Adam Levin - The Instructions

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 didn’t want reform (regardless of what it meant). Most of the Shovers’ debates went like this:

“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.