Mamas, nag your saggers

Who else out there has been tempted to approach one of these young men with pants hanging south of his equatorial region and ask, "What's up with that, yo?"

If you're like me, you resisted that temptation for fear that the dude would pop a cap in your equatorial region.

While walking to work one recent morning -- high gas prices are a great inspiration for exercising, aren't they? -- I was approached on Main Street in Durham by one of these B-boys with the sideways baseball cap, the sleeveless T-shirt and a pair of long denim shorts that hung so low he had to pull them up with every other step. He looked, in other words, like every stereotypical homeboy you've ever feared, and I wasn't about to question his fashion sense.

Until he asked me to buy some candy from him.

He had a boxful of mouth-wateringly colorful, neatly stacked candies, and I started calculating how many times I'd have to walk to work and back home to make up for all those calories.

The candy man was named Delquan. He was 16, and he said his father was a local pastor who was trying to raise money to provide recreational opportunities for kids during the summer.

Because that sounded like a worthy cause -- and because I've never seen an M&M I didn't want to melt in my mouth -- I bought a couple of packages from him.

"D," I asked, presuming we were on a first-initial basis and that my $2 gave me permission to ask about his pants, "why do you wear your pants like that?"

To be cool, he said, smiling. He said he wasn't in a gang and, in response to another question, answered, yes, he had a girlfriend who didn't mind being seen with him.

So offensive do some people find GPDU -- gratuitous public display of underwear -- that some cities have instructed officers to arrest the most egregious bloomer-barers for indecency.

Spokesmen at Triangle cop shops said that they would get back with me to let me know whether there was an official policy on sagging but that so far they hadn't thought much about the need, effectiveness or constitutionality of such a law.

The latter is something to think about, because both the ACLU and probably every lawyer who has ever chased an ambulance are champing at the bit to get a piece of expected lawsuits.

A word of caution: Issuing citations for sagging pants is, troublingly and figuratively, but a belt loop away from citing someone for wearing white after Labor Day, brown shoes with a navy blue suit -- that can actually work, if the shoes are dark enough -- and stretch pants on women who shouldn't be wearing stretch pants.

Who's to say that a law forbidding sagging pants won't be followed by one forbidding men -- OK, just me -- to wear a lime green, crushed-velvet jumpsuit like the one Tyrone Davis wore in 1980?

Let's implore mothers and fathers, not politicians and cops, to lead the anti-GPDU brigade. So here, with apologies to Waylon & Willie, is my protest of pants-sagging. Maestro, hit it:

Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be saggers.

Cos they'll never act grown and they'll still live at home

even when they're 39.

Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be saggers

Cos they'll hang in the street and scare people they meet

And their drawers will all say "Calvin Klein."