He leads. Then I lead.

Then he leads.

I’m walking to work. I imagine he is, too. We’re both marching headlong down Houston Street—frosty air escaping our mouths in the same ghost-y streams—but he and I are much different.

For starters, he’s black, not, well, ghost-y white like me. I would say  he’s “African-American,” but he might be Jamaican. I used to go out with a Jamaican woman who hated being labeled African-American because while she was black, she was neither African nor American. So this guy, he’s black until I learn more.

I take the lead again.

He retakes it again.

The man is also much younger than me. Low-twenties, probably. White iPod ear buds are snaked up from under his puffy black coat and hidden just below his black doo rag. Kanye West is piping through, I think, but I can’t be sure. Either way, this guy with his thin mustache looks less like Kanye West and more like Ja Rule.

He certainly is wearing Ja Rule’s low-slung navy-blue jeans. Way low-slung. So low-slung, in fact, that his exposed baby-blue boxers are more visible than his white sneakers, which are drowning in the clogged pant-legs of his Levis.

I keep hearing Denis Leary’s shouts ricocheting around my skull. In his 1997 concert special Lock n’ Load, the manic comic repeatedly rebuked such slacks-ers. “Pull up yer pants!” he shrieked.

The droopy-drawers look favored by some black guys (and a few trying-real-hard white dudes) has dubious origins. “The style of sagging one’s pants, or wearing them baggy and low without a belt,” states Wikipedia, “was also style that originated in prisons.” It’s depressing someone would rebel by imitating convicts at any time. But when jobs are scarce and crime might seem more appealing? It’s clueless.

Not that criminalizing someone’s attire makes sense.

According to The New York Post,  “a Florida judge threw out a saggy-pants law in Riviera Beach, Fla., in September after a teen was arrested for showing four to five inches of his boxers.” Yet similar measures have passed in other parts of the U.S. That’s as dumb as the not-passing fad itself. For heaven’s sake, it’s not flashing. And, call me crazy, but wardrobe regulation just feels un-American.

Which brings us to our President-Elect. (No, he does not wear his suit trousers low and shame on you for thinking that.) The incoming commander-in-chief deems such laws “a waste of time.” However, he did add, “Brothers should pull up their pants. You are walking by your mother, your grandmother, your underwear is showing… Some people might not want to see your underwear—I’m one of them.”

And I’m another. But we don’t need a new law. We need a new perspective. So I simply retake the lead from my fellow pedestrian.

This time for good! 

–Tim Coleman covers the street beat for Trainjotting.