The Instructions by Adam Levin
The next day at Recess, Wayne told his story. No one wrote the speech down, but its opening was famous: “I’ve read sixty-five pages and we need to get scarves because basketball is better than soccer.”
By the end of the week, the paperwork was finished. Wayne filed a petition with twenty-five names and Miss Kimble signed on as the faculty sponsor. Like the Sci-Fi and Fantasy and Pastry-Lovers clubs—unlike Squaw Squad, Debate Team, or Band—the Shovers got semi-private status. They could meet twice a month after school in the gym, under Miss Kimble’s supervision, but the school would provide no bus-space for away-games, no section in the bleachers, no official uniforms. Shovers ordered and paid for their scarves themselves.
Twenty-one guys formed the club that first year, about 7 percent of Aptakisic’s male students. Anyone who wasn’t a bandkid could join. Bandkids were the enemies of the Main Hall Shovers: partly because their purpose rivaled the Shovers’ (though they did give an annual concert in Spring, the primary function of the Braves Brass Band was to “support” the Indians during pregames and rallies and homegame halftimes); partly because they got the best seats on the bleachers; mostly because the Shovers needed kids to harrass to buttress their identity and keep up morale, and whereas the few counterparts they had in the conference (i.e., the Knifelike Fangs at Heinrich Junior High, the Uberdunk Slammies at Twin Groves Middle, and the Kinderpop Pep Squad at Sandburg Middle) were encountered but twice per season at most, the bandkids were everywhere, always.
From “Red Zeppelin, Led Inddian,” part one of Ruth Rothstein’s “State of School Spirit”:
…and only two years after having founded the Shovers, Wayne Acer, as a freshman at Stevenson High School, fell in with a crowd not known for loving sports, not known for the pride they took in their school, their family, or even themselves—a crowd that is known to everyone at Stevenson.
A crowd everyone at Stevenson knows as “the skids.”
Wayne bought a chrome-zippered black leather jacket, cut holes in the knees of his jeans, and smoked. According to Blake, Wayne changed for a girl.
You just shouldn’t ever change for a girl like that,” the new Shover President told me over lunch. “If you change for a girl, who are you, really? You don’t know who you are. And I’ll say so right to Wayne’s face cause it’s true. I HAVE said it right to Wayne’s face, last May. ‘Who are you, now? Who are you, Wayne? What about basketball? You FOUNDED THE SHOVERS. You lived for the Indians. You knew all the stats.’ And he did, Ruth, he did. And not the stats for only just Aptakisic, either. He knew all the stats IN THE CONFERENCE. Where do you think I learned all that stuff from? Wayne wasn’t just some average older brother. Wayne was my mentor. Everything I know, I know because of Wayne.
But I asked him who he was now, or who, you know, HE THOUGHT HE WAS, and he looked at his feet and giggled this really uncomfortable giggle, and what that giggle meant, Ruth, was: ‘I don’t know who I am, Blake. I really need your help. I’m lost.’
Lucky for us, the Bulls were playing the Sixers, and Wayne was fighting with this girlfriend who will so-called BE A FAMOUS DRUMMER ONE DAY, and I convinced him to watch the game with me. He wouldn’t do any of the cheers we used to, and he kept going outside to smoke stinking disgusting death-causing cigarettes, but he only did it during timeouts I kept noticing. See, in the end, he hadn’t shaken basketball. He never will, either, cause no one can. Once you catch that bug. And so on.
That was last May, and since then things have gotten a little better. Wayne still says he doesn’t care about the Shovers, or the Indians, let alone The Stevenson Patriots, but once in a while, Ruth—three times now, to be exact—he’ll throw on a Bulls game on the TV in his room, and invite me upstairs to watch with him. And the silver lining—gold lining, really, even platinum if you think about it—is that during timeouts and half-times, we listen to all this music Wayne’s into, and even though the guys who sing it seem fruity, it’s okay because they’re joking about the fruitiness. What they’re really doing is making fun of dudes who think it ISN’T fruity to look all fruity. Wayne and the other skids don’t get that at all because they’re always so serious, but all you really have to do is have a sense of humor to see that even the bands who might actually be a little fruity have earned the right to be fruity like that because of how they’re geniuses. Mostly they’re joking on skids, though—it’s subtle. It’s great music Wayne listens to, though, is my point, and plain and simple? Wasn’t for Wayne, I’d have never even heard OF Led Zeppelin. And if I’d never heard of Led Zeppelin, I’d have never HEARD Led Zeppelin, you see what I’m saying? I’d have never known “Stairway to Heaven,” hands down, was the best song ever, on what is, bottom line, the best album ever, in all the history of music. If Wayne, to sum it up, never became a skid and started, in a nutshell, listening to their music, then no doubt I couldn’t’ve, long story short, had my creative revelation, and so, the 2006 scarf, to put it plainly, wouldn’t be as sharp as you’ll see in November when the order comes in and you’ll see what I mean.”
Apart from not being a bandkid, all it took to be a Shover was the annual scarf. It was made of red wool with white fringes and embroidery, and all of the Shovers wore it the same: tied around the neck in an overhand knot with the right leg two times the length of the left so that none of the signifiers went unexposed. On the right, by the shoulder, was Chief Aptakisic, feather-headressed and -earringed, a sillhouette in warpaint, the year of the season in thin roman numerals that looked like whiskers along his square jawline; beneath that the numbers assigned to the players, JV and varsity, varsity on top; and on the left above the fringe that hung just beneath the heart, the names of the varsity A-team starters, captains at the bottom (so they wouldn’t get covered if the knot slipped low), then up to the neck reverse-alphabetically.
This design had been constant for five years running, but its left leg had always been a problem. Since players improved at various rates, line-ups were always subject to adjustment, and by the start of every season since the Shovers had been founded, at least one Indian off the bench or the B-team took an A-team position from another player whose name had already been embroidered on the scarf. The cause of the problem was variously diagnosed. Some blamed the scarf’s maker for the six weeks its factory took to fill orders, which required Desormie to give to the Shovers his rosters that far in advance of the season. Some blamed Shover presidents for failing to find a maker of scarves who required less lead-time. A few—mostly presidents—blamed Desormie himself for being fickle with his lineups, or the victim of brain disease. Many of the Shovers didn’t care either way; the important thing to them was for the scarves to identify Shovers as Shovers. Among the proponents of scarf-reform, though, 2004 was invoked almost daily. That year a captain got bumped from the lineup: within three weeks of the scarf being ordered, Bam Slokum, til then but a middling sixth-grade player, had grown four inches taller and ten times as dominant. He came off the bench of the JV B-team to play A-team on varsity as a starting point-guard, and went on to break, in the eight weeks following, three Aptakisic and two conference scoring-records. The captain Bam replaced was called Gregory Gumm, and to get Gummed became slang that for Shovers was fighting words, harsher even than any phrase it might have euphemized.
Not that Shovers ever actually fought. The events they called fights were chest-bump engagements where one guy said “What?” and the other “So do something,” and sometimes a third and a fourth said “Yeah, do something.” A few of the Shovers were stooges for Indians—carrying their textbooks, doing their homework, hearing hints of affection in their verbal abuse—but most of them only aspired to be stooges. They met twice a month, shoved around Main Hall, and as of only very recently had seemed poised to schism over trouble that stemmed from their scarf’s new design.
By the end of the 2005–2006 school year, the scarf-reform issue was so starkly polarized that the Shovers had forgotten its mechanics. You either wanted reform (whatever that meant) or you did
“They may not be perfect but our scarves are the best, so don’t rock the boat, homes, it’s dangerous.”
“All I’m saying is 2004, dude. Two-gumming-thousand-and-four.”
Thus, when during his pre-election speech, Blake Acer spoke of his scarf-redesign plan, a plan that would alter the scarf’s left leg’s looks but didn’t address the real problem at all—the problem of immanent roster-change/scarfmaking-leadtime/embroidery-permanence itself (taboo)—the majority by which he would soon acquire victory was simple in more than one sense of the word. The really dumb Shovers fixed on redesign which sounded a lot like reform, and those among them who wanted reform thought Blake backed their cause and voted for him; those among them who didn’t want reform thought Blake opposed their cause and voted against him. The less dumb Shovers—both those who wanted reform and didn’t—saw that Blake Acer, intentionally or not, had undermined reform with redesign, and they voted the opposite of those really dumb Shovers who shared their position on reform. The split between the two kinds of dumb was pretty even, but the few undecideds knew Blake to be the brother of the Shovers’ founder, and they figured the blood was good, so Blake won.
The morning after the election, during announcements, Blake reiterated, for all of Aptakisic, the details of the scarf-redesign plan. “Over the summer, I had a creative revelation, and the creative revelation that I had was this: However smartly colored and intelligently organized and totally perfect on the right leg our scarves are, they’d be even better without English on the left. This creative revelation was what got me elected, so that’s why we’re getting rid of all the English and replacing the names of our starters with symbols: symbols the starters will choose for themselves; symbols that really mean something to them, like the symbols the guys in Led Zeppelin chose to represent their souls on the cover of IV; really deep symbols that mean more than words, that mean more than names; symbols that capture the spirit of each starter as a person as well as a player. Thank you!”
Co-Captain Baxter, at lunch that day, stood on a table and shouted for attention, then raising his can of protein drink, said, “Bam and I were sitting here, talking to the Indians, and we all agree that this moment’s historic, and we all agree this year’s Indians are historic, and this school is historic, and, on behalf of all the school and especially basketball, Bam and I want to thank the Shovers for voting for Acer, who’s really got a vision here that’s also historic. Even though it can only happen for five of us, none of us can wait to see our symbols on the scarves, but especially not Bam and I, who are both looking forward to this chance to be creative, and know that the opportunity to be creative will motivate our teammates to seize the opportunity: it’s just one more reason to work hard to make starter, and bring home the victory and the glory and so on, so thumbs up to Acer and his Main Hall Shovers. We value all of you, and not just as the army of goodguys you are, but each and every one of all sixty-however-many of you, on a first-name-type individual basis. We don’t listen to Led Zeppelin, me and Bam and the Indians, but you can bet we’re gonna start to this very afternoon. Right after practice, y’all, right after practice. Three cheers for Acer and his Main Hall Shovers. Three cheers for Acer. Three cheers for the Shovers.”
Acknowledged and praised, their three cheers resounding and rifts all healed, the Shovers bore Blake like a casket or champ on their shoulders to recess, feeling like brothers and knocking down bandkids, smashing the fast ones against walls and lockers.
The rosters were posted twenty days later, and the varsity starters gave Acer their glyphs. Blonde Lonnie Boyd chose the cap of a jester, Co-Captain Baxter a tomahawk. Bam Slokum, for reasons no one could or would say, chose peace symbols flanking a bigtop tent, and the starter whose name no one ever got straight—the one whose replacement was himself replaced twice in the weeks leading up to the opening game—chose a bow and arrow surrounded by a garland. The last of the starters to turn in his glyph was Gary “The Quiet Indian” Frungeon, who Main Man attended weekly Pentecostal mass with, a kind-eyed niceguy who liked to shake hands, who no one at school—not even Benji Nakamook—had ever even wished to bring any damage.
Frungeon gave Acer a red-on-white ichthys.
Shovers who were Israelites remembered they were Israelites.
An emergency meeting by the dumpsters was held.
The Israelites stated that wearing an ichthys was against their religion, like wearing a cross.
Yet, argued Acer with all due respect, the ichthys was the symbol Frungeon chose to express the depths of his soul creatively with, and who were they to suggest that the Shovers had the right to stifle the creative expression of a soul, let alone that of the soul of an Indian?
Jews, they said. They were Jews, they said. They were Jews who couldn’t wear an ichthys.
So then they couldn’t wear an ichthys, Acer told them, so what? Maybe they could get themselves a different kind of scarf, or cover the ichthys on their scarf with marker, though on second thought marker would be disrespectful, and on third thought another kind of scarf would be, also—anyone would see they were singling out Frungeon, then—but what about another item of apparel? A smaller item that didn’t feature starters, an item on which five symbols couldn’t fit? Something like a hat, but not exactly a hat because you couldn’t wear a hat in the classroom; maybe a wristband or headband or handkerchief? Maybe a patch they could sew on their outerwear?
No, said the Israelites, that didn’t make sense: without the scarf you were other than a Shover.
But weren’t they saying they were other than Shovers? If no Jewish Shovers could wear the ichthys, but all of the non-Jewish Shovers could, then didn’t that make them different from the others?
If being a Shover meant wearing Christian symbols, then yes, said the Israelites, but that’s not what it meant, so no.
The Shovers don’t wear Christian symbols, Blake explained: the Shovers wear symbols of the starters’ souls, one of which only happens to be Christian.
The atheist Shover, Trent Vander, weighed in then: One thousand pounds of this, said Vander, and half a ton of that. Vander told them Jesus was used to make war and do evil and kill the environment, so Vander wasn’t crazy for the ichthys either, but Vander knew God wouldn’t punish the Jews for wearing a symbol that meant nothing to them, not if God was full of total love, which didn’t matter anyway because there was no God, so why not decide the ichthys wasn’t a Jesusfish? Call it two meaningless arcs intersecting because that’s what it was, and that’s what he was doing, was being open-minded, and so should they.
The Israelite Shovers demanded a plebiscite.
Acer scheduled the vote for the next official meeting.
Then some of the Israelites, led by Josh Berman, went to see Brodsky. If I was among them, I’d have told them not to, but I didn’t tell them anything: I wasn’t among them. I’d only read of them, and after the fact. Before I fell in love with June and met Eliyahu, my only Israelite friend at Aptakisic was Jelly, who told me they teased her for being in the Cage—not just the ones who were Shovers either, but all of the Israelites, or nearly all of them, none of whom I knew. I’d decided when I started at Aptakisic that I wouldn’t talk to Israelites who didn’t approach me. They were secular there, and they likely hadn’t heard of me, but still they might have, which meant that their parents might have barred them from being my friends, and their being secular didn’t make it okay for me to risk leading them toward breaking the fifth commandment. Still, of course, I’d hoped they’d approach me and tell me their parents didn’t know who I was, but then after Jelly told me they teased her, I began to hope that they wouldn’t approach me. After I’d read about the nonsense with the scarves, the latter hope only got stronger and stronger.
They were right about one thing: Adonai would get pissed if they wore the ichthys. But that was whole miles beside the point. The majority of Shovers clearly
In any case, I’d never have ratted to the principal about the ichthys, especially not after demanding the plebiscite. Apart from being wrong, to rat was self-defeating. If the other Shovers found out (which they did), then the passive disregard they already had for the cause of the Israelites would, by many, be replaced with active contempt (which it was), and worse than that, it would give them a cause, make them—the Gentile Shovers—the underdogs, and Brodsky their oppressor, a figure to defy.
And that happened, too.
As soon as he learned of the dispute from the finks, Brodsky announced that nothing religious could appear on any item of school apparel, and thereby banned the ichthys from the scarf.
But Acer said the scarf was not school apparel. He said that the Shovers, being a semi-private club, paid for and ordered and designed it themselves, and now it was they whose creative souls were at stake, so it wasn’t Brodsky who’d make the decision, but the “majority of Shovers who would hold a democrat [sic] vote.”