriages I spent a lot of time wondering whether I was keeping my husband happy enough. But I now have enough life experience to know that when a man finally commits to a chick, he may eventually cheat on her with her best friend or drive her crazy eating Doritos on the couch all day like a sack of potatoes, but he is never leaving, regardless of how much he can’t stand her. He will always make her lower the boom. And even then she probably won’t be able to get rid of him! I mean, Spencer Tracy wouldn’t leave his wife for the great Katherine Hepburn, despite the fact that they spent thirty years together and costarred in nine films!

  Years ago, after my first husband, Ronnie, made me kick him out,* I met a really beautiful German rock star, who was in the INXS of Germany. I could hardly believe my good luck. He was blonde, funny, great in bed and had the hottest south German accent I’d ever heard. To top it all off, he lived at the Chelsea Hotel. I mean, can you say Traum, baby? Within two weeks, we’d embarked on a massive love affair. We traveled together and hung out with each other’s friends, and every night after working in the studio, where he was recording an album with my musician friend, he appeared at my apartment on Hudson Street in the West Village.

  One day about a month into our relationship, I ran into a friend of mine named Nico, who always knew everyone’s business. Nico mentioned that he’d heard I was dating this German rock star and wondered if I knew he had a three-month-old baby at home in Germany, with his live-in girlfriend. I felt as though I’d been hit in the head with a ton of bricks while being kangaroo-kicked in the heart. There was just no way. Nobody could fuck me so hard and so pure and be so corrupt at the same time.

  “It can’t be the same guy,” I said, shaking my head. I was about to learn that men have an amazing ability to compartmentalize. (FYI, so do women, but we’re not talking about us right now.)

  “Why don’t you ask him?” Nico suggested gently, almost daring me.

  That night, when the rock star knocked on the door, I opened it only halfway.

  “Hey, babe,” he said.

  “Before you come in, I have a question for you,” I said accusingly. “Do you have a girlfriend? Better yet, do you have a baby?”

  He nodded. “Yeah,” he replied, with a slight tinge of annoyance that said, How inconvenient you’re finding out about this in the middle of our wild love affair.

  That’s when I swung my fist and punched him harder than I’ve ever hit anyone in my life. Then I slammed the door in his face.

  Outside, he banged and pleaded in vain. “Come on, we need to talk about this,” he said.

  I just sank to the floor and cried and cried, vowing never to speak to him again.

  The truth of the matter is, you just never know what’s going on with people. I believe that even if a guy tells you he’s separated, divorced, or about to get a divorce, it doesn’t hurt to do a little digging around on the Internet or even pay a few bucks for a background check. I mean, there are just so many different family systems out there today. It’s not enough to just ask if he’s married; you may need to come up with five or six ways to find out whether he’s in a relationship! Does he live with another human being besides his child? Is he in any sort of ongoing sexual relationship with someone to whom he is not related?

  I’ve actually been forced to learn this lesson more than once. Five years ago, I’d become an eco-dater, meaning I was only sleeping with people I’d already slept with in the past. It was around then that I reconnected with my ex-boyfriend Jimmy, whom I’d dated on and off since 1991. We’d both had kids with other people, but he told me he was no longer intimate with his son’s mother, with whom he was still living “platonically” in L.A. And guess what? I fucking believed him! That’s right, at thirty-five years old, ten years after my affair with the German rock star, I believed him!

  Several months into our bicoastal relationship, I flew out to California to shoot an ad campaign. When I invited Jimmy to come, he told me to pick him up on the corner of his street. (Here’s a tip: don’t ever agree to pick anyone up on the corner.) As I drove up, my phone rang. “Hit the pedal!” he screamed. “Don’t stop driving! Go, go, go!”

  Before I knew it, I was being chased down Wilshire Boulevard by a silver soccer-mom Volvo station wagon. Oh fuck, I thought. It’s Jimmy’s wife. (Here’s another tip, sisters: a married woman who is not sleeping with her husband will not chase her husband’s lover down Wilshire Boulevard at ninety miles an hour in her silver hatchback soccer-mom Volvo. Translation: wife is still sleeping with husband, boyfriend is a liar, and you are in danger.)

  I stomped on the pedal of my rented SUV and tore off with the Volvo hot on my tail, weaving through traffic, trying to make a right turn while keeping my speed up. Eventually I lost her, which is when I had to admit Jimmy’s behavior was affecting my work. I was now late to my shoot. Fuck him!

  If you have the bad luck of entering a relationship with someone who’s still in the process of leaving his last one (or hasn’t yet), I suggest you put on your listening ears. He will probably try to tell you his ex-wife or girlfriend is crazy or, better yet, hysterical, a word that is derived from a term meaning “in the uterus,” and go on to describe her faults. What he’s actually about to give you is a list of everything that’s wrong with him. It may sound at first as though the woman is in fact out of her mind, but there’s a good chance a lot of the problems she’s complaining about are the ones you’re about to inherit.

  When my first ex-husband’s fourth wife—did you get that?—called me years after my divorce to complain about him, I was antiquing in southern Virginia with my daughter. It had been years since I’d been married to Ronnie—I was now a happily single mother—but hearing this woman talk about him made me feel as though my divorce had been yesterday. “He won’t let me take his car; he’s saying I should have thought to get my own tires changed. He looks like the Wolfman. He’s chasing me around saying he’s going to kill me!” she moaned. I mean, it was basically a play-by-play reenactment of my own breakup with my husband! Yes, Virginia, history and our lovers’ bad behaviors t
end to repeat themselves.

  It was just this past year, while working on this book, that I told Ava’s father, an Italian, the story of the German rock star and me, and how I confronted him on that fateful night. Ilario started laughing in his beautiful Italian accent.

  “That’s funny,” he said. “That’s the difference between an Italian and a German man. A German man will tell you, ‘Yes, there is a baby,’ ” he said. “An Italian man will say, ‘Baby? What baby?’ ”

  10. Just because you’re great lovers doesn’t mean you’re going to live happily ever after. News flash: there is a huge difference between being great lovers and being partners. Just because a guy can throw down and fuck your brains out does not mean you’re going to be able to grocery shop together and get your bills paid. Yes, sex is superimportant, but it’s a small part of partnering. We shouldn’t call someone our partner or even our boyfriend if they’re really just our lover. Sometimes in life, you’ll have a lover who is not meant to be a partner. And sometimes it’s okay to just enjoy having a lover for a few years. We need to figure out the reasons we want a relationship, anyway. In some cases, we just want someone to baby-sit us, because we don’t want to be alone with ourselves.

  This was the case when I married my second husband, Jeff. I had just been signed to a deal with Atlantic Records at the time, meaning I had a lot of time on my hands (I mean, what was I supposed to do all day? It only took me a few minutes to write a song!) and very little money, a lethal combination. It wasn’t long before I’d ditched the record deal and started my own company, though, while my husband remained a struggling actor. He’d always say things like, “We’re partners, baby.”

  Oh really? I’d wonder. How exactly are we partners? You’re doing exactly what you want, which is working on your acting career, which generates no money for this house, while I’m earning cash, going to the grocery store, cooking the food, and doing all the other things that have been considered feminine responsibilities for thousands of years, only to be told I’m escalating and need some rest!

  I know from friends that if you’re going to attempt to be the breadwinner in the relationship, you’re going to need some regular checks and balances. It doesn’t have to be about male/female; it can just be about person/person. Who is doing what, and how is each partner contributing to the overall relationship? Is one person feeling like shit? Does one feel like the other’s friends think he’s a loser? Jeff never wanted to go to any of my work events, because he said no one wanted to talk to him. Which was ironic, since for decades women have been showing up to work events of their husbands assuming that no one wanted to hear what they had to say—that they were just there to look good in a dress.

  You can’t have a real partnership without dialogue. Few people pause to consider whether they’re actually compatible with someone before starting a relationship; they just start getting fucked and think, Oh my God, this is it! But real partnership is about much more than great sex: Do you have the same desires for your lives? Where do you want to live? What do you want your life to look like? What happens if you’re the one making money? Does the other still expect you to go to the grocery store too? This isn’t rocket science. We need to deprogram ourselves from thousands of years of stereotypes, but at the same time we can’t kid ourselves about who we really are. If what you really want is to make money and have a career, you probably aren’t going to be the one cooking dinner every night. That’s where a partnership can be valuable, if you do it right.

  Love Is a Crazy-Ass Blindfolded Angel with a Weapon in His Hand

  Just after I had my daughter, a handsome lawyer I’d drunkenly made out with one night in the early 1990s started positioning himself to be my next boyfriend. He even sent Ava her first Christmas snowsuit. My mother could hardly believe my good fortune. Here I was, parenting a little one-year-old girl all by myself, and I had an Italian American lawyer from upstate New York—a mere fifteen miles from where I was born—lining up to marry me! He was basically my mother’s ideal son-in-law. I was forced to deliver the crushing news that, although this lawyer was amazing, cute, and all-around great, there was just one problem: I didn’t have energy with him. I didn’t want to kiss him, and I most certainly did not want to fuck him.

  This is when my mom decided to do a reenactment of 1640 and insisted that “that part will come in time.” The fact that people went to bed by candlelight the last time anyone actually believed such nonsense didn’t seem to give her pause. I mean, I’m now forty-five, and I’ve still yet to meet one person who was initially turned off by her husband, but found herself fucking him like a rabbit seven years into their marriage. This is why, although the lawyer continues to be a friend of mine and I will always appreciate that he showed up to be my suitor, he now has a Russian model for his wife.

  Let’s be honest. Most of the time when we fall in love with someone, it’s not because the wider world has given us any indication that their dick should be inside of us. Energy has nothing to do with what’s practical or aesthetic; it has nothing to do with his stats, his bank account, or how he looks on paper. It is not the same as attracted to or makes sense. Instead, it comes directly from the source. Most of the time when you meet someone, you’re either in or you’re out. Does he make you want to do crazy things? If he doesn’t, and you’re just trying to figure out how to keep him happy or how to leave by noon the next day, you’re a liar, not a lover, and I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that if you continue this relationship, you’re going to need a lawyer.

  One of the great things about making my own money is that I’ve always been able to fuck who I wanted, not who I thought would marry me or take me shopping. Maybe it’s not good to keep bringing my daughter into the sex chapter, but I recently gave Ava her own wallet, allowance, and cash card. She’s eight; I thought it would be a good way to teach her math. After Ava made her first purchase (clothes at a store called Justice), calculating what she could afford, then counting the money out carefully, and handing it to the clerk, she was thrilled. “You know what was really good, Mommy?” she said afterwards. “I didn’t have to say thank you to anybody.”

  I believe that’s how our love lives should be too. We should be with someone because we truly love them, and our soul wants us to be with them, not because they’re going to buy us a great apartment or Birkin bag. Can you even imagine having to sleep with some of those businessmen who look like they’ve been stranded in an English library since 1820? I mean, maybe some of them are smart and interesting, but I’ve seen plenty a girl out in the Hamptons who looks like she can’t wait to see her tennis instructor.

  When I was younger, I passed up a possible opportunity for an assignation with Leonard Cohen, one of my favorite musicians. I was signed to Atlantic Records at the time, and one of my employees had played my album for his daughter. He’d heard my music and invited me out for coffee. I didn’t go, because I was married, and I knew I didn’t want to get coffee with Leonard; I wanted to fuck him. I mean, he is ridiculous! To this day, Leonard’s song “Hallelujah”—which has been covered by about 150 other artists, including Jeff Buckley—contains one of my favorite lines about sex, or at least how sex should be: “Remember when I moved in you / The holy dove was moving too / And every breath we drew was Hallelujah.”

  If you have ever had the great privilege of crying when you make love with someone, then you will understand what it’s like to be a god, an angel, and a human being all at the same time. I have at certain times in my life cried while making love, and in those moments I’ve been delivered with my lover to places we didn’t know we were capable of going. We got there with energy and gentleness and roughness and a deep mutual respect, but most of all through vulnerability and self-revelation. Through total transparency of expression, we achieved the great cry and the great exhaustion and the great nothingness of all that is. This is what it means to make love, I think. (Hey babe, I’m doing my best here. I’m sure not everyone wants sex tips from Mama Wolf, but so
meone needs to be talking to you about these things!) As beings, we should insist on this. Should you have the great privilege of being with a partner who can embrace you through your tears as you mutually strengthen one another—well, that is a great relationship.

  The truth is, when you do it right, sex is not all that different from church. Yes, that’s right. Falling to your knees to pray and asking God to help you is not that different from lying on your back with your legs spread, saying, “I love you. I want to taste the nectar of Divine consciousness through you.” We’re just small human beings, after all, and physical love allows us to dance a special magical dance that is both part of our destiny and larger than ourselves.

  The world is a dangerous place. When we make love, we’re acknowledging, Yes, even my family doesn’t really know me. So I, this strange swan in this big, strange pond,* choose to hook up to you and allow you to be inside of my body. I trust you, and I’m transparent, and through this vulnerability and mutual sense of adventure your consciousness and my consciousness will intertwine like strands of DNA to create a song of magic and sensory heightening that is one of the closest things to God and the Goddess on this earth. This oneness is an offering—an acknowledgment and expression of the Divine’s magic. And trust me, it has rarely been adequately captured in sex drugs, rock ’n’ roll, film, or fashion.

  When you explore sex and love with someone, you’re agreeing to enter into a new type of yogic teaching—one in which you have a lot to give and a lot to learn (it’s like having a child). I promise that you will hate your lover sometimes. You’ll also laugh with each other, cry with each other, fuck each other, and fuck each other over. Being truly yogic with another means offering up your whole self, just like you do when you pray in church. And let me tell you, making love with someone you love is a much more powerful thing than sitting in a church that doesn’t let women speak. You’re basically saying, This is our love, our song, our vibration of love and ecstasy that we send out into the universe. Making love, like making war, creates a powerful and totally unique vibration.