My Real Hue

By Daniel Yves Eisner

My Real Hue is an extraordinarily brave man’s quest to fully understand and accept himself despite his family obstructing his path. Though it spans five decades, the story is a poignant reminder that adult life is constantly and comprehensively affected by childhood. From the instant readers meet young Danny, his torturous relationship with his parents is evident. His dysfunctional family capitulates everything from challenges with coming to terms with his sexuality to a set of burgeoning neuroses. He discovers the only way to save himself is to sever ties with the very people who brought him into the world. The reader will accompany Danny on his painful journey toward shattering the age-old notions that “blood is thicker than water,” “family is everything,” “family comes first,” “Thou shalt honor thy father and mother,” “You’re going to regret severing your relationship with your parents when they are gone,” and the like. Readers in similar circumstances to Danny’s will be confronting a thought-provoking alternative to the self-destructive, self-loathing, guilt-ridden, depressing, dangerously unhealthy, stressful, and often suicidal existence associated with feeling inextricably attached and obligated to an abusive and dysfunctional family. Danny will ultimately demonstrate to the reader that the potential stigma of being estranged from one’s family may be well worth the tradeoff of being able to live out one’s life far more happily, peacefully, healthfully, and self-fulfilled than one could have ever imagined. To read a review of My Real Hue, please click here.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781635688368

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My Real Hue

A Memoir

Daniel Yves Eisner

Copyright © 2017 Daniel Yves Eisner

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2017

ISBN 978-1-63568-835-1 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63568-836-8 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Prologue

No Nazi Sommeliers (Translated from French)

"Imagine it! After decades living in Paris and raising a family there, suddenly you have to leave. They were terrible days, Danny.

"Now this was still a couple years before they made you wear those horrible yellow stars with Juif written on them, but no one knew what was coming, not yet. I just had to quickly get my family out of there.

"I piled your grandfather, your mother, and her sister into our car at dusk. Your grandfather had suffered a massive heart attack upon learning of the occupation, and in those days, heart doctors recommended nothing but several weeks’ bedrest. He wasn’t much help to the rest of us. We stopped at his law office to grab a few things and hit the road.

"On the way, we had to zig-zag through the Loire Valley, staying with a couple of friends that afternoon to sleep. We only drove at night with our headlights off. We paid dozens of bribes to people along the way, knowing the heftier sum we paid, the more likely they’d keep their mouths shut when the Nazis came. We passed through Poitou Charentes before we finally arrived in Aquitaine, where we had our summer home.

Usually, when we arrived at our villa in Arcachon for the summer, the three of us were all so eager. Your mother and her sister anticipated gawking at our neighbor Tyrone Power. He was an extremely handsome Hollywood movie star and often tanned shirtless on the beach. I looked forward to some time away from my husband. You see, your grandfather often stayed in Paris during the holiday so he could play high-stakes bridge with his cronies. I never approved of it but kept my mouth shut because I knew it was his passion and it gave us some needed time apart. Did I ever tell you that when he died in 1960, he owed his bridge buddies $35,000? He belonged to a very exclusive bridge group known as the Cavendish Club, where every member took an oath to pay all gambling debts no matter what. Their motto was Debt of the game, debt of honor." Needless to say, I wasn’t thrilled about having to pay that off even before I knew how much his estate was worth. Anyway, when we arrived that June, your grandfather was with us. Normally, we looked forward to a few months in Arcachon enjoying the sunshine and the wine. The temperature was pleasant as usual, but this time, we walked up to the doors knowing it might be the last time.

"I was sad, sure. I went through the rooms and took what I could carry. They said you couldn’t bring much onto the SS Ile de France, but I didn’t care. There were some things the Nazis were never going to get their hands on as far as I was concerned. I instructed your mother to take her big sister and do the same.

When I made my way down to the musty wine cellar, I already knew what I had to do. First, I grabbed just one bottle—a precious 1921 Château Cheval Blanc, Saint-Émilion—and set it down on the stairs. Then I turned around and got to work.

"I tipped over our oak barrels. I smashed bottles against the walls and the ground. The wine sometimes splashed onto my clothes, staining my dress, but I didn’t care. I was having a ball. You see, Danny—there would be no Nazi sommeliers. I wouldn’t stand for that. They could take my country, but they would never take my wine!

"When I finally brought the bottle upstairs and met your grandfather and the girls, they looked at me like I was crazy. I laughed. I looked like I had just been swimming in grape juice or blood. I washed up and changed into my favorite summer dress. Then we went back outside, got in the car, and left.

"We made it to Le Port de Bordeaux and boarded the ship before we even knew where we were going. By the time your grandfather finally discovered our destination, Buenos Aires, I had found a wine opener. We started to pass the delicious Cheval Blanc back and forth as we set off.

"By the middle of June, the German soldiers would march down the Champs Élysées. By the end of the month, they would make it to the coast and to Aquitaine and our summer house. As the coast disappeared in the distance, I tried to imagine the faces of those Nazi commanders when they went down into our wine cellar.

I must say, Danny, 1921 Château Cheval Blanc was the most delicious wine I ever had.

Chapter 1

Long Beach Les Misérables

I sat with my head titled back, mesmerized. Plumes of True Blue cigarette smoke picked up the piercing fragrance of Cabochard by Gres as my nanny spoke to me in French, as always. I sucked the aromatic mixture deep into my nostrils. My younger brother Mitch slept beside me. I rubbed my small feet gently against the Oriental rug in our living room, hoping to keep the energy going, praying she wouldn’t stop. Fortunately, my maternal grandmother had a deep love for storytelling. She would never stop, at least not voluntarily.

It wasn’t only the tales of her harrowing escape from the Nazi occupation of Europe either. I was equally enthralled, if not more so, by her stories about Paris between the two wars, a period she referred to as la belle époque (the beautiful era). She told stories of Picasso’s days as a struggling artist in the Montmartre section of the city and how he hung his paintings in a pink-colored restaurant called Le Lapin Agile (the agile rabbit) in exchange for hot meals. Nanny revealed how the Parisian aristocracy, of which she counted herself a member, entertained themselves by visiting sleazier sections of town to see how the other half lived. These aristocrats visited gay and lesbian bars, watched prostitutes in action, and on occasion, partook in Paris’s underground activities themselves.

People called Nanny a grand dame. Born in Poland at the turn of the twentieth century but raised in Paris, she was impeccably dressed, flirtatious, and extremely funny. Her sense of humor kept her afloat. Like many Jews fleeing Europe, Nanny, her husband, and their two daughters spent a year in Buenos Aires because of the immigrant quotas in the United States. In 1941, they settled in New York City. Because my grandfather had been a successful lawyer while living in Paris, they had been able to bring enough money with them to live comfortably until he began importing lace, a hot commodity at the time. Nanny’s heavy French accent made her all the more charming in America. She basked in the attention and talked as long as an audience was there to listen.

Nanny’s husband, my mother’s father, died when I was young. Nanny told me many years later his last words to my mother, delivered with his final breath, were Occupe-toi de ta mere (Take care of your mother). Though she had a beautiful studio apartment on the upper east side of New York City, my grandmother spent nearly every weekend with us. My mother didn’t want her to be alone, so Nanny had her own bedroom in every home we ever lived.

My earliest years took place in a fashionable part of the Bronx called Riverdale. We lived near friends of my parents from Eastern Europe, who immigrated when the Nazis invaded Poland. One of them, a Polish medical doctor, became my pediatrician and diagnosed me with eczema, bronchial asthma, and a number of allergies. She recommended we move closer to the sea where the ocean air would be good my health.

My parents took her advice. We moved to Long Beach, a popular beach resort town on the south shore of Long Island. To get there from the city by car, you crossed the Long Beach Bridge, the Atlantic Beach Bridge, or the Meadowbrook Parkway Bridge as it was sandwiched between Reynolds Channel to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the south. Long Beach started in the 1920s as a resort to the rich and famous with luxury hotels running along the boardwalk parallel to the Atlantic. By the 1940s it developed into a residential community where my parents raised my brother and me.

Neither my brother, father, nor I had particularly good posture, and we were told we walked like ducks. Beyond the crisp, clean, ocean air, it was a simply idyllic place to grow up for people who loved water. We three ducks, and my mother fit right in.

My father, a stout, dark-haired man with olive complexion he passed down to me but not my pale-skinned brother, was an avid boatman. Long Beach was his playground. He had power boats ranging in size from eighteen to thirty-eight feet. Out on the open water, I developed a sense for safety. I noticed how much care and consideration my father took when navigating between other vessels and the organization of the equipment. He never took unnecessary risks. He always put safety first.

By boat, it was two to three hours along the Atlantic shoreline to New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty. We took many voyages from Long Beach to New York Harbor, the East and Hudson Rivers, and under all the famous New York City bridges. An acrid smell emanated from the bustling city smokestacks when we entered New York Harbor. On hot and humid summer days, we passed the Statue of Liberty, and I imagined the faces of immigrants like my parents who had come to the United States in search of safety.

I began piloting boats at seven years old, after taking classes with my father. I learned how our boats behaved under different wind, tide, and current conditions. I knew how to manage the speed, steering, and engines to deal with changing circumstances on the water.

My appreciation for boating, like my father’s, was born out of a feeling of fearlessness. On the water, there was a connection with nature’s vastness. I saw the stress shred off my father and blow away with every gust of fresh Atlantic air. His worries on the shore, as endless as the ocean itself, were temporarily replaced by a fixation on making sure the boat, the only thing under his control, was being managed safely and properly.

I took to boating well and became adept at docking the boats during difficult weather conditions. When summer storms came, the workers at the beach clubs folded up the umbrellas and stacked the beach chairs by the time we returned. On these occasions, I felt proud. I took over at the helm for my father, who openly admitted to my docking superiority, and gently slid our boat into its slip.

By the time we tied everything down and hopped off the boat, it wasn’t merely that sense of fearlessness that disappeared. Any respect I had developed during the course of the day for my father vanished as well. Waiting a few blocks away, was my mother, ready to collect on the quid pro quo for the day’s boating adventure.

My father was a talented and well-known electrical engineer in his field. He worked on projects all over the world. His career was his nucleus, validation, and sense of self-worth. Aside from his job and his boat, everything else was my mother’s domain. She decided where we lived, what we did, what kind of house we lived in, what color it was painted inside and out, when and where we moved, what kind of furniture we had, what kind of car we drove, where we went, who we saw, who we socialized with, which housekeepers we had, what summer camps we went to, what clothes we wore, where she and my father went on vacation, what schools we attended, what we ate: everything else. I never saw or heard my father dispute anything my mother wanted. Maybe history had something to do with it.

Both my parents came from highly successful and respectable families. Hailing from London, my father’s family was considered quite wealthy by the standards of the time. The pair had been introduced in 1948 by a mutual family acquaintance and married six months later. The French and British have never gotten along famously. England’s King Edward III’s attempt to claim Calais in the 1300s and the pillaging, murder, and starvation which ensued are among many examples of the long-standing rift between the two countries. As for my Franco-Anglo parents, their Jewish-European upper-class backgrounds appeared to be sufficient grounds for the wedding bells to chime.

Because my French mother and grandmother were such powerful forces, Da always lived in Ma’s shadow. Any influence his Englishness might have had on me was insidious and intangible. The words my parents meant my mother. I have never thought of him as a separate and distinct person independent of her. My mother was such a dominant, domineering, and overpowering figure and my father such a weak and diminutive one. She absorbed his image into hers.

After a day of boating, while we waited for our housekeeper to prepare supper, my father, like a misbehaving puppy, hid away in his room. He sat on the side of his bed, rolled up his pant leg to expose the patch of eczema he picked up in the Navy, and dove in. He scratched the little area above his ankle, which he called his Jungle rot, until the skin flaked off. He scratched for so long a dead skin pile formed on the carpet and the bedroom reeked of rancid pork. He eventually stopped and cleaned himself up for dinner but only after my mother scolded him. I hated this habit as much as she did, but his powerlessness against her, even when he was neurotically hacking away at his jungle rot, was what I respected least about him.

My mother was short with dark complexion and black hair. Her weight rose and fell, but she was never petite. She always tended to be largest in the behind and thighs. From a very early age, my brother and I were prone to being overweight as well. We inherited the plump gene from her side. Being that my mother saw life (i.e., people, places, things, and especially physical appearance, manners, and dress) through the eyes of a consummate Francophile, everything was judged against French and European standards.

Compared to the average Frenchman, my brother and I were, at least as far as my mother was concerned, bigger, worse-mannered, less polished, less sophisticated, and never well-enough dressed. Fortunately, my brother never took her criticism to heart and rarely paid any attention to it. As a child, Mitch loved to play outside with his friends and, without fail, arrived home filthy. It drove my mother mad. No matter how many times she got after him for getting so dirty, her admonitions never made a difference. Eventually she gave up. It was a small but sweet victory for Mitch. She still regularly called him a schlumper (slob in Yiddish), but he learned to take it as a joke.

I, on the other hand, took my mother’s criticisms personally. It hurt when I didn’t meet her approval. As such, I always tried to dress, behave, and in every other way, do whatever she asked. When I disappointed her, she criticized and berated me to a point where I felt devastated.

I was dubbed her little pachyderm (a French word derived from Greek relating to the elephant, rhinoceros, or hippopotamus). Other times, even in front of guests, she called me a plouk (a derogatory French word for peasant) whenever I didn’t meet her dress code. The great irony that she struggled with rising and falling weight throughout her life was lost on her. Nobody dared call her out.

Like I did when I boated with my father, I would study my mother