As we were high schoolers with a fair amount of freedom in a large and bustling city, it would be dishonest to leave it that our free time was always spent in edifying and wholesome pursuits. Many of us had acquired “fake IDs” and had learned from first semester Pages which establishments in town would serve us drinks. From The Hill to Georgetown and a few places on the margins, there were a number of places that wouldn’t bat an eye if we dressed up our attire a bit like preppy college kids and presented our counterfeit identification with confidence and ease. This felt grown up and sophisticated…getting dressed up, having dinner with friends, and at one restaurant in particular, truly novel for an underage kid from Meridian anyway, sipping our beers out of half yard steins.
I have very fond memories of these evenings. A couple of them even led to fooling around with different female pages - one in the bushes abutting the west side of The Capitol looking out over the Reflecting Pool to the Washington Monument in the far distance, and another evening sitting on a bench among the foliage of the U.S. Botanical Gardens. If the locations of romance seem a bit odd, at least part of an explanation is that we weren’t allowed in the rooms of our opposite gender counterparts. Male and female dorm rooms were on completely different floors of a multi-storied office building deemed House Annex #1. We were only permitted to congregate in designated public spaces on each floor during specified timeframes, although I’d heard a few guys were keen on sneaking beyond the public space into their girlfriends’ rooms and staying overnight. And another couple of daring, or nutty, guys once tied some bed sheets together to climb out of their third-floor window and up a floor to get to their significant other.
If, as I wrote in previous posts, I felt internally that I was losing some confidence, it didn’t seem to be evidenced by my new friends, female interests, or our page supervisors. Among the regular responsibilities of a page, I was additionally assigned to work in the impressive and vaulted offices of The Speaker of the House just off the House Chamber itself. There I answered and directed phone calls, and received and delivered messages. I even opened and closed a press conference with the Speaker and congressional press corps once before The House went into session.
Although by some measures I was at the heart of the national and even world stage, in retrospect, I was naïve to many of the players and events of the day. I hadn’t realized for example, until I bought a Newsweek magazine for my flight home to Mississippi for Spring Break, that a fella named Alfredo Cesar, for whom I had often received and directed calls to the Speaker’s staff and the Speaker himself, was a leader of the Resistance during the civil war in Nicaragua and later a signatory of its Peace Accords. Other experiences don’t illustrate my naiveté as much as an innocent lack of proficiency and focus at times, like the time Congressman Joe Kennedy II called from a plane to talk with the Speaker, and I kept attempting to transfer his call without properly putting him on hold, thereby inflicting incessant dial tones onto his last auditory nerve. It didn’t help matters that he kept yelling, “Page! Page!” But I finally got him through.
Paging was a meaningful and motivational experience for me. Its freedom, accomplishment, and esprit de corps all combined to strengthen a thread of empowerment within me. If I could have stayed in D.C. for my senior year, I would have without a second thought. But I accepted, not absent a bit of self-pity and a bout of mononucleosis, that I would return home to Meridian for a final year determined to discover an institution of higher education that would have some of these compelling qualities that paging had possessed.
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I can neither confirm nor deny those nights of debauchery of which you speak...