Adam Levin - The Instructions

On the other hand, adherents of the original form (of whom I am most certainly one) have continued to call the newer form simple slapslap , and to call the original form slapslap , even while — in order to avoid ambiguity when speaking in mixed company or writing mid-term papers — they will occasionally deploy the term real slapslap to describe the one they love.

Robotness vs. Roboticness

Though I can understand the motivation to play it, simple slapslap gets me worried and mournful. You cannot simplify what is complicated without subtracting subtlety, and thereby richness; and the willful subtraction of subtlety, no matter how practical it may be (or seem to be), strikes me as a non-scholarly — even anti -scholarly — endeavor. It is not true that a person’s urge to erase or prevent controversy via simplification necessarily indicates that he aspires to become a robot; that urge existed before anyone even dreamed of robots. Nonetheless, by giving in to the urge to render simple what could defensibly remain complicated, a person becomes more robotic.

Furthermore, real slapslap is just more fun than simple slapslap. The scholar Emmanuel Liebman once told me that the latter was checkers to the former’s chess. I think that’s an understatement.

Imagine the rules of boxing were such that boxers weren’t allowed any footwork, were forced to stand in one spot in the middle of the ring and trade blows, one for one, the block their only legal defensive move. The champions would always be the soundest-bodied heavy-hitters. Muhammed Ali would never have lasted a round with Joe Frazier, let alone ever rope-a-doped Foreman. Eventually, as scientific techniques of measurement grew more advanced, boxers wouldn’t even need to enter the ring, much less hit each other, to determine the winner of a given match; the same kind of violence-allergic people on the state boxing commissions who invented the TKO and made it illegal to fight for more than twelve rounds would employ hack physicists to measure the PSI of the boxers’ punches, the rigidity and pressure-aborption capacities of their upper bodies, their pain-tolerance levels, and the physical integrity of their blocks, then plug all these variables into an algorithm and declare the winner. To box, at that point, would be as barbaric as the haters say: two men clobbering each other to prove nothing that isn’t already known.

Just as the stronger will always win in such a contest of strength, so will the win always go to the faster in a contest of speed. And simple slapslap is but a contest of speed. Strategy is nearly impossible. Thinking is all but useless. The game allows for no details in which a devil, let alone a human being, might reside. It’s like a novel about people who use common sense to arrive at comforting, commonsense conclusions.

When, however, the distinctions between balks and fakes and between twitches and flinches are of consequence, a great variety of slapslapping strategies can’t help but develop; strategies based on faking and faux-faking, on drawing balks with skillful twitches, on toying with opponents’ expectations by establishing and then departing from rhythms, etc. Yes, gimmes and do-overs are frustrating, born of and then bearing only more epistemological discomfort, but for every instance of controversy over a balk/fake or flinch/twitch, there are, between honorable slapslappers, at least ten instances free of controversy; ten in which the slapslapper scores by his wits, by his capacity to be unpredictable, and is properly recognized.

Simple slapslap only wishes it were checkers to real slapslap’s chess. Simple slapslap is tic-tac-toe.

The Way It Was Done At Schechter

When I started kindergarten at the Solomon Schechter School of Chicago, Emmanuel Liebman and Samuel Diamond were the only great and honorable slapslappers there who hadn’t quit real for simple. That is one reason why, despite our differences in age — they were both in the third grade — I became such close friends with them so fast.

On the first day of school, I arrived twenty minutes early and went to the fenced-in playground, where scores of early students sat shiva for summer break. Some older boys were playing tournament-style slapslap-to-13 by the bigtoy. They needed a sixteenth, so I volunteered, and they told me I looked like a kindergartner. I said I was a kindergartner, but that I’d been slapslapping for approximately three-fourths of my life, which was true — my mom taught me slapslap before I’d learned to walk (I’m told that from the crib I aborted a round of pattycakes — I don’t remember ever playing pattycakes, but I do get a shake of disgust through my shoulders at the sound of its cloying melody — with a thumb-stab to her wrist, and she, as she explains it, figured, “And so why not?”) — and the older boys let me play, thinking they were humoring me.

I won the first three rounds 13–nothing, but Simon Katz, the sixth-grader I was to face in the championship round, was much better than my first three opponents. I’d watched the last two points of his semi-final. He wasn’t as fast as me, but he was really fast, so I decided I’d mess with him out of the gate.

I won the roshambo for serve (scissors to his paper), and opened with a fake. Simon Katz flinched. I called 1–0 Gurion. “You didn’t slap me, kid,” said Katz. I told him he flinched. “What do you think this is, a nursing home?” he said. I asked him what that was supposed to mean. Simon Katz just said “Tch,” and I figured that he was trying to tell me that he hadn’t flinched, but dodged, the implication being that I’d balked and so it was not 1–0, but either a gimme or a do-over. I figured that when he asked me if I thought we were in a nursing home, he was saying that people in a nursing home often had weak vision, but that he didn’t have weak vision like someone in a nursing home, so if he saw a balk, then a balk there had been.

I knew I hadn’t balked — my fake was all chin — but I also knew there was no way to settle the argument. So I said to Simon: Are we playing do-overs or rotating gimmes?

Simon said, “The score’s 0–0.”

I took that to mean do-overs.

Then I did another chin-fake, and Simon flinched again.

I called 1–0, Gurion.

“What is wrong with this kid?” Simon said to the crowd — this crowd had gathered to watch the finals.

I said, Look, I know I won’t convince you by insisting, but that was not a balk. I didn’t even move my hands. Why don’t you pay attention to my hands instead of my face. And stop calling me kid, because I’m Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, and unless you’re really small for your age, you’re not thirteen yet, so you’re a kid too, and I don’t keep calling you kid, so don’t call me kid.

It was not a very elegant speech — I didn’t know how they talked on the playground yet, and I had yet to learn concision.

Simon Katz was not a dickhead at all, and he immediately ceased to call me kid, but when he said, “Look, Gurion ben-Judah, we play slapslap here, not olden slapslap,” I thought I sensed contempt in the unfamiliar phrase olden slapslap , and the presence of this contempt was then corroborated by some other kid behind me who said, “Olden slapslap is Lame Lamey von Lamey McLamensteinowitz.” The popular X Xey von Xey McXensteinowitz joke-form was unfamiliar to me at that time, and I thought this kid behind me, on top of the contempt for whatever any of them meant by olden slapslap , was expressing contempt for the many syllables of my name.

And I said, You are all a bunch of fuckers.

There was a collective gasp, a giggle or two, and then someone said, “You can’t swear.”

I can’t what? What can’t I do? I said.