Word: bannon
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...before the school assembly, staged a campy takeover of the school's intramural stickball league, declaring himself high commissioner and installing various classmates as flunkies. He went on to outline the rules, the schedule and the venues (wryly named after various parts of the female anatomy) and, according to Bannon, concluded his speech with a pledge to issue membership cards that, he assured his deeply amused audience, could double as fake IDs. True to his word, soon thereafter Bush began to distribute "officially certified" cards to the student body...
...people treated it as a joke, but as soon as I saw the card, I knew it could work," Bannon recalled last week. The card had been signed by "Tweeds" Bush in cherry-red ink, presumably to distinguish his signature from those of three lesser stickball officials. Above the names were spaces for descriptive data, such as weight, height, hair and eye color and, most critically, date of birth. Bannon rushed back to his dorm and typed in a fake name ("Everett B. Ford"), address and his team name: the Trojans. He then affixed his school picture as a special...
...Alas, Bannon's schoolboy interest in procuring beer was his eventual undoing. Weeks later, he ran afoul of Andover's zero-tolerance alcohol ban and was booted out of the school. (Interestingly, Vanity Fair reports that Tweeds' brother Jeb, busted for alcohol a few years later, was permitted to stay on. Go figure.) Bannon may not have left Andover with a diploma, but he didn't leave empty handed: he had his ID. Unbowed by his first run-in with authority, he set out to dupe barkeeps across the country...
Perhaps because of his mature appearance, Bannon proved remarkably good at it. Presenting a fake ID to a bartender is a tense interaction, pitting one's willingness to deceive against the bartender's need to preserve his job. In a darkened barroom, judgments are notoriously arbitrary. But Bannon's stickball ID proved infallible, never let him down, and he imbibed at will at the taverns of his choice. Often this would be at a notoriously unvigilant bar like New York City's Malkan's, whose entire business model seemed to be based on serving minors. But the seasoned bartenders...
...Although Bannon said he eventually became "tremulous about its continuing viability," he used his card for four years, eschewing the more popular fake ID of the era, the altered draft card. The day he turned 21, Bannon retired the battered document, grateful for its many years of uninterrupted service...