The Flasher

Rota, Spain circa 1982

We loved the beach in winter. In the summer the ocean was calm and flat and clear, but in the winter the waves were rough and awesome, and there weren't many people around. Colorful sea glass littered the sand, sparkling like pirate treasure. We swam in the ocean even during winter, but when we did we wore our clothes. We didn't have wet suits, we'd swim in jeans and t-shirts and exhaust ourselves in the heavy surf.

Once while jumping waves, I swear I felt – then saw – a shark swim past me. It scared me so badly that instead of saying anything to anyone I silently fought my way out of the ocean and sat on the sand by myself, hugging my knees to my chest, shivering in a way that had little to do with the cold. Some things are too terrifying to talk about. 

Sometimes we'd walk down the beach to the tide pools to hunt for crabs, eels, and mollusks. We had to be careful to pay attention so that we didn't get stranded on a part of the reef that got separated from the land when the tide came in. 

This particular day my friend Allison and her little brother Danny and I decided not to go to the tide pools or to swim. We were digging a hole on the damp-but-not-hard-packed sandy part of the beach furthest away from the ocean, up towards the sea wall. Above the sea wall was a little plaza that led to the street. Allison and Danny's house was a short ways down the beach. Mine was about a kilometer up the main avenue.

We didn't have buckets or shovels so we used our hands and feet to dig, and we had to be careful because the sand was coarse and full of rocks and shells and it hurt when we'd dig into a sharp edge of sea glass. We wore jeans and long-sleeved shirts but we'd taken off our shoes and socks, the sand cold on our feet, the wind gusting off the ocean. Rota, Spain was dirty back then. Foul smelling tar globbed the sand together in big lumpy piles. We did our best to avoid the clumps, but still managed to smear our clothes, and the tar never came out in the wash, which pissed our mothers off.

As we dug deep in the sand, we lost interest in the hole and changed our focus to our pile of displaced sand, getting down on our knees and using our hands like bulldozers to push the sand into a mound. Soon the pile was big enough to climb and we raced up to the top, pushing each other off, inventing a game we called knock the goat off the mountain. We made up the rules as we went along. Points were awarded for whomever knocked the goat off with the most flourish, but the scoring was subjective and involved a fair amount of arguing. We took turns being the goat and we'd have to rebuild our hill between each turn. We were loud — yelling, pushing, and laughing. Sand coated us. It chafed the skin on our bellies inside the waistbands of our jeans and filled the cuffs at our ankles. Bits of tar streaked our hands, feet, and clothes and the wind blew strong, blasting sand into our faces. We were immune to it all, totally absorbed in our game. So much so that at first we didn’t notice the man. 

He descended the stairs from the plaza above. We might not have seen him at all, except that when he got to the bottom of the stairs he walked along the wall so that he was directly in front of us where he unbuckled his pants, turned to the wall, and started to pee. It was unmistakable. We could hear the pee hitting the wall above the roar of the wind and see it pooling on the cement at his feet until it started streaming towards the sand where we'd built our mountain. We watched him with our full attention, quiet and disbelieving. I'm not sure which one of us reacted first, but we all chimed in quickly with our elementary school arsenal.

"Gross!" 

"Oh my God!" 

"Watch out, it's going to touch our sand!" 

We theatrically jumped away and pantomimed vomiting and gagging. We yelled that he was disgusting and a freak.

If we hadn't reacted, maybe it would have ended there. Maybe our attention encouraged him. Perhaps we were just the audience he needed to go on with the show — who knows? It didn't occur to us that there were kilometers of deserted beach so the fact that he chose that particular spot to urinate directly in front of a bunch of kids should have been a red warning flag, but somehow, we missed it.

He was smiling at us as he turned completely to face us, brandishing a full erection.  

I was ten years old. Aside from my dad, who had zero compunction about walking around naked, I'd never seen a full-grown penis in person before and I'd never seen an erect one anywhere —not even in the Penthouse magazines my dad kept stacked on his nightstand. Those magazines were all boobs and no wangs. This was my first. It was long and thick, and though it stuck out straight and stiff, it wobbled and looked rubbery, but the thing that shocked me the most was the color — dark purple, almost black. There were veins popping out of it as he stroked it back and forth, the head disappearing into the sock-like foreskin and then angrily popping back out again with its one black almond-shaped eye at the tip staring us down. It looked choked and strained in a way that reminded me of how someone being strangled in the movies looked. We screamed in shock and horror, and he laughed and put it away.

We were in total disbelief — so much so that at first we whispered to each other that it must be fake, like something you'd buy in a joke shop – some sort of plastic and rubber appendage that he'd fastened to himself where the rope or string holding it in place must be hidden lower in his pants.

He put it away and we were silent, and when he whipped it out again we screamed, but our shrieks were turning from horror to laughter. It was a game. He put it away and took it out again. And again. We were competing for which one of us could scream the loudest. I was winning. He placed his finger over his lips in the universal sign for shut the fuck up and Allison covered my mouth with her sandy hand and we held on to each other while Danny hid behind us. 

The winter beach was mostly deserted, but every now and again somebody walked by. Two women strolled along the water and he waited for them to pass before he pulled out his penis again. At this point we were really hamming it up, falling off our goat mountain, running in circles in our confused hyperactive frenzy. We were revolted and thrilled at the same time – a dark kind of thrill like when I’d watched Poltergeist during my friend Annhara’s birthday slumber party and it scared a girl named Lisa so badly she puked up red Kool-Aid on the flokati rug. We were old enough to know this was bad news, but still too naive to realize how truly fucked up it was.

We were braver now. The initial shock had worn off and we were fully committed to the game. We stood on our sand pile screaming with a combination of horror and delight each time he whipped it out. We became his lookouts, motioning him to put it away when we saw someone coming and then giving him the thumbs up when the coast was clear.

When he pointed directly at Danny, the youngest of us — third grade — and gestured for him to come over and touch it, our revelry ceased.  

"Oh my God he wants you to touch it," we whispered.  

"No way,"  Danny croaked.  

The man grew increasingly more bold, letting his pants slip down around his ankles, leaving his penis out to bob around freely while he continued to rigorously stroke it. We kept a running commentary going:

"Look at how purple it is near his nuts. It looks like a snake!"  

When the man put it away we'd scream "Otra vez!" and he'd take it back out. It had gone limp and he was pumping it hard to make it stand at attention again, and it reminded me of the little hand pump we used to inflate our soccer ball.

We got the idea that maybe Danny should run up there real quick and touch it. Maybe yank it as hard as he could and run back.  Danny wasn't game. We shoved each other and said, "You do it, no you do it." Nobody did it.

All our screams attracted the attention of an old man who came to investigate. We didn't know him, but he was a typical resident of our village, dressed traditionally – heavy winter wool pants, a white button down shirt layered under a vest and coat and a tweed newsboy-style cap. A dapper little man who would not approve of such a scene. We saw him up on the plaza above the sea wall looking down on us. Our man saw him too and smoothly stepped into the stairwell with his back flush to the wall to conceal himself. We knew that we wouldn't be seeing the pee-pee show until the old man left, so we quieted down and pretended to go back to our mountain goat game, keeping the corners of our eyes on the older gentleman until he finally walked away.

As soon as he was out of sight, the show continued but the mood was different now. The man seemed to have lost his sense of humor. He was now more insistent that Danny touch it, and he wasn't smiling anymore. When Danny refused (we had stopped goading him long ago) the man unceremoniously zipped up his pants, fastened his belt, and walked away.  

Once he was gone we felt deflated. We stayed on the beach waiting to see if he'd come back but at this point we'd entirely lost interest in our previous entertainments, and we were shivering. We decided to head back to Danny and Allison's house to warm up and find something to eat.

We disagreed about whether or not we should mention this incident to our parents. My view was no.  

I was sure we'd get in trouble if we told the grownups. The way I saw it, it seemed clear that we might be branded as the guilty party here, not the man brandishing his dick at a bunch of little kids. We were ages nine, ten, and eleven — too young to realize how dangerous the situation was, but old enough to know that if all the details came to light, we'd be implicating ourselves. We were the ones carrying on for him to keep going. We knew it was wrong, though we didn't fully understand all the reasons why. We knew we should have run — told an adult right away. We had gotten caught up in the excitement and now we were worried. Guilt crept in and began to irritate us, like the sand scraping our skin. On the one hand, it hadn’t seemed dangerous to us but on the other hand, the scarier one that would dole out the spankings, we knew there would be consequences. The bottom line was we didn't want to get in trouble. There was no way I was confessing to this, I informed them. Danny and Allison decided they weren't either. We made a pact to keep it a secret between the three of us and shook on it.

Danny betrayed us immediately. The moment we stepped foot in Danny and Allison's living room, Danny spilled the beans to his mom, who was sitting in an egg-shaped rattan swing chair nursing their baby brother, David.

As Danny burst forth with the details about the man peeing in front of us and waving his penis around, Allison and I telepathically reassessed our positions on the matter and chimed in. We quickly adopted a solemn and serious tone in the retelling. In the version we offered Danny's mom, we had been entirely horrified and frozen with fear, running home immediately to inform the grown-ups about this very bad man. We compressed our timeline, no mention of how long the show had lasted or how we’d hung around afterward waiting in vain for him to come back. We laid it on thick, all wide-eyed and incredulous like a bunch of Eddie Haskells. We'd sneak sideways glances at each other and nod emphatically when one of us was talking.

Danny's dad appeared out of nowhere and asked in a very-serious-business-adult voice where exactly we had seen "The Flasher." The term was hilarious to me — so old fashioned and stiff, but I knew better than to laugh. I kept my tone solemn to match Danny and Allison's. My dad was in the Navy, but Danny's dad was an officer in the Army. I wasn't as familiar with that branch of the military, so I didn't really know what Danny's dad did for a living but he was different from my dad in a million ways regardless of his rank, or job description. He was a short, stocky man and though he carried himself like a puffed up little Napoleon, he didn't give off the sense that he was capable of violence the way that my dad did. He was more intellectual and earnest. Danny’s dad didn’t walk around the house naked. They washed their salad greens before dinner and ate together at the dining room table making polite conversation – a far different breed than my family. I couldn't see Danny’s dad turning to someone’s mom and goading her into having another drink by telling her that she "Didn't have a hair on her ass," like I'd heard my dad say to my friend Erin O'Hara's mom at the Officer’s Club.

"My mother certainly does too have a hair on her ass," Erin later hissed at me, outraged at my dad's apparent ill grasp of the facts. "She has an enormous amount of pubic hair," she insisted.

Allison and Danny's dad listened to us finish the details, and my stomach seized when he sat down to put on his shoes. He was going to investigate. I had not planned on this. The adrenaline that had just started to ebb jack-rabbited through my small body as he headed out towards the beach, taking us with him to show him exactly where the incident had taken place. I prayed as hard as I could to the sweet baby Jesus that The Flasher would be nowhere in sight, and I felt a winter-sized wave of relief when we got to the remnants of our goat mountain and there was no sign of The Flasher. Danny's dad walked around the plaza for a few minutes, looking for clues like a pompous little Poirot, but when there was still no evidence of The Flasher he escorted Danny and Allison home, leaving me by myself on the plaza. He left me alone in the same location where we’d just seen a man flashing his dick at us. 

I walked home, alone, and did not mention a word of it to anyone at my house when I got there. Apparently Allison and Danny's parents didn’t feel the need to apprise my parents of the situation, either. 

It was a few weeks later, when I was walking along Avenida de Sevilla by myself, that I saw The Flasher again. I was heading up the main boulevard that ran along the beach, and he was riding his moped towards me. It felt like slow motion. He passed me and time stretched and we made eye contact. I recognized him immediately, and it was clear from the malicious grin spreading over his face that he recognized me, too, and a shiver ran through my body like the time I’d opened the refrigerator door without wearing shoes after my dad installed it incorrectly and it shocked anyone not properly grounded. 

Later, when I reported the sighting to Danny and Allison they were riveted. Right after the original incident we'd hung out in our same spot on the beach both hoping and fearing another glimpse of him but he hadn't come back so the fact that I saw him on the moped renewed our interest in the subject and we started hanging out on the beach again warily watching out, hoping and dreading the prospect of seeing him again. But no luck.

Until the following spring.

Our fireplace was our house's only source of heat, aside from some butane space heaters we used in the bedrooms. When we were home during the winter, we hibernated in front of the fireplace. My dad converted our living room into a cave by hanging a large tapestry over the archway to seal in the heat. If you left the cave to go to the bathroom or the kitchen and didn't close the tapestry all the way you got yelled at. My dad lit the fire and we all were responsible for keeping it burning until we went to bed. We ate dinner in the cave and listened to the radio and watched the same movies from our small VHS collection over and over on the VCR, the smoke from my parent’s cigarettes mixing with the smoke from the fireplace all winter long. Some of the bricks in the back of the fireplace began to fall out, and my dad jammed them back in with an iron poker, but they wouldn't stay and my dad said we'd have to wait for the fireplace to completely cool off before it could be fixed properly with cement. Since the fire burned nonstop all winter it meant the repair wouldn’t happen until spring.

I was home one spring morning when my mom mentioned that the landlord was sending someone over to fix the fireplace. We had to wait for him to get there before we could go to the commissary on base to do our monthly grocery shopping. When the workman knocked on the door my mom was in the back courtyard doing the laundry so I answered it. He wore grungy white coveralls and a cap covered in dried cement and was holding a grimy bucket in one hand and a trowel in the other, a heavy looking burlap bag full of material the consistency of sand lay next to his feet. I recognized him immediately. It was The Flasher.

I felt a wave of nausea come over me as I saw the recognition in his face as our eyes met, but he didn't acknowledge me. I held the door open for him and he wordlessly walked past me into the hallway. I pointed to the living room and he went in and knelt down in front of the fireplace to look inside. My mom came into the living room carrying a basket of wet clothes and she asked me if I could explain to him in Spanish what we needed done before turning her back on us and disappearing up the stairs to hang the clothes on the drying lines on the roof patio.

Of everyone in our house my Spanish was the best so it was nothing out of the ordinary for me to be the interpreter, except this time my brain wasn't working and I couldn't remember the word for fireplace. I couldn't bring myself to look at him. I kept my eyes on the fireplace or on the floor and I found the few words and gestures I needed to get the point across – the situation with the bricks was fairly obvious, so it didn't require too much explaining. I stood frozen in the doorway between the living room and the entryway waiting for my mom to come back downstairs.

In the meantime, The Flasher setup his supplies. He used the hose in our front courtyard to mix the cement. When my mom came down she told me to ask him if it was okay if we left to do our shopping and to tell him that we'd be back in about an hour. He didn't look at me when we left, and when we got back my dad was home and The Flasher was gone. I never said a word to anyone about it. Not even to Danny and Allison. It felt like the time I’d encountered the shark. Some things are too terrifying to talk about.

Not long after that, the bricks fell out of our fireplace again. I wasn't sure if the thud I heard came from the bricks hitting the hearth or from inside my stomach.