Reagan, Punk Rock, and Me: A Love Story
IN THE SPRING OF 1983, I returned to my dorm room one day to find a note scrawled on the college message board: CALL THE WHITE HOUSE. At first I thought it was a joke. It was not unusual to get prank messages: MATT DILLON CALLED or PRINCE WOULD DIE 4 U, left by the work-study receptionist who also happened to be my roommate. I ignored it until several days later, when I remembered the woman from the Reagan administration who had come to speak at my college the year before about professions for women in politics and her work as the head of the Office of Congressional & Legislative Affairs. After her lecture, I had approached her to ask about a job.
At that time I was a sophomore at Goucher College, outside Baltimore, planning my junior year abroad in Ireland. I was also a Democrat who had voted for Jimmy Carter in the most recent election—the only one in which I’d ever cast a ballot. I knew nothing about the Republican Party and was only mildly interested in Washington. My defining character trait at that point was curiosity. I longed to get a glimpse of a world that extended beyond my suburban Virginia childhood and my closed-off college campus. I had not been fantasizing about cocktail parties at embassies or Sundays at the Smithsonian, but I figured a potential job at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was too good an opportunity to dismiss outright.
When I called back, they explained that they had been dealing with an unexpected departure and that they needed somebody to fill in over the summer while they searched for a permanent replacement. At the interview, in a dimly lit, wood-paneled restaurant near the White House, I was nervous; I wasn’t used to eating at places with starched linen tablecloths and elaborately folded napkins. At the tables around us, men in dark suits spoke in hushed tones. My future boss and I discussed mostly literature, and my love of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges—a favorite of hers as well won her over.
At the start of the summer, I took the train down to D.C. to begin my job, reading Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative on the way. Goldwater’s insistence on conservatism as the “laws of God” made me uncomfortable, but this feeling was not unfamiliar; as a minister’s daughter I was used to often feeling like a fraud.
I WORKED ACROSS from the president’s lobbyists in the East Wing, and I sat at the same desk, I’d find out later, that Monica Lewinsky would occupy during the Clinton administration. Our office received both letters written by congressmen and letters forwarded to us from their constituents. My job (like Monica’s) was to answer the lowest tier of correspondence sent to the president, turning down people who wanted to donate a giant blue spruce for the White House Christmas tree, and explaining to an irate conservative congressman why Jane Fonda had been invited to sit in the stands to watch the recent NASA liftoff. We also accepted gifts from Congress for the president: a bag of Vidalia onions; a giant box of peanut brittle; a red, white, and blue quilt.
Twice daily I was sent over to the West Wing, down the long hall underneath the private residence. Early in the day, I picked up the apple tarts left over from the president’s morning staff meetings. In the late afternoon, after my boss had read the letters from Congress and written short summaries for the presidential log, I walked over to the Oval Office and handed it to the president’s secretary. Though the door was usually open, I never saw President Reagan at his desk, but I did often hear the sound of the television coming from the side room where it was rumored he retreated for naps.
I was not a very good employee. I could neither type nor spell, and I spent a lot of time calling far-flung friends on the White House WATS line (a fixed-rate long-distance service), loading up on packs of free White House cigarettes—I loved the gold presidential seal—and sending auto-penned signed photos of Reagan in his cowboy outfit to everyone and their cat. Each day was an odd combination of tedium and enchantment, hours in front of a computer screen followed by Felliniesque scenes: the violinist Isaac Stern serenading ladies in wide-brimmed hats at the First Lady’s garden parties; the Beach Boys harmonizing on the South Lawn; and dozens of tables in the state dining room set for dinner with three-foot-tall candlesticks and gilded chairs.
Because of the shortage of women in senior staff positions, younger female employees were regularly invited to attend Rose Garden functions. We were instructed to sit in the first rows and to look both attentive and impressed. Afterward I would wander down the colonnade into the West Wing, where I’d peek into the Cabinet Room with its long wooden table and the Roosevelt Room with its painting of Theodore Roosevelt on horseback glaring at anyone who entered.
One day, I watched on the closed-circuit televisions as my boyfriend, an earnest do-gooder who was working that summer as a congressional intern, waited at the East Wing gate to deliver a letter signed by a number of fellow interns protesting government aid to the Contras in El Salvador. My boss decided not to accept the letter, and I watched—silently, feeling guilty for not speaking up to say that I knew this young man—as my boyfriend finally threw the letter on the ground in frustration and stormed away.
As the summer progressed, my life became even more surreal. When the First Lady rejected 200 bird-of-paradise flowers, a gift from a Hawaiian senator, I took them home to my un–air conditioned town house on Capitol Hill. My room had been a nursery, with alphabet-block handles on the built-in dressers and a pastel mural of elephants and giraffes painted over the twin bed. I stuck the exotic flowers in any container I could find— vases, coffee cups, saucepans, even a casserole dish—until my room resembled a botanical hothouse.
And then there was the single time I saw President Reagan up close. The East Wing employees were having their pictures taken with him, an annual event in which all the departments participated. I stood with my office mates, and when our turn came, the photographer arranged us around the president. Afterward Reagan seemed confused. “What do these people do?” he said in a wobbly voice to no one in particular.
THAT SUMMER I WAS fragile, even amorphous, unsure of what I wanted to do with myself. I’d been raised in Roanoke, Virginia, by my minister father and a volatile beauty-queen mother. Part of me wanted to strike out on my own and become a writer; the other part, trained by my mother, anticipated that I’d marry a powerful man and that act would be the defining moment in my life. Before I began at the White House, my mother bought me a linen blazer, silk blouses, fitted skirts, and a pair of black leather pumps. “You look like a member of that horsey set,” she said to me when I tried on the outfits. This was a genuine compliment; my mother came from a working-class background, and more than anything else, she hoped I would, by attaching myself to people who emanated prestige, raise myself to a position in society that superseded hers.
But the more time I spent in the White House, the more the protocols and procedures began to seem superficial and unreal. I felt out of sync with the sunny California disposition of the place, suffocated by bureaucratic intricacies, and I itched for something different, a setting where I could exorcise the sense of disquiet I was beginning to feel.
As it happened, just a few blocks from the White House was a storied punk-rock venue, the 9:30 Club, and I went there one night, midway through my summer in D.C. Located on the ground floor of the Atlantic Building, next door to Ford’s Theater, where President Lincoln was shot, the club was a small, darkly lit space; the only light came from television monitors suspended from the ceiling and playing art films on a continuous loop. The neighborhood surrounding the 9:30 had not fully recovered from the 1968 riots that had followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and consisted mostly of boarded-up storefronts and peep shows. Drug dealers would solicit customers from concertgoers standing in line outside.
But none of this put me off. There I saw the Violent Femmes, the Dead Kennedys, the Fleshtones—bands that played angry but intimate songs, filled with restlessness and longing. The first time I visited, I stood in the back drinking long-neck bottles of Rolling Rock and watching as a dozen people up front started to slam dance. It was frightening to see bodies so out of control but thrilling, too, that they were so free. Around them the crowd grew ecstatic and united.
Soon I was regularly slinking into the White House with a hangover and an ink stamp on the back of my hand. My boyfriend—himself in a kind of liminal space—would go with me to shows, but I could tell that he held himself outside of the gravitational pull of the counterculture. When my high school girlfriends came to visit I toured them around the White House, where they were impressed by the China Room, which stored the former First Ladies’ porcelain. But when I took them to the 9:30, they were disgusted by the graffiti-covered walls, beer- sticky floors, and filthy bathrooms. One night, when Gordon Gano, the lead singer of the Violent Femmes, appeared onstage wearing a towel wrapped around his head and declared, “We’re queer and we’re cool,” my girlfriends were horrified. After a few songs I sent them back to my room on Capitol Hill and stayed until the encore was over.
Something about this duality— days at the slickly formal White House and nights in the wild and unhinged punk scene—woke me up. I began my first real journal, describing both the White House barbershop, where the president got his weekly haircut, and the punk- rock girl crying on the curb, her stiff Mohawk bent over sideways in the rain. Somewhere, in those months, I began to learn about the contradictions and juxtapositions that make for the best kind of art.
As August came to an end, my boyfriend packed his bags for Boston, where he’d be attending Harvard Business School, and I packed my bags for Ireland. We didn’t break up, exactly, but it was clear, geographically at least, we were moving in different directions. We said our goodbyes sadly but not bitterly. I was over the idea that a man could save me. I slept through most of the overseas flight, until the plane began its descent, tipping sideways, the wing cutting through the gray clouds. Out the window I saw the lush iridescent island, the first of many worlds that I would make my own.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
