Summer holiday. I drive up the to the Redwood Coast. Stop in a small town to explore an informal street fair--house after house having yard sales. Cottages for summer rental. One has a familiar car parked in front--just like my family's. With gear that looks just like my family's. What a coincidence!

Next door, two cute blonde teens are selling stuff on the lawn. They look very similar--twins? I ask "Hey... is the Wayan family staying next door?"

"Yeah, the Wayans rented that cabin from us,"

"...and there's an extra room on the side for a brother they said might show up..."

"That's you, huh?"

The twins are selling more than their own stuff--several boxes of magazines, hundreds of them, that my family brought. Sex magazines. My family's selling porn? Of course, it's not in their own town, so none of their friends'll know. I wonder if they rented this cabin just to unload this stuff.

The girls leaf through with interest...

I go in, shut the door, and look at the sex images my family's selling. First one I pull out's a Playboy, with glossy airbrushed dolls. A lonely world where no one ever touches. But the next is a lesbian sex magazine showing couples: emotionally warmer AND sexually hotter than the straight mag. SO hot I get an instant erection--and start tearing my clothes off!

But intuition flashes a warning. Or is it just old fear? My parents opened doors without permission, we never had much privacy... but that was years ago, and this door locks!

It IS locked, isn't it? I get up naked to check. Yes. Locked locked locked.

Knock knock knock! "Go away!" I yell.

"NO!" yells a girl. I know that voice. My sister Althea. I yell "NOT NOW!"

She pushes at the door anyway--and when it won't budge, she SLAMS at it, smashes it open! She walks over to me and looks down in amused disgust at me--masturbating in a bare room on a floor paved in porn. Looking down at me.

For a moment I feel ashamed, then look back in equal disgust and say "I told you not to come in. If you don't like what you see, it's your problem. I don't want to see you now. Go away."

She says, eyes still glinting, "Come out and have dinner. We went to a Thai restaurant and saved the leftovers for you. There's elephant meat." She's got a food bucket. An elephant trunk dangles...

She does, but leaves the door a bit ajar. Furious, I go over to it and find it WON'T shut tight now. She broke it when she burst in. Three hinges, and the two upper ones both tore loose. They're not standard doorhinges, just wire spirals like a school notebook; they might be bent back into shape. I try for a while, but can't make them hold.

So I start to dress again, to leave. Don't want to stay after that double insult--not just the door, the dinner. I wouldn't eat elephant even if I could digest Thai peppers. Why not dolphin while they're at it--or "long pig?"

I cross the hall, seeing none of them--no, hear shower a running, Althea singing. A little devil on my shoulder says "Go in and jam her shower door open, see how SHE likes it!" But the little angel on the other side says "That's petty--and a waste of time." Can't deny that.

So I just drive away from my family. For good.

Elephant!

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• The sex magazines = my parents' models of sex. My dad's were very Playboy; I think my mom is a closet lesbian--she's down on men, and acts like women can do no wrong. My family's hand-me-down beliefs still linger, at the expense of reality (like the sisters doing the yard sale, who were cute, friendly, & flirtatious.)
• The room reserved for me = what my family values offer me--a bare cell, no privacy, fantasy relationships, and leftovers.
• My sister Althea = the voice in me saying "Put on a mask and seek social acceptance. Don't get caught being deviant." Sneering isn't her real-life style at all (since our parents were unreliable, we siblings learned to cooperate) but she was always the practical one, deferring her feelings to get the job done; so in my dreams she often symbolizes this. While I'm the kind of doofus who puts a dream like this on the Net.
• The door echoes my friend Dawn's broken back door! Is the dream warning that because of my family's training, I let my friends violate my privacy too? Not sure.
• Elephant meat in hot peppers I see elephants as basically people, and I get sick from hot peppers--so their food's both immoral and sickening.
• I leave: good! Better would be to go back to those girls who flirted with me, but at least I'm leaving my family's sex images behind. And their diet.

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