Gunn's Golden Rules

by Gunn, Tim

  A father has been stalking me since my Parsons days about meeting with his daughter and giving her an indoctrination into the fashion industry. They showed up at a book signing in New Jersey and cornered me. I was, I thought, lovely to them both. I talked to his daughter and encouraged her to go to a summer program when she’s sixteen (she was eleven at the time). That’s done, I thought, when I’d exhausted my advice and moved on to the next person on line.

  But no. Still the father calls me every three months to plead for a Liz Claiborne Inc. tour for this daughter, a girl whom I can’t imagine is as desperate to see our conference room as her father thinks she is. It really does seem to be all about him and what he wants for her rather than what she wants for herself.

  If she is in fact just as pushy, then she has my pity. In my world, the squeaky wheel doesn’t get the grease. Instead, I just stack the sandbags higher. People have even called my boss and said I wasn’t being responsive!

  Well, I immediately shut out anyone who does something tacky like that. I will write to the person and say, “I must not have been making myself clear. This isn’t going to happen.” It’s like negotiating with terrorists. You can’t let rude people win.

  Hilariously enough, it’s frequently the people who hold themselves up as paradigms who are the worst behaved. The countess from The Real Housewives of New York City wrote an etiquette book and e-mailed to tell me she’d told her publisher that I might write the foreword. I thanked her for asking me, but said I had a conflict of interest with my own publisher and so would have to decline.

  She responded that if I wouldn’t do it, she’d write it for me.

  I said, “Ha-ha. Very funny.”

  “I’m serious,” she said. This was for a manners book!

  Perhaps sometimes forewords are really written by the author and then reviewed and signed by the foreworder and this was what she was contemplating, but I’d already made it clear that the issue wasn’t about having time to write but with using my name.

  I told her that if she was serious, then her lawyer should talk to my lawyer.

  I never heard more from her.

  IF YOU DON’T SET boundaries, it can get to the point where nothing’s ever enough.

  Case in point: I joined the board of directors of GMHC, the wonderful AIDS organization that I’ve long supported. I’ve hosted the event Fashion Forward for them since its inception and have been happy to do so. But then they made me a board member, about which I felt thrilled and honored at the time. I didn’t think it would change my life very much, but it totally did. Suddenly, I was signing letters asking people for money. And I kept hearing back from fancy people saying, “If I help you with GMHC, you need to help me with this.” I really couldn’t give any more time or money to anyone, so I thought, I need to scale back here.

  After much consideration, I said I had to bow out as a board member.

  Well, guess what? They wouldn’t let me. Their CEO said, “‘No’ to me means ‘later.’ You can just do these things for us later.”

  She said using my name had really helped them, and that was enough.

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Really,” she said and talked me down off the ledge.

  She reassured me that I was off the hook and they would stop asking me to do things all the time.

  I relaxed and thought, Phew, no more obligations, no more invites, no more events. Two hours later I got an e-mail from her asking when I could go on a retreat!

  Luckily, I now have an agent who handles charity requests, and he can say no for me. What I’ve learned from him is that boundaries are very liberating. They can be readjusted all the time, but it’s important to have them. Always. When you don’t have a shopping list, you can easily go astray in the cereal aisle. If you burn out, no one’s going to benefit. So it’s in everyone’s interest for you to do what you can and then make it clear that you can do no more.

  Carry On!

  NOW THAT WE’RE WRAPPING up our conversation, I think it’s time to talk about the eternal mysteries. I was raised as a loose Episcopalian, but I’m fascinated by all religions. God knows they’re at the core of every society and culture on this planet. I’m also fascinated by the ceremony of it. But I haven’t been to a church since my niece was baptized, and she’s now twenty-three. None of the weddings I’ve been to since then have been in a church. I consider myself an agnostic, because I believe there are many things we don’t fully comprehend.

  Going to church was not my favorite thing when I was young. From a very early age, I was very suspicious of our priest. My parents thought I was crazy and just trying to get out of going to services, but I said, “No, there really is something weird about that man.”

  Indeed, one day when I was nine or ten, the priest was up at the pulpit. He went into a silent prayer and … never came out of it. After a few minutes the ushers realized he’d left the plane of reality the rest of us were on, so they had an intervention and took him away.

  And yes: I smiled very smugly at my parents all the way home.

  That’s the mind-set I had when I went to see a psychic once about thirty years ago. I was in the middle of a personal and professional crisis. A dear friend, who is a clinical psychologist said she’d been to see this psychic, had an amazing experience, and encouraged me to go, too.

  I scoffed and said, “One of those people with a neon sign?”

  “No,” she said, “I did my homework. This woman Jean MacArthur works three months of the year each in New York, Paris, London, and Washington. She’s a consultant to NASA and the FBI.”

  Why not? I thought. I’m certainly not a crystal person or an astrology person, but I figured it would be good for a laugh if nothing else. I went with another friend of Pat’s named Molly. Molly is a dear friend of mine, too; she’s the painter with whom I shared a studio during my years as a sculptor. She’s extremely smart and doesn’t suffer fools gladly, so for her also to agree to see this person was disarming to me.

  I was so disappointed when Jean MacArthur answered the door, because I was expecting to see Isadora Duncan, and instead she looked like the checkout lady at the Safeway. She looked very haggard and had scars running along her neck. She shook my hand, and we sat down. She told me to write down my date of birth. Then she said that I couldn’t lie to her, and that whatever I said to her went through God and back to her and vice versa.

  I was sitting there thinking, This is ridiculous.

  “You will put your work as an artist on the shelf,” she told me. “This will happen soon. You will enter the academic arena.”

  I was thinking, Fat chance. I hated school.

  She told me a lot of things about my father that I thought she couldn’t have known without talking to him or other members of my family. Did she talk to Molly in advance? I wondered.

  She said she didn’t believe in talking about prior lives because such talk wasn’t useful, but then she paused and said, “However, I have never met a new soul … until today.”

  I can still hear her saying that, and it still gives me chills. It’s not that I put any factual stock in it, but there was something about it that sounded right somehow. When she said that, I thought, New soul is at least an apt metaphor for my openness and sometimes naïve belief in people. I’d just had my heart broken, and felt duped and humiliated, and I liked that notion of “new soul” more than “fool.”

  “Whatever I see in my third eye I will never share unless it’s something you can change,” she said next. “If I tell you the train’s coming, watch out—that means you have a shot at getting out of the way. But if the train’s going to hit you no matter what, why say anything?”

  I thought that was kind of a relief, and kind of a disappointment. After our session, she told me about all these surgeries she’d had. She said her third eye takes a terrible physical toll on her. I left my session thinking, What a charlatan.

  Meanwhile, when Molly left her appointment, she looked stricken and said, “
I have to see a doctor. Jean said something’s wrong with my blood.”

  Molly went to an appointment with her doctor. There was nothing wrong with her. The doctor said, “What sent you to me?” and she was too embarrassed to say. So Molly and I said many disparaging things about Jean MacArthur.

  The next week, Molly’s identical twin sister was diagnosed with aplastic anemia, a form of leukemia. Again, I don’t believe in psychic phenomena, but we found that quite spooky at the time.

  And even if I am not a believer, I did find that meeting incredibly useful. I still think about Jean’s train-wreck analogy whenever I talk to the Project Runway designers. I talk to them only about things they can change.

  If we get back from Mood and they’ve bought only red fabric, I don’t say, “Gee, it’s too bad you didn’t get green!”

  It doesn’t advance the plot. That’s why I wasn’t that thrilled by Nina’s words to the designers the day before the Bryant Park show in the Season 6 finale: “If you have anything referential, get rid of it!”

  Get rid of it? The show was the next morning—a little late for replacing a whole look. Nina tends to talk about things the designers can’t change. Editors go there more than teachers. Editors are all about changing and improving all the time—which is what makes them so great and valuable to the industry, but it also makes them a little infuriating when there are unavoidable constraints. I like to talk only about the way things are, not the way they would be in an ideal world.

  Maybe that’s why I like etiquette so much: manners help us deal with the way things are, with the place we find ourselves in, whatever that is. Rules of behavior come in handy when you can’t think straight, as when you’re extremely happy or sad over a major event like a birth or a death.

  Funerals are especially tricky for people. At your most emotional you suddenly have to do some very complex logistics, usually involving last-minute travel reservations, car rentals, and ironing.

  Which reminds me—one tip for the men out there: Make sure you have a nice dark suit and tie. Even if you never have cause to wear them in the rest of your life, you will need one for funerals. It’s shocking how many men in their thirties don’t own a tie and don’t even know how to tie one! Even if you don’t need one for weddings, you need one for funerals. What message are you sending if you show up in a sweatsuit to a funeral? It’s a basic lack of respect. Every man needs a suit. Okay, end of lecture.

  I should tell you about my father’s funeral in the mid-nineties. He’s been dead for more than fifteen years, and before that he’d been in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s for seven years. And yet, between you and me, I’m still not completely over his death.

  When I went home years ago for the Thanksgiving holidays, my father was in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer. My mother and I went to see him, and he was pulling his IVs out and very disoriented. They had to restrain him. That’s how bad it was.

  Well, the next morning, Thanksgiving Day, his doctor asked us into his office, and he had a social worker in the room with us. I thought, What are all these people doing here on Thanksgiving? This must be serious. Sure enough, the doctor said that my father had Alzheimer’s and told my mother, “This will ruin you financially. This will tear your entire family apart. And your husband will lose his soul.”

  In other words: Happy Thanksgiving!

  When we left, we were both shaken up, but in the parking lot Mother turned to me and said, angrily, “What does that doctor know about our financial circumstances? Or the strength of our family? This won’t tear us apart. And that’s ridiculous that your father will lose his soul. How overdramatic.”

  When we got home, the phone was ringing. My father was restrained, but he had access to a phone and he kept calling over and over again, every minute and a half. Mother got to the point where she wouldn’t answer it. My niece was a year and a half or so, and she kept pointing to the phone every time it rang, saying, “Pop! Pop! Pop!” which was her name for him. She knew it was Pop calling. It was very cute, and very depressing. Finally, we took the receiver off the hook.

  The first time we went to visit Dad at the nursing home, we brought Raffles, our family’s beloved dog and a favorite of my father’s. She pulled out of her leash and collar, ran through the place straight to my father, and jumped in his arms. She’d never been there before, but she knew exactly where to find her master. Every time from then on, we’d let Raffles loose at the front door, and she’d run to my father and jump onto his lap, tail wagging.

  Cut to year six in the nursing home. We brought Raffles, and that time she didn’t bolt down the hallway. She didn’t even want to go into Dad’s room. She treated this man she used to worship like he was a foreign piece of furniture. At this point he really was a vegetable. I looked at my sister and said, “That doctor was right. His soul is gone.”

  It was another full year before he actually died, of a congestive lung problem, but for that year, as much time as we spent with him, he was a stranger to us and we to him.

  We were offered an autopsy to conclusively determine that it was Alzheimer’s. My mother asked my sister and me what we wanted to do, because there was concern about the disease being genetic. I had mixed feelings about it, so I asked my mother what she wanted to do. She said she thought maybe she would rather he didn’t go through any more indignities, so we decided to forgo the autopsy.

  Besides, we were pretty sure of what it was. My father was fairly young when he died: sixty-seven. His mother had died in a mental hospital at age sixty-seven, too. That was in the early 1950s. I’m thinking that she must have had the same disease, and they didn’t know what to do with her, so they assumed she was crazy.

  By the time my father was the age I am now, he’d already been diagnosed. Knock wood, I’m okay. And I’m ever vigilant about my mental health. I’m the first person waving down a flight attendant to tell her that the magazine’s crossword has been filled in and to request a new one. Puzzles keep your brain sharp; at least that’s what I’m counting on.

  My mother still has her wits very much about her, and I think I’m a lot more like her than I am like my father. That said—if I start counting quarters and handing them to you to recount, you’ll know it’s too late. My father kept change in pill bottles. He would fill up a pill bottle, then pour out the coins count them, put them back in, and hand it to me to count. You can’t ask why. When someone is past the threshold of Alzheimer’s, you treat them the way you would an infant or very young child.

  Now to the funeral: I am all in favor of cremation, but my father had never specified what he wanted, so we did the traditional thing. For some reason lost to time, we were having him buried in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania. Although Dad grew up in Cleveland, I believe his mother was from Pennsylvania.

  My sister and her family were on the other side of Pennsylvania, so my mother and I stopped there overnight on the way to the funeral.

  As we’re driving on through Pennsylvania the next day, it’s cold and starting to snow. We’re all off in our own worlds. I’m staring out the car window at the winter weather, and suddenly, I have this flash: I left the garment bag with my suit at my sister’s, on the other side of the state. The wake was that very evening. The funeral was early the next morning. It was small-town America. It was Sunday. No shops were open. I had on a pair of casual khakis.

  I started laughing hysterically. When I announced my dilemma, Wallace, my niece, who was then about seven, offered to color in my khaki pants with a black Sharpie. Then I laughed even harder because I was seriously considering it.

  Luckily, my sister and brother-in-law pack like they’re leaving the country for a month, even if they’re just going around the corner, so they had an extra suit that was close enough to my size that I didn’t have to show up to my father’s funeral in marker-stained pants.

  Anyway, how Freudian was that? This was the first time I had ever in my life been without a suit on hand, and it was the only time that it was absolutely neces
sary.

  It was tough at the wake, because there he was, lying in front of us. The funeral was rough, too. Even though we’d waited for this moment for a long time, it was very hard once we realized he was really gone.

  But the hardest time was six months later. Out of the blue, I received a check from an insurance company. Without telling anyone, many years before my father had taken out a life insurance policy with me as the sole beneficiary, and for quite a lot of money.

  I had a colleague from Parsons staying with me that night. I opened the envelope, saw what he had done for me, and fell apart. We had to order takeout because I was too much of a mess to cook or go out.

  He didn’t do that for anyone else or tell anyone that he’d done it—not even my mother. Everyone was shocked. I told my mother that I would turn the money over to her, but she wouldn’t let me.

  My father and I were not close. He didn’t approve of me particularly, and he was not warm and fuzzy. Maybe he was trying to make up with me? I’ll never know. But it was lovely and completely unexpected. It was an act of pure generosity.

  I like to think that it made him happy to make that secret gesture, and it certainly taught me a lesson about humanity. You never know what goes on inside people’s heads, even when they are your flesh and blood.

  That is one thing I try to keep in mind when I talk about people’s behavior. I believe very strongly that we should all try our best to treat one another well, but I also know that some people who are difficult are doing their best, only their best isn’t all that great. I used to be much more hard-nosed about this and about a lot of other things. But that moment when I opened up the check from my father taught me that I didn’t actually know everything about him. He had things going on inside his head that I never knew and that I will probably never understand.