Normal Gets You Nowhere

by Kelly Cutrone

  The meaning of forgiveness has been confused in our culture. It doesn’t mean, “I agree with you,” or even “I like what you did,” or “You didn’t hurt me.” It means, “I recognize in you the human being in me, and therefore I understand how this happened and I’m willing to move forward in my relationship with you. I’d also like to talk about why this happened or is happening, and what I can do to help you.” I’ve had young women in my office who have done something stupid—obviously out of real personal pain—and instead of firing them, I’ve taken it upon myself to grow closer to them and help them through whatever is holding them back. I’m not saying these people are necessarily in my No Matter What Club. But I do believe we all need help at certain points in our lives, and we appreciate small acts of kindness and understanding.

  Once you’ve made vows of lasting friendship, I hope you’ll stand by your friends no matter what they do. Maybe you should even put it in writing, like old-fashioned marriage vows (without the sex):

  Do you vow to keep _______ as your friend no matter what, even if she makes a fool of herself in the middle of the night? If you see her escalating, do you promise to go toward her and offer her meditative practices or bring her ice cream? Will you love her when she is not loving you or herself?

  If you want your friends to be more forgiving of you, you’re going to need to be more forgiving of them, and more helpful. You can also use these opportunities to evolve and grow closer.

  I’m not saying we should tolerate unacceptable behavior from everyone or that our No Matter What Club should be a codependent free-for-all bazaar. You have to have boundaries. I don’t want anyone to be stuck in a dangerous or violent situation. But we also need to be very careful that we don’t use the DSM-V*—a nasty little book that psychologists use to diagnose mental illness (by checking symptoms like “suffers from delusions of grandeur; dry mouth; believes in crop circles”—I mean, this could be any of us on a bad day!)—as a shield to protect us from our own slothlike responses to loved ones in our own community.

  If your friend is a drug addict, being abused by her boyfriend, or struggling with an eating disorder, you need to at least sit her down in a quiet and loving manner and say, “I am worried about you. I want to help.” If you don’t—and you might not want to hear this—I believe you’ve contributed to her downfall, since it was inconvenient for you and you just couldn’t deal. I’m not saying any of us can single-handedly cure anyone of drug addiction or anorexia. But I will tell you one thing:

  The truth is one of the most powerful vehicles ever driven by humanity. An arrow shot into a diseased heart can perform a world of wonders.

  Even if you need to take your physical distance, I hope you’ll stay invested, praying and meditating daily for your loved one—and for everyone else in the world who’s suffering while you’re at it. In my twenties, when my drug use was spiraling out of control, I coined the phrase, “Duck, here comes my best friend!” (I was on mushrooms and with David Lee Roth at the time. FYI, mushrooms in New York clubs are not a good idea.) You know you’re in a bit of trouble when you start avoiding the people who love you most. Years later, after I’d met The Mother and cleaned up, I was thrilled to run into an old friend from those days on the Lower East Side. I hadn’t seen him in years, and he probably assumed I was still out of it. I walked right up to him and told him I was fine and that I’d had an amazing spiritual experience that had changed my life. “I prayed for you every day,” he said. Hearing this, I felt my heart blow right open, and I knew it was the truth. I also knew his prayers had helped me.

  Despite the fact that I know tons of people, my No Matter What Club is actually quite small—as yours probably will be too, when you really start to think about it. Number one is obviously my daughter, Ava. My love for her is unwavering and has the capacity to springboard over the top of any future dysfunction of hers. There’s also Ava’s nanny, Nana, who has probably done more for me than any other person in my life.

  And Ronnie Cutrone, my first husband. Ronnie and I haven’t been intimate in decades, but our love has morphed into different forms over the years. Ronnie doesn’t have any other family, so I’ve gone from being his much younger second wife from upstate New York to the executor of his estate and closest of kin. (Years ago, he called me and told me I’d have to share this duty with Tatiana, one of his ex-girlfriends.) I’ve always known that when Ronnie nears the end, regardless of what’s going on in my life, I’ll drop everything to be at his side—and that it will ultimately be me who buries him. It doesn’t really matter what’s happened in the past, because my love for him is bigger than any of our antics.

  Then there’s my mother, my sister, Allison, and my brother, Lee. Despite the fact that I grew up with all of them, we’re completely different. Unlike some families, we don’t share political beliefs or any common interests. Take my brother. He’s into Nascar; I’m into Margiela. He lives in Virginia; I live in SoHo. Jesus is his God; The Mother is mine. Even though my brother and I don’t see eye to eye about things like Michael Moore and politics, I have to tip my hat to him, for he placed me in his No Matter What Club long ago. When we were growing up, it was me who held Lee’s hand and told him not to worry at the zoo, that the animals weren’t going to bite him. But as we got older, my brother became the leader, and I the loser.

  I was just beginning to burn through all my money in L.A., using drugs, and erasing the life I’d built for myself in New York (my first PR business, my friends, my husband), when my brother called to offer his support. He was only nineteen at the time, at the University of Rochester on a hockey scholarship. But he was so obviously distraught over my situation that he burst into tears on the phone and told me he felt I might die. He even offered to cash in his scholarship and come take care of me until I got back on my feet again. I may not have grasped the significance of all this at the time, but if Lee called me in distress today, I would be there as fast as I could. (And yes, Allison, I would do the same for you.)

  Unfortunately, not everyone in your No Matter What Club will put you in theirs—in fact, some will probably drop you despite how much you love them. This was the case with a good friend of mine who was a prominent fashion editor in L.A. During our ten-year friendship, we shared each other’s horrors and joys, including but not limited to her endometriosis scare, the birth of my daughter, my breakup with my second husband, and her husband’s draining her bank account to fund his addictions. I could talk to her about anything. After she got a divorce, she met another guy, a wannabe video director whom only she found really interesting. Our friends all made a point to welcome him into our world, but it soon became clear that this guy was a loser and a user.

  Years passed, and we had another mutual friend who discovered while trying to get pregnant that she was riddled with breast cancer. After getting several opinions, it was decided she needed a radical double mastectomy. The night before her surgery, I convened a dinner among friends to toast our friendship and celebrate my friend and her beauty. My fashion editor friend brought along her annoying boyfriend. I was running late to the dinner because I’d been working at a photo shoot all day, and no sooner did I walk in than I heard the clinking of glasses. I assumed it was a toast to my friend who was about to go through one of life’s most harrowing experiences.

  Instead, the wannabe video director stood up to announce to the table that he and my fashion editor friend had decided to get married. They went on to gush about how they were going to do it barefoot on the beach in Mexico, where an infamous, annoying queen we all knew would officiate at the ceremony. Without really even thinking, I stood up and told my fashion editor friend that I thought this was the most inappropriate thing I’d ever heard. Our friend who was sick looked shocked. (She couldn’t defend herself, and rightly so!) But by then I’d already established a reputation as a straight talker. I was just being myself, and everybody knew it.

  The next day, I called up my friend so we could talk. Obviously, we had extremely
different viewpoints on the evening, and some mending was in order on both sides. I didn’t really feel I’d overreacted. Hadn’t her announcement been slightly insensitive?

  “No,” she replied. “It’s unforgivable that you said I was selfish for announcing my engagement at the dinner table, and I’m never going to speak to you again.”

  And she never did. Obviously, she wasn’t a believer in No Matter What Clubs, or she would’ve found a way to process my outspoken moment in the context of our entire friendship and move on. Instead, ten years of triumphs and tumultuousness were flushed down the drain. I’d like to tell you I was hurt—and I was slightly shocked—but I understand that people can be close-minded. (Now she’s married to that asshole, and I’m so glad I don’t have to spend the rest of my life listening to him put every sommelier in L.A. through twenty-five minutes of torture as he pretends he has the money and the know-how to order wine and then watch him disappear when the check comes!)

  Often the connection we have with people in our No Matter What Club is forged for reasons we can’t explain. Sometimes we feel inexplicably connected to certain people before we even really know them. It’s a reflection of where our soul is at and the resonance it has with theirs. Think of your life as a movie. Your soul is going to cast the players it wants to cast, and it won’t always tell you why. (It’s a lot like a French director, actually!) Sometimes some of the people in your No Matter What Club will turn out to be a real handful. There will certainly be times in your relationships with them when you’ll be overwhelmed, afraid, and short on compassion. You don’t have to be nice all the time. There are some people we love even when all the rules of how to love someone and what’s appropriate have been broken.

  Take Jimmy, my on-again, off-again boyfriend since 1991. We’re both Scorpios, so it would be an understatement to say that we’re a tossed salad of oil and vinegar. For two decades, we have loved, fucked, cheated, taught, repeated, hated, embraced, dreamed, daydreamed, swam through Hades, intertwined and flown, and ruthlessly ripped each other apart. If I had a choice in the matter, based on my level of education, my success, and our entire history together, I would never love him. It would be that simple. Sometimes I wish I’d never met him and could move forward without any memory of him at all! But despite everything we’ve done to each other, if he called me tomorrow and said, “I’ve had a heart attack. I’m at Cedars-Sinai,” I’d catch the next flight to L.A. Whether we’re lovers, friends, or enemies, Jimmy will always be in my No Matter What Club.

  When I met Jimmy in 1991, I was living in a house in L.A. with a couple of notorious power girls at the time, fresh off my divorce from Ronnie. One of my roommates, Alison, was dating Lan from Alice in Chains; another, Marissa, was dating Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Basically, this house was every girl’s dream and every parent’s nightmare. Jimmy was a music producer for such bands as the Red Hot Chili Peppers and counted Kurt Cobain as one of his best friends. One night Jimmy showed up at our house with Flea. Jimmy was the quiet guy in the back of the room—the one who attracts girls like a vortex, because they just know he can throw down.

  (I now interrupt this chapter to bring you my theory on men. The ones who can throw down are like Rottweilers; they don’t come running up to you, yapping, and sitting on top of you. Instead, they just stand there and let you feel their presence. The ones who are yapping and talking all the time—well, let’s just say they probably have a bigger bark than bite.)

  I guess you could say Jimmy and I had an instant connection, but almost every girl has an instant connection with Jimmy. It wasn’t long before he became my lover. I joked that I was his three o’clock, between Courtney Love and Juliette Lewis. I usually left his house thinking, I am never coming back. He does not appreciate me! Little did I know I’d go on to have this feeling seven million more times in the course of our relationship. After I’d met my guru, The Mother, I remember buying a huge smoky quartz crystal and driving over to Jimmy’s rock ’n’ roll mansion in Hollywood. I’d become convinced that his house was spiritually contaminated, since he abused the feminine there every day. I actually buried the crystal in his front yard as a way to diffuse the negative energies that clearly lived inside. (News flash: Jimmy found the crystal two years ago during a remodel; he couldn’t wait to call to tell me.)

  In the almost two decades since, Jimmy and I have broken up for years on end. I once even got my nanny to be my partner in a crime against him, ordering her to throw all his stuff into the elevator, so I could chuck it at him while kicking him out of my apartment. (He chose to use this as a yogic experience and sleep outside on Broome Street. He later thanked me for helping him to empathize with the homeless.) When he wasn’t infuriating me, he’d have moments of extreme generosity. One time he pulled a $300,000 line of credit out of his house to help grow my business. I cried all the way through the paperwork, because no one had ever done anything like that for me before.

  Despite our best efforts, even Jimmy and I—two sweet, but sinister Scorpios—have been unable to destroy this love. For the most part, real love—whether between friends, lovers, family members, or spouses—wants to keep on loving. It can’t help itself. Some people describe the Divine as being just that: pure love. My guru, The Mother, once said that when we’re in a state of pure love—one that exists on a higher plane than our own petty human emotions—we are in a Divine state. Having a No Matter What Club is really just a way for us to feel what it’s like to be Divine, then, to hook up to a force, the Mothership, that none of us could access alone.

  In the last fifteen years, there has been so much talk in our culture about what is and is not therapeutically acceptable, and what we do and do not have to put up with from other people. Unfortunately, we’ve left little room for one thing, and that’s our human nature. We have so little patience for the things that make us human, and even less understanding of these things. It bothers me that instead of dealing with what’s really going on with people or helping them heal, we tend to just recommend they pay someone else to hear about their problems or go on medication. The truth is, most people don’t need medication. They need understanding and help.

  Take my mom, for example, who was with my father for five decades before his death last year. Growing up, I remember them being deeply into each other—they were partners. When he passed away, my mom was struck down. Her insides were crumbling. Yet when she went to see a doctor, he told her she was depressed and prescribed antidepressants and sleeping pills. When I heard about it, my first thought was, I’m going to sue this motherfucker! When the love of your life—the person you’ve spent forty-two years building your whole world around—is gone, grief is a normal, healthy response! How can anyone want to live in a world where normal means crying for a week after your love of half a century dies, but then feeling great because you’re on Wellbutrin? This has become normal nowadays. But that’s Stephen King’s world—that is not God’s world.

  All these medications we’re so obsessed with nowadays aren’t real solutions; they’re just temporary, inadequate aids that separate us from our friends, our personalities, and ultimately our being, constructing a plexiglass shield between our soul and the way we express ourselves. Our soul is put behind a partition, left to mime in vain. Unless you’re clinically depressed or bipolar or the kind of person who runs around naked singing “When the Saints Go Marching In” while waving a chain saw, maybe you don’t really need to be medicated. Sometimes the easy way out is not the best yogic move. There are plenty of times I too want to medicate myself through my troubles, so I can go through life above the fray, not feeling anything uncomfortable or painful and not offending anyone. There’s just one problem: I’m living!

  At this point in my life, when I call people friends, I pretty much mean that I intend on knowing them for a long time. I may not call them every day, and I may not even see them for a year or two, but I am going to be there for them in some capacity if they ever need me. I know that even I can’t say,
“Oh, you have this strange brain disease. I’m going to quit my job and be with you every day,” or “You just broke up with your boyfriend? Let me take a week off.” We all have to be productive in our jobs and in society. Our lives will always be time-consuming, and there will always be more things that come up with our friends than we can personally handle. But I also believe there is a greater requirement to true friendship than going to a nightclub a couple times a week trying to score dudes. We need to tend seriously to our friendships on all levels—physical, social, emotional, psychic, and spiritual, and in fact if we see a breakdown in any of these elements, we need to step up our game. Swoosh!

  Chapter Eight

  Seasons in the Sun

  I cannot think of death as more than the going out of one room into another.

  —William Blake

  Let me tell you something. All the people you love are someday going to die. I’ve already lost three of the people I’ve most feared losing: my grandparents and my father (Ava and my mother are the other two; I don’t fear my own death anymore). But it was only last year, at my father’s deathbed, that I finally got it.

  Death is like birth, and the soul entering the body and leaving it are equally beautiful and celebratory events, filled with work. When you die, your soul is literally in labor, trying to separate itself from the body and move on to its next phase. (Like giving birth, it can take a while.) Rolling Ava around SoHo in her stroller when she was a baby, I’d often bump into elderly people being pushed in their wheelchairs by caretakers, and it was hard not to notice that the beginning and end of life have a lot in common. We don’t have teeth or hair, and we rely on someone else to meet our physical needs.