Normal Gets You Nowhere by Kelly Cutrone (ereader for android .txt) 📕

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