Dink out · Posted Dec 21, 06:45 PM by Todd Babiak
One day during lunch hour, in grade seven, I strode the halls of Leduc Junior High in a pair of tight Jordache jeans and what was then called a “beer shirt” — a long-sleeved, white cotton shirt with a string enclosure in the front. My beer shirt advertised Labatt Blue. For some reason, my parents had agreed to buy it for me.
Two pretty grade nine girls with blonde feathered hair and bad reputations, leaning against a bank of lockers, said, “Your fly’s open.”
In my mind, then, looking down would have been an admission of failure. But of course, by every measure, I was a failure. I only had one friend and he lived out in the country. If I wanted to go to a movie, I had to go with my brother and cousin, who were both younger than me. On Halloween, I trick-or-treated alone. I had recently given up competitive hockey for martial arts, a profound social error in my hometown. To prove that martial arts were useless, my cousin’s mentally retarded stepbrother and his friends had recently stuffed my head in a toilet before a crowd of merrymakers.
I kept walking past the girls, and they laughed. It wasn’t a charming giggle, either. It was a laugh of derision, of confusion, of disgust. I rounded the corner and looked down. Sure enough, my tighty-whities were visible through my gaping fly. I found a quiet classroom, hid in the closet, and wept.
Today, I walked through the mall with my fly undone. Several strangers, in the halls and stores, looked down package-ward. I wondered what they were doing, and assumed they were maybe stealing cock-eyed glances at my daughter. I was holding her hand and walking next to her. She was looking mighty cute today.
It wasn’t until we were in the line-up for pictures with Santa that someone pointed it out. Another little kid, riding in one of those tot-cars, pointed at my crotch. Social success is no longer important to me, so I looked down immediately. And, in front of a long line of parents and children, I zipped up.
And wondered why I was embarrassed.
Why had those girls, in junior high, called me “dink out” for weeks? My dink had not been out, after all. That very afternoon, I went to the Black Gold Pool in Speedos, which were much more revealing yet culturally acceptable (at least back then). It’s the marriage of carelessness and genitalia, bells ringing, that
Either way, it’s a feeling I still don’t enjoy — being revealed as “dink out.” Especially by a two-year-old, dripping snot at Santa’s Village.
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The Japanese euphemism for having your fly open is sekkai no mado (society’s window.)
— Leopold Dec 26, 02:39 AM #
Sorry, I didn’t see your earlier PFO. You can delete these two comments.
— Leopold Dec 26, 02:54 AM #
That is cute and funny
— Crystal Brown. Dec 31, 01:39 PM #
I was a LJHS “Laser” for three years also. What I like about this story is the subtle hints about what it was like to grow up in small town like Leduc and not fit into the established norms, and that those girls called you “dink out”
— Peter Sabo Jan 19, 03:38 PM #