About ten years ago, I was living in a shitty little apartment in a drab, white-trash neighborhood. I was about twenty-one years old and my life revolved around getting fucked up, sleeping, puking and smoking. Sometimes I’d combine one or more together for kicks because I was an angry little fucker and I liked it that way.

One afternoon, after waking up naked and extremely hung-over, I scrounged around and discovered that I was completely out of cigarettes. I was chain-smoking bastard at that point in my life, so this simply would not do. I needed to run to the corner store to further martyr my lung cilia.

Bleary and with head a-throbbing, I still had the common sense to not run out the door completely naked. I threw on a T-shirt and slapped on a pair of these Armenian work pants that I’d found in some Army-Navy surplus store. I’ve no idea if real-life Armenians actually did any work in them, but I kind of liked them. They were dark blue pants that instead of having a zipper or button fly, they used an overlapping contraption that closest resembled how the crotches of tighty-whiteys are set up. It looked completely normal to me and for some reason, I was partial to them. Perhaps it was the drugs.

Since I planned on coming right back, I threw these pants on without bothering to put on anything underneath and hit the street, heading for the corner store.

Ahead of me was a family on their porch. Father and mother, sitting around while several children ran about, screeching and giggling as the fucked up little parasites are known to do. One of the children came running in my direction, chasing after an inflated rubber ball. When the ball neared me, I crouched down, picked it up and gently lobbed it back in the kid’s direction.

Suddenly, the kid starts bawling, turns tail and runs to her parents. The mother looks at me and offers up a “Oh Jesus fucking Christ” to the heavens and the father starts eyeing at me like he’s about to beat me half to death.

It was about that time that I began to notice a draft.

I glanced down and saw to my sheer fucking horror that a force beyond my control, be it fate, karma or physics had caused my dearest pieces to be exposed. I was hanging out. The flag wasn’t raised—thank whatever Gods responsible, but it was definitely flying in the wind.

Somehow in bending to get the ball, the fly-contraption on these Armenian work pants had managed to shift a little here, a little there and now here I was, standing in front of some white trash family on a Sunday afternoon, hung-over with my dick hanging out. The older children stood there, slack-jawed—the image of my face being burned into their brains as the role model to compare all future examples of “bad men” against. Score one for daveb.

I may have little or no redeeming qualities and I may just be an overall useless leech of an asshole but one thing I am most certainly not is a pervert that whips his junk out, especially in front of children. I was fully mortified.

As quick as I could I stuffed that shit back in and took off as fast as possible without actually breaking into a run. There was just no point in trying to explain myself and the curious contraption that made up the crotch of my Armenian work pants. I hit the store and chain-smoked my way home, taking care to walk a much longer and completely different route. I was to maintain this new route for the remainder of my time living in this neighborhood.

I have not worn Armenian work pants since that day.