Normal Gets You Nowhere Read online

  “Hello, Ms. Cutrone,” she said.

  “Hello, Your Honor,” I replied.

  “So what is going on here?” she asked.

  I explained that I was a single mom who works very hard for her money, that I’ve worked for sixteen years for top names in the business—from Bulgari to Christie’s Auction House to Vivienne Westwood to Paco Rabanne—and that none of these people had ever accused me of stealing. I’d been fighting my former client for four years at a high cost to myself and my business, on principle. In fact, I’d already spent the equivalent of two years’ worth of my daughter’s private schooling.

  The judge nodded. “I understand,” she said. “But the problem is, if you go to court, you leave your fate to the jury. They might see a single mom, or they might see a powerful, tough-as-nails businesswoman. It just depends who you get.”

  I couldn’t believe that even the judge was encouraging me to settle. She was in on it too! It was actually her job to discourage people from going to court, as court eats up the taxpayers’ money! I stared up at the wall, where I saw the words “In God We Trust,” and then looked down at the dollar bills visible through my clear clutch. That’s when I had an epiphany that caused me to bawl my eyes out.

  “Why does it say ‘In God We Trust’ on our money and on your wall?” I demanded. “Nothing here has anything to do with God or the truth!”

  I used to think Justice was blindfolded so her other senses would be heightened—I mean, that’s how it works in S&M; if you cover your eyes, you can feel and hear more. I also thought she was blindfolded because she wouldn’t want to judge by appearances. Now I realize that is poppycock.

  Lady Justice is blindfolded because she does not want to see the legal system. If she saw it, she would see it has nothing to do with the truth, and this would destroy her.

  “I need some time to think about this,” I said.

  The truth was, I was beyond devastated. When I started out in business, I was an idealist with a capital “I.” My business model was It’s a Small World, i.e. the Disneyland ride. I thought everyone could just work together and make beautiful things and that none of my employees would ever quit and everything would be amazing. But that’s not how the world is. Laws are arbitrary, after all. They were written because humans have agreed that they do not want to master themselves. So they appointed leaders to get together and do their dirty work for them. I mean, for most of the twentieth century it was illegal to give a blow job in New York state! Certain laws are for the best, of course, but the fact that someone can just waltz up to me and threaten my livelihood by accusing me of breaking the “law” seemed so ridiculous.

  By the time we stood in the judge’s chambers together, the two of us with our lawyers, I’d dispensed with all niceties.

  “I will only offer you one number,” I said. “And if you do not accept, I’ll take this all the way to the end.”

  She wanted $100,000, but I told my lawyer to tell her to go fuck herself. The judge told her she’d have to come down, since she was lucky I was offering her anything.

  “$58,000,” I said. “And that is it. I would like permission to leave now, Your Honor, so I can get back to meditating.”

  I paid her the money over six months, since I didn’t have enough to cover it in a lump sum. It’s money that would have gone to my daughter’s college education, and now it was going to this stupid lying bitch. All because anyone can accuse you of anything, and the burden is on you to prove you didn’t do it.

  I Now Believe that When You Do Business with People, You Have to Recognize They Are Potentially Dangerous to You

  Doing business with people is no different than moving to a big city. You can’t just see every man as a potential boyfriend; you also have to see him as someone who could be dangerous to you at night. And if you open your own company, you should be aware that all those who pass through your doors, whether visitors, clients, messengers, or employees, are not just a potential boon to your business—they’re also a potential menace. As you follow your intuition and pursue your dreams, you must be very careful about who you do business with. I mean, God forbid someone you’ve invited to your office slips on the ice, or a ceiling fan falls on their head, or you say something un-PC, or the elevator gets stuck and causes someone emotional trauma—being an entrepreneur is a scary business! Every time I raise my voice, I’m risking a labor case from a wounded underling.

  In fact, several years ago, I was sued for stealing dog food from an employee! This was my favorite legal battle of all time. A senior employee had had a full-blown anxiety attack in the corner just four days before fashion week and required hospitalization. Needless to say, this totally screwed us over. I was producing twelve to fourteen shows and running showroom appointments—where buyers come to see the collection after the runway show and purchase it for their stores—for over a dozen designers. I ended up having to place two of my clients in other showrooms, since we were now short-staffed and there was no time to hire more help.* Somehow we survived, albeit with fewer clients, and six months later my anxiety-ridden former employee stopped by my office to pick up his bike and his dog food.

  “Your bike? Your dog food?” I responded. “Well, the dog food we threw out. You left it here, and we were infested with mice. As for your bike, I have no idea where it is.”

  Well, he took me to small claims court. I went with my lawyer friend, Herman. “You have been accused of stealing fifty pounds of dog food,” said the judge, clearly amused when I approached the bench with my former employee and his mother, whom he’d brought along for emotional support. (If you want to be entertained, you should spend the day in small claims court seeing the ridiculous things humans cannot resolve between themselves.)

  “My former employee left rather abruptly with a medical condition,” I told the judge, “and when he left, he left the dog food. I threw it out because it was attracting mice. And he never even asked my permission to bring his dog in the first place.”

  “And the bike?”

  “Your Honor, look at me,” I said. “Do I look like I ride a bike?”

  The judge dismissed the case. But as long as I was there, I decided to see what was in it for me.

  “Your Honor, I had mice in my McQueen shoes,” I said. “Can I at least get some money out of him for the exterminator?”

  Chapter Seven

  The No Matter What Club

  A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.

  —Arnold H. Glasow

  In today’s disposable culture, we throw away people like we do razors, always assuming there’s someone better out there to hang out with, or to work for—people who will never embarrass us, let us down or offend us. I see it all the time in my own life and others’ lives, and even in my office. When one of my employees or one of her friends says something insensitive late at night after a few too many drinks, she spends the day on the phone putting out fires, judging or overreacting. I’ll hear things like “Do you have any idea what you did last night?” or “Listen, I need my space, this isn’t working for me,” or “You betrayed me!” Just like we’ve been programmed to walk by homeless people lying on the street in desperation, we’ve been programmed to dump and discard friends anytime we’re hurt or something inappropriate has been done to us. I hate to break it to you, babe, but you, too, will do things that horrify you and your loved ones in this lifetime! At certain times down the road, you probably won’t even recognize yourself. Join the club. It’s called the human race.

  The truth is, is if we keep running away from everyone who hurts or betrays us, we will ultimately end up alone.

  The evidence is mounting that we’re suffering a crisis of friendship in our time. A 2006 study found that Americans’ average number of confidantes dropped one-third between 1984 and 2004 (from three to two). Twenty-five percent of people said they had no one to talk to about important things! They also said they were relying more on their families for support. There�
��s just one problem. As a professor of sociology named Rebecca G. Adams told the New York Times in 2009: “Friendship has a bigger impact on our psychological well-being than family relationships.” And it’s not just our psychological well-being; lack of friends has been linked to higher rates of viral disease, cancer, and even death! See, it does pay to be popular!

  The famous Roman orator Cicero is one of my favorite philosophers on the subject of friendship:

  What can be more delightful than to have someone to whom you can say everything with the same absolute confidence as to yourself? Is not prosperity robbed of half its value if you have no one to share your joy? On the other hand, misfortunes would be hard to bear if there were not someone to feel them even more acutely than yourself. . . . Such friendship enhances prosperity, and relieves adversity of its burden by halving and sharing it. And great and numerous as are the blessings of friendship, this certainly is the sovereign one, that it gives us bright hopes for the future and forbids weakness and despair. In the face of a true friend a man [okay, a woman too!] sees as it were a second self. So that where his friend is he is; if his friend be rich, he is not poor; though he be weak, his friend’s strength is his; and in his friend’s life he enjoys a second life after his own is finished.5

  Is it me, or has friendship lost some of the intensity it seemed to enjoy two thousand years ago? You might be wondering: what the fuck is a No Matter What Club? Well, it’s something I’ve created for us out of a need for true friendship and intimacy.

  The No Matter What Club is a group of people who are progressive, open, fearless, and courageous enough to agree to truly be there for one another, no matter what.

  Think of it as a list of names you’ve tattooed on your mind and heart. Possibly a few things could get someone kicked off this list, like pedophilia or cannibalism. But for the most part, these are the people you’re choosing to take life’s journey with, through thick and thin, shame and excess, failure and victory. It’s kind of like what a marriage is supposed to be—except better, and purer.

  In America, we tend to think of friends as social companions, people to go to the movies with once or twice a month. But your No Matter What Club is not just a list of people you work, meditate, go shopping, or even have sex with. These are people whose team you’re genuinely signing up to be on.

  If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably connected with tons of people in friendship over the years. Maybe you’ve even been lucky enough to love a few of these people (and I hope for your sake they’ve loved you back). It’s possible you’ve told them you’d do anything for them. But think about it now. Would you? It’s weird, because at the same time that our world is disposable, it’s also strangely accelerated. So many of these people we throw away are the very same people we told, when we met them just four weeks earlier, that they were our new best friend and that we would love them forever! (American society’s definition of “forever” is usually between four weeks and four years, whether we’re talking about friendships, marriages, or jobs.)

  Often I hear things like, “Oh, I know so-and-so. She’s a great friend of mine.” Oh really? But you’ve only known her three weeks! Are you really friends? Do you really love her? Why don’t you try hanging out for at least a few months before you decide, because by then it’s highly likely she’s going to do something to freak you out or upset you. Social acquaintance is not the same as friend; we need to use phrases like, “I love you,” “You’re amazing,” “I’ll do anything for you,” and “You’re my new best friend,” appropriately. We shouldn’t just throw them out at the hostess stand when we’re trying to get a good table.

  Most of us are too quick to call people friends, too quick to say “I love you,” and too quick to write people off forever. Instead, we need to accept that whoever we decide to truly love and call a friend will inevitably let us down in our lifetime. This is why we should be very exacting in our selection of who we will place in our No Matter What Club. The people you love most will hurt or destroy you on some level, whether it’s in the immediate future or years down the road. So will your mother (if she hasn’t already), your fiancé, your husband, and your child. It doesn’t make them horrible, worthless, or unredeemable. It just makes them human beings.

  Besides, I can promise you you’ll do it right back to them. Especially when you’re young and trying to figure out how to manifest and embrace your own power, a lot of mistakes are going to be made. There are so many distractions in the world that can take you down: vanity, greed, lust, envy, and yes, drugs and alcohol . . . you get it. Sometimes when we’re in the middle of fucking these things, it makes it hard to be good friends. Drugs and alcohol, especially, turn us into marionette puppets; they pull our strings and make us do stupid, regrettable things. I don’t know anyone who drinks, myself included, who hasn’t at some point had to call a friend, play fill-in-the-blanks, and offer apologies for the night before.

  When we see people in pain, whether it’s from depression, heartbreak, or drugs and alcohol, we tend to back off, reverting to responses like, “I can’t deal with her,” or “She is so awful when she drinks. I’m done with that.” But if your friend is struggling with depression, alcoholism, an eating disorder, a big breakup, loss of a loved one, paranoia, OCD, ADD—or any of those other three-letter diseases we’ve come to know so well—and you bail on her, then it doesn’t matter what you tell yourself: You are not a real friend.

  If a friend were having a heart attack, we wouldn’t walk out of the room saying, “Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re writhing on the floor like a total idiot. This is just not acceptable. You’d better stop that or I’ll never speak to you again.” But when people are suffering spiritual or emotional illness, we tend to kick them to the curb instead of loving them back to life.

  I have two good friends whose twenty-seven-year-old son has been struggling for several years with a heroin addiction. He’s been lucky that some of his friends, rather than saying, “It is unacceptable that you came to my house and stole my money,” have rallied to his side, checking him into the hospital and doing their best to get him the help he needs. Obviously, these people subscribe to the No Matter What theory of friendship. But I’m sure that 85 percent of his so-called friends don’t bother talking to him anymore, because he’s a big time-waster.

  Well, guess what, everyone we know may at some point end up in the hospital for physical or emotional illness; they’ll have heartbreaks and moments of extreme selfishness and even offensiveness. One thing I can promise you is that life will show you its glory, beauty, and ugliness—it will raise all its heads at some point.

  When you think about it, friends who are lost or overextended are really just crying out for help, and they need our friendship and love more than ever. When we see people we know acting in a mean or inappropriate way, we need to move closer to these people. In fact, I believe we should psychically throw them a lifesaver to grab as we pull them back to wellness, family, and heart. We need to treat them as a mother would treat her child.

  I don’t know about you, but to me it is such a relief when I do something completely out of whack and absolutely terrifying and my friend says, “That was completely out of whack and absolutely terrifying, but it’s okay. I still love you, and we’re going to get through this.” In fact, for me this is the feeling of “relief.” If you’re a conscious human being you’re probably already feeling ashamed enough as it is!

  I know that over the last year, when I’ve really been stressed out with work, motherhood, a recession, two TV shows, the death of my father, and promoting a book, I’ve had some moments of not so nice behavior. A couple of my friends have said, “Are you okay? I am worried about you!” while others have been coy and judgmental, saying things like, “Are you okay? You’re acting kind of weird and agitated. That’s not cool.” To which I want to say, Duh, of course I’m not okay! I have four jobs! Go fuck yourself, I think I’m handling everything just beautifully!

  One recen
t evening, I got a text from my friend Jack. Handsome and wealthy, he said he felt unhappy in this world. He’s not the type to cry wolf, so without hesitating, I split from a business meeting to run down the street to hug him like a child. He told me that I was the only person in the world he wanted to see in that moment. Four days later, I was hanging at a bar with a friend when he texted me again, asking where I was. When I told him, he showed up with two young girls. This was nothing unusual; being handsome and rich, he’s always surrounded by women volunteering to be his wife.

  But on this night I was hanging out with a coworker and knew I wasn’t in a place to receive these girls. Despite what people may think, at night I really just want to be peaceful, and the last thing I want to talk about is fashion. I’m surrounded for fourteen hours a day by young women, with three phone calls in progress at all times, running from meeting to meeting.

  “Do not bring these chicks to our table,” I told my friend.

  Of course, he ignored me. Soon we were listening to some twenty-two-year-old patter on about how she used to be a model. “Listen,” I said. “What kind of model are you?” Let’s just say it all went downhill from there. This is why I really recommend you try to stay as conscious as possible—to limit the amount of apology time you have to set aside in your life.

  The next day, I called my friend to say I was sorry. I mean, why was I picking on a twenty-two-year-old? It just wasn’t nice, and I was not proud of my behavior. Instead of blowing up at me, my friend simply said, “You’re so amazing. But the person I called for help last week was not the being I was experiencing last night. I just think you’re just really overwhelmed, and I’m worried about you.”

  It’s not easy to forgive and move on when you feel hurt or confused by a friend. But offering forgiveness with a heart full of understanding rather than a fist full of resentment is one of the most amazing things you can do for someone—and for yourself.