THE FLASHER

"Mom hesitated for effect, then flung open his coat...."

My mother introduced me to The Flasher—acquired in one of her legendary shopping sprees—in 1977. I was 25 and had my own apartment on Chicago’s North Side. Mom lived in our family home on the Southwest Side with my alcoholic father and combatively drug-addled brother. Born in 1931 and raised Catholic, she’d been taught to accept and bear “life’s crosses.” Shopping helped her. Laughter helped even more.

Saying she had something to show me, she opened her lingerie drawer and pulled the mustachioed doll from a brown paper bag. She was already snickering, lips pressed tightly to avoid a full-on cackle. His cartoon face and skewed body had a kooky kind of innocence, but his trench coat and sly eyes hinted that something weird was up. Mom hesitated for effect, then flung open his coat to reveal a stiff stuffed manhood, fringed by a mop of yarn pubic hair. Something weird was up, all right. Of course I knew flashers weren’t funny, but once Mom started laughing her ear-shattering, siren-like laugh, I couldn’t help joining in.

Laughter was our bond, going all the way back to my preschool days. Back then we laughed at Peanuts comic strips, Looney Tunes cartoons, Laurel and Hardy shorts and Kukla, Fran and Ollie. At night, watching I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners, Mom raised howling with glee to a new artform. My father: “Damn it, Joan! I can’t hear the goddamn show!” My grandmother: “Joanie, please! You’re going to hurt yourself”—as if my healthy mother might literally bust a rib or vocal cord. But Mom didn’t stop. Laughter was her rebellion.

As a young woman, she was known as a wacky blond bombshell. Few realized she had artistic talent. I remember her at the kitchen table sketching me, my brother, her favorite cartoon characters. But she never took the painting classes she dreamed of, instead sublimating her passion into home decorating, a stay-at-home-mom pursuit requiring lots of shopping. When I wound up studying art myself and became a graphic designer, she’d proudly tell people, “My daughter took up where I left off.” I only wished she were happier with her life so I wouldn’t have had to be her amateur counselor. I just wanted to laugh with her.

In 1982, junk—the heroin kind—went into my brother’s arm and killed him. In 2001, after my father’s fatal heart attack, junk—the hoarder kind—started filling our family home. Worried that Mom would fall amidst all the boxes, baskets and bags of laundry piled in the hallways, I convinced her to leave frigid Chicago and come live with me and my husband in California.

After she moved in, she’d often beg me to stop working and watch TV with her—“Oh, Laurie, you’ve got to see this!”—but I rarely did. I had deadlines. And my husband and I were already spending every evening with her. So one day I said, “You want someone to watch your show with?” and went to her old dresser, which the movers had moved intact, drawers full. I found The Flasher right where he belonged, face down under her unmentionables. “Here, Mom,” I said. “Your friend wants to join you.” She looked confused—her memory was fading—so I opened his trench coat. She laugh-wailed so hard, I feared she really might have a coronary.

Following the return of The Flasher, my mother would live another eight years, until Lewy body dementia stole her sanity, her sense of humor and ultimately, at the age of 81, her life. Despite her troubles and her losses, she remained as loving as she was fun-loving right up until the dementia struck. If only I’d known beforehand, I would have watched a final rerun of I Love Lucy with her, so together we could have had the last laugh.

—Laurel DiGangi

My parents threw themselves an anniversary party when I was about 12. One guest bought my mother a pair of babydoll pajamas and dared her to model them for the crowd. After telling me to be ready with the camera, she went upstairs, changed and came back down wrapped in her robe so she could give the party this little flash.

Mom and I doing what we did best.

The Flasher doing what he did best.

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Laurel DiGangi’s fiction and creative nonfiction have been published in The Chicago Reader, Denver Quarterly, Fourth Genre, Asylum, Atlanta Quarterly, Cottonwood, Two Hawks Quarterly, Under the Gum Tree and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Woodbury University in Burbank, CA.

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