<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\nLate Frontier Myth, __Early Formational Stages\n\nThe dall or Dall's sheep (Ovis dalli dalli) is an all-white subspecies of wild mountain sheep found in Alaska, where it inhabits the most northerly range of any sheep in the New World. A creature of the snowy passes and dry, craggy alpine meadows, a Dall sheep may go its entire life without venturing below the timberline. In wintertime they eat lichen. Their lambs are sometimes carried off in the talons of golden eagles. The rams grow massive, curling horns, with age rings like a tree's, which they wield in fall tournaments of so-called hierarchical head butting.\n\n One morning last September, a Dall ram was grazing on cliffside furze in the wilderness north of Anchorage when a couple of seasoned hunters\u2014a father and son named Keith and Levi Johnston\u2014crept within sight of him down the crest of a nearby ridge. They had traveled from the small town of Wasilla, in the lower part of the state, and both carried traditional muzzle-loader rifles, accurate in their hands at more than 200 yards.\n\n The ram sampled the air, but the men were above him. He went on eating and looking up with the strange wariness of the game animal as it is seen through a hunting scope, sensing everything except that its time has been measured. This sheep, who feared few predators, owing to the sheer extremity of his terrain and an uncanny ability to leap from pinnacle to pinnacle among the rocks, was meant to die that morning, from a bullet fired by the boy, Levi. Something intervened.\n\n There was a deep lapping noise that grew louder. Low in the sky there appeared a great black bird with swirling wings.\n\n The bird opened its belly, delivering more men onto the ground. They squawked at the boy and led him into the bird, and the bird moved off, and the ram forgot what had happened and went to check on his ewes, and the father returned to the locally owned gun shop in Wasilla, where they said, \"Aren't you supposed to be sheep hunting\" and he said, \"Yeah, I was, till the Secret Service came and took my sheep-hunting partner!\" and they laughed.\n\n Levi was in the bird. It flew with him all the way to a city in another world, in what he would describe as the south, in Minnesota, and dropped him into a sort of conference room, full of talkative people\u2014some of whose faces he knew without knowing how\u2014and a guy was touching him, and before the smell of the open country had left his nostrils completely he was leaning back in a chair, having makeup applied to his face, to his eyes and neck, and gel worked into his hair. They had cut his hair. Indeed they had given him a superb haircut, probably the best he would ever have, a haircut designed to shape away the last traces of baby fat from his cheeks and define his jawline, and they stood him in the corner and dressed him from head to toe in new preppy clothes and looked him in the face and said, \"You do not say a word.\"\n\n \"Those words exactly\" I asked.\n\n \"Pretty much,\" he answered.\n\n If facts were unstable\u2014it may not have been the Secret Service, it may have been campaign operatives; they got him not from the field but from a campsite, or picked him up at home on the day after the hunt\u2014that paled in interest next to the sense, as you spoke to people here, that you were hearing a scrap of western folklore being born. The boy who went to hunt sheep, and got spirited off by the Secret Service, and then came home.\n\nAnchorage\n\n welcome, southerner, to the law offices of Rex Lamont Butler &amp;amp; Associates, third-floor suite in a nice gray building, windows looking onto a late-sunny avenue with an alp at the end of it. Mr. Butler is in court. No, he did not mention your name. You may wait.\n\n I had waited hours, into the evening, although the sky outside had not visibly darkened. The walls of the waiting room were festooned with thank-you cards from clients. It was advertising you couldn't buy. They looked a little shabby at first\u2014Butler hadn't framed them or anything, just tacked the back flaps to the wall so you could open and read them. Of course, it was impossible not to read them, not to become engrossed in the serial melodrama that had flowered from his paneling over twenty-five years. Mr. Butler, you are a good man. Mr. Butler, without you my sister's babies would have no mother. Mr. Butler, nobody would listen to us, but you took our case, you listened to us. Anyone who grew up in Anchorage knew Rex Lamont Butler's ads from the paper, saying to remember his name, if you were in trouble.\n\n Sherry Johnston made contact with Butler in February of this year. At first it had nothing to do with her famous son, Levi. She herself had been busted a couple of months before for selling a handful of OxyContin tablets to an informant in the Target parking lot in Wasilla. It later emerged that another, only slightly less small-time Wasilla pill-peddler had given her up to the police, lacking, evidently, any prize more valuable than the chronically pain-addled mother of two, caught trading out of her own legitimate prescription in order to pay bills.\n\n Thus far, Sherry Johnston's tale follows a recognizable course of small-town values. The weirdness of her case is that while she was being pursued by the state police\u2014whose informant was sending her texts, asking her to \"go for coffee\" at Target\u2014she was also undergoing occasional surveillance by the U.S. Secret Service. Her 18-year-old had impregnated the governor's daughter, the kids were engaged, now the governor was maybe becoming vice president. Either that brought the Johnstons close enough to the White House to make them conceivable targets, albeit of some wildly confused and frustrated polar terrorists, or else the Secret Service possessed an interest purely in Sherry's house, as a place where the candidate's daughter spent time. The state government took an unusual interest in the case. That, along with the monitoring, delayed the bust by several weeks.\n\n When McCain lost the election in November, Sarah Palin went back to being governor, and the black cars faded away, and pretty soon the cops had what they needed and were pounding on the front door of Sherry Johnston's house\u2014Levi's boyhood home. They booked her. It was a week before Christmas. The defense lawyer from the public-advocacy office said she should probably get ready to do a little time. The case progressed poorly, and she reached out to Butler in a pleading four-page handwritten letter. Butler took pity on this woman, \"poor as a church mouse,\" and agreed to represent her for essentially nothing.\n\n Did it affect Rex Butler's decision, the fact that, due to the Palin connection, Sherry Johnston's parking-lot bust is the only Alaskan criminal case anyone in the Lower Forty-eight has ever heard of, and that Rex Butler is not a man to shrink from a little fame Or that former state assistant attorney general Butler\u2014who is black and a Democrat and has publicly characterized Governor Palin's policies on African-Americans as \"Don't need them, don't worry about them\"\u2014might take a certain glee in putting more light on a situation the Republican governor prays every night will go sailing on a vanishing glacier As a Frenchman said, we do not look where God looks, we would not understand what is written there.\n\n Only after Butler had taken on Sherry Johnston as a client, for the OxyContin thing, did she ask him to help her boy, Levi, too. \"Please help my son,\" she said.\n\n This is why I am here, waiting for Butler. Levi has people now. To get to Levi, you must go through Rex.\n\n When Rex showed up, he was preceded by someone, a person called Tank. To get to Rex, you must get past Tank. That is unlikely until such time as Tank decides to let you by\u2014which he will do, in that event, with good humor, having assumed his gentle-giant mien. He does 300 push-ups in one set every night before going to bed, and he often goes to bed at three in the morning. He has had some kind of military training. Later, when we knew each other, when we \"had history,\" as he put it, I asked him to let me try on his soft sky blue Sean John baseball cap. It dropped straight to my eyes, loose as a candle snuffer, and my head is so large that a waitress at a country restaurant once told me I looked like \"a 40-year-old fetus.\" Tank's head was slowly swallowing its ears.\n\n On the wall of Rex's inner office hung two sets of photographs of Rex with Johnnie Cochran, taken on different occasions. I asked about Cochran.\n\n \"He was so real,\" Rex Butler said. \"If he were here, he'd be talking like we are.\"\n\n \"Listen,\" I said, \"tell me where to stick it if this question is offensive or anything, but are there many other black people in Alaska\"\n\n \"What you need,\" said Rex, \"is to read Black on a Background of White, about the history of blacks in Alaska, written by a fraternity brother of mine, Louis Overstreet.\"\n\n Duly read, fascinating. Classic frontier scenario: Blacks flow in to fill a labor demand or (like Tank) with the military, stay for the relad social conditions and attendant opportunities, achieve in the end a hard-won pride, a unique destiny. Rex Butler is identified as a young African-American attorney \"on the way up,\" a man who \"has a vision\" and is \"working for a change that is imminent.\" The book was written in 1988. There is no doubt he has done well.\n\n Tank's cell phone rang. It was Levi. I could hear him. \"Guess what.\"\n\n \"What\" said Tank.\n\n \"I shot a big-ass bear,\" Levi said.\n\n There followed one of those conversations where one person is holding up a phone and two physically present people are shouting at it. \"How big was the bear\" Over six feet. That's good for a blackie. \"Did you take any pictures\" No, we left the camera in the boat. \"Dammit, Levi. Where is the bear\" At the taxidermist. They were slowly cooking the hide in a special oven, cooking away the gristle and juices. \"This writer needs to see it,\" Rex said, maintaining eye contact with me. \"He's never skinned a bear. Maybe he's never eaten bear meat. Can he see it at the morgue He wants to go bear hunting with you.\"\n\n \"I'm not going into the woods with them,\" said Tank.\n\n \"Why not\" said Rex. \"Just don't wear a brown suit!\"\n\n We laughed until we had to collect our breath.\n\n \"Levi is a very interesting person who has been thrown under the bus,\" Rex said, turning to me. His features took on a grave slackness of extreme fatigue. \"Now he's coming out from under the bus.\n\n \"I think you'll like him.\"\n\nAmong Twenty __Snowy Mountains\n\n i had lunch with Levi the next day. Tank was there, too. That's how it would be\u2014the three of us\u2014for most of the week, back and forth between Anchorage and Wasilla, or as Tank and Levi call it, the 'Silla, as in \"If you grew up in the 'Silla.\u2026\" Rex checked in about once a day to make sure everyone was okay. He wanted me to know that I had this young man's future in my hands.\n\n Levi and Tank were forced to get new cell-phone numbers a lot, and their new numbers were only one digit apart, the last one. It was quite sweet. Tank is Levi's mentor in this new world of people who want something from you. Tank told Levi to say \"Gentlemen don't kiss and tell,\" in case Larry King tried to ask him about sex with Bristol, which transpired. Tank is working to contain and reduce in frequency Levi's homophobic outbursts, instituting a new philosophy of \"versatility.\"\n\n \"We versatile, we versatile,\" Tank says in mantra fashion whenever he senses Levi tensing up around an unfamiliar social type. \"Versatile\" does not mean \"tolerant.\" Tank sees \"versatile,\" he told me when we were playing slots at a casino later, as a plain over which he must guide Levi on the young man's journey from intolerance to tolerance.\n\n They were tense in the restaurant, surly with the waiters. The day before, it had been reported in an Anchorage Daily News gossip column how they were seen \"breaking bread\" in town with Rex. Tank had been identified as the \"super-stud P.I.\" of Anchorage.\n\n He is in fact a working investigator, for Rex's clients and his own.\n\nIs YOUR partner, husband or wife&amp;gt;\n\n CHEATING Having an AFFAIR or&amp;gt;\n\n\n\n FLING Let us uncover the truth. Tank&amp;gt;\n\n\n\n Jones Investigations: Discreet, confidential.\n\nHe may possess superstud qualities, too. I noticed, as the week wore on, that many women in their forties and fifties would experience around him a desire to rub their heads against his arm like a cat. It was a Great Big Guy thing. Life is different for them. They go through the world differently. People on the street enjoy getting out of their way.\n\n Levi was mostly monosyllabic at that first lunch. He didn't know me yet, and he didn't trust me yet, and really, even when he came to know and trust me, he was still mostly monosyllabic, but the syllables took on greater depth.\n\n He did something impressive almost right away. He refused to go bear hunting with me. It was the obvious thing for us to do. Indeed, people at home whom I'd told I was going to Alaska for an encounter with Levi said unprompted, \"Are you going bear hunting\" There's no question it could have happened, had he wanted it to. On my first day in Alaska, he got back from a bear-hunting trip. The day after I left, he went on another one. So it was feasible. And it would have shown him doing something dangerous that he's good at and proud of. (As he said to me some days afterward, in a conversation about fame, \"If I can hold my own with a bear charging me, I think I can handle a bunch of cameras.\") But a little child could look at me and see that any hunt I were to join would end in a Cheneyesque face-blasting incident. No one has ever allowed me to handle a gun, and everyone I know has one. Levi was not going bear hunting with me. He didn't want a reporter to die on his watch, with him as a guide, and he sure as hell didn't want to be shot by me.\n\n As it sunk in that his reluctance could not be weakened, even by Tank, I had to deal with the idea that the kid was a serious person, and I ordered another. Not kid, drink. At least I knew they were going to let me gaze on the bear in the oven.\n\n Is it weird, I asked him. (They have told me that he goes into the woods to get away from it all, at one point hinting it might be the case that I could meet with him only in the woods.)\n\n \"Yes,\" he said. There were people sleeping on his lawn; there were people spying on his house. Tank told me about a computer printout as thick as two phone books, full of numbers that had called his home, not just psychos and Inside Edition but The New York Times and the Times of London. Every paper with a young unmarried father on staff, in the mail room, had that kid e-mailing, saying, Hey, look, I understand, you can talk to us. A guy showed up in a pizza-delivery uniform and pulled out a camera. One night, Levi went out with his dog and saw a guy dressed in camouflage running through the woods with a zoom lens. \"Just running back and forth,\" Levi said, \"like an idiot.\" He has had to cut off most of his friends, who were selling stories to the tabloids. He trusts, during my time there, only one cousin, and Tank. And the men who work at Chimo Guns in Wasilla. There's a wider circle of almost-trust.\n\n In roughly the past year, Levi has experienced:\n\n (a) having dad leave home;\n\n (b) seeing mom get arrested and face incarceration, in national news;\n\n (c) watching own son be born, with Sarah\n\n Palin also in room;\n\n (d) dropping out of high school and taking electrician job;\n\n (e) losing fianc\u00E9e, son, job for reasons that mystify him and may be political;\n\n (f) becoming instantaneously megafamous\u2014Antichrist to some, slab of sweet Arctic man-beef to others\u2014but either way finding self at center of momentous events with zero comprehension or aid after having left home to go on sheep hunt.\n\nLunchtime conclusion: The reason Levi often seems like he has about seventy-five English words with which to process and articulate these experiences and their effect on his interior life is that he has been thoroughly traumatized by them.\n\n Rex was right, you kind of liked him. He had no sense of entitlement, because he never expected anything. When he started dating Bristol, her mother was a former mayor of Wasilla, and now I have seen Wasilla. He was never interested in her family, and they never really liked him. Todd tolerated him, Levi says. They went riding on snowmobiles.\n\n You may be aware\u2014it became an item of trivia during Sarah Palin's rise\u2014that if you say \"snowmobile\" in Alaska, people laugh at you and tell you that it's \"snow machine.\" That's what Levi would have said, and did say. Here was the exchange. Q: \"What is Bristol like Tell me about her.\" A: \"I don't know. Pretty smart. Her family does a lot of snow-machining.\" Let me address this issue briefly. Snowmobile is an excellent and distinct-sounding word that has been honed and rounded by millions of mouths over nearly a hundred years into a luminous nugget of idiomatic data. To go riding on a snowmobile means something. The snow itself, and the cold wind, have established residence in that word. Scarves and goggles and heroic rescues and even a slight French accent are there. A snow machine is a machine that makes snow for a rich kid's birthday party. What if I were to make myself a pair of snowshoes and wear them out one day, and when met by admiring persons who said, \"Nice snowshoes,\" I'd pivot on them and say, \"They're snowplanks, idiot.\"\n\n When Levi and Todd were riding on their snowmobiles, Levi liked to \"do jumps and things, go all over\"; Todd liked to \"go straight ahead at a hundred miles per hour\" (which must be considered a possible cause of the flash-frozen appearance of Todd Palin's visage). Levi tells me that on several occasions, Todd even offered to buy Bristol a new car if she would dump Levi.\n\nMomentito\n\n it takes some mental effort to recover the feeling of how much he seemed to mean at one time, and practically yesterday. Obama has made him seem kitschy already, has stolen his power to signify. Not presuming anything about one's politics\u2014referring instead to the sheer dynamism of events since the election. We are a couple of beads farther along the necklace of cultural time from Levi. We are post-Levi. It's decadent to think of him now. But the chemical traces remain of a plausibility structure inside which his very face seemed full of information and even warning. Something was happening to the country, it was splitting in two. Levi looked like a place where the ripping might start. We were laughing at him then, too, of course\u2014that was largely it. If McCain's choosing Palin had been cynical (as borne out by their recoiling from each other in defeat), not until his embrace of Levi did things become farcical. September 3, on the tarmac, that was when you knew we had reached some point, some level. The McCains came out to welcome the Palins onto the ticket. It was an introduction and some kind of cryptic archconservative coronation. Wind blowing, Bristol dressed in a crisp khaki dress coat. Suddenly into the group shot hove this Levi, chaw-chomping Levi, young, dumb, and full of comeliness, a self-proclaimed redneck hockey enthusiast, no-kids-wanting-but-no-protection-using Levi Johnston, tricked out like a duck hunter now, granted, not like a serious hunter, but no less ready to kick your ass if you messed with him or manifested homosexual tendencies around him. He was at once a bodying forth of the Bush octad and its whole queasy bargain with American masculinity, and at the same time a captivating time bomb of white Alaskan authenticity, with a tattoo on his ring finger. We knew he was there only because it had been deemed worse for him not to be there. That gave him a curious magnetism. And John McCain, fine, he was trying to win a campaign, he's an opportunist. He's also a United States senator and a war hero, and there was something in how he greeted Levi\u2014how for a second it mattered whether he greeted this boy, and in what manner\u2014like an acknowledgment. Not of one man to another, exactly, but of one force to another. It was either the beginning or the end of something. Briefly recall when you didn't know which.\n\nWasilla\n\n it is a shithole surrounded by such loveliness. Stand there and blink back and forth, shutting your left eye, then your right. Left eye: spit of highway, aggressive proliferation of half-abandoned strip malls, a few roads dwindling off to little houses. Right eye: the mountains, the expanding sky, the shadowy crevasses, a bald eagle. Highway, strip malls, little houses; mountains, sky, crevasses, eagle. Highwaystripmallslittlehouses; mountainsskycrevasseseagle.\n\n Both eyes: Wasilla.\n\n For most of its history, the Iditarod dogsled race began here, in the heart of the Mat-Su Valley, but the snow is not coming heavy enough anymore. They have moved the starting line.\n\n You can feel the Palins. From my budget hotel on Lake Lucille, I can see the big wooden wall that surrounds their house, and a roof beyond it. They are of this place, they belong here, but their power has disturbed an equilibrium. At the gun shop, where the owners have known the family forever, the men at the counter say they believe deep down that when she puts her head on her pillow at night, she wishes she had never said yes to McCain. It's a remark made with some sadness, sure, but also by way of indicating Cincinnatus qualities.\n\n She is a great American frontier story. Maybe that was hard for you, as it was for me, to see, when we were so busy hoping she would win or lose. But the historical demiurge that spoke through Sarah Palin is one that has cyclically made and remade this country. The funny grammar and the grating voice, the appeal to the old ways hand in hand with new kinds of political ferocity. Tocqueville would have loved her, would have taken her by the hand and walked with her in a meadow. Here it is happening again, at the end of our west. Levi is a mushroom growing in the shadow of that story, I know. But one can talk to Levi.\n\n \"Do you want to go on a trip on one of those planes with the floating things that can land in a lake\" I asked him. \"What's that called\"\n\n \"A floatplane,\" he said.\n\n Levi's unemployed. That makes helping take care of his son, Tripp, tricky. He has been on The Tyra Banks Show, where he met Nick Lachey, but he has very little money. Sarah Palin's father has called him a deadbeat dad in the paper. Levi then responded, saying he's tried to get a job but his notoriety makes it impossible. No crew boss wants paparazzi following his men around, I suppose. And they are mainly Palin people around here. Levi's known to be on the outs.\n\n At one point, before he and Bristol broke up, he did have a job, as an apprentice electrician on the North Slope, where the pipelines are. His father works there, in management. But reporters started scrutinizing everything connected with Sarah Palin, looking for ethics violations, and someone noticed that to get Levi's apprenticeship, you were supposed to have finished high school. Had Palin asked someone to bend the rules Levi's dad told him he ought to go ahead and quit, before they were forced to fire him.\n\nIs he actively seeking work That's not really something you can quantify. I didn't see him fill out any applications, but then I didn't see him cleaning his rifles, either. I don't know what he does. He goes places.\n\n Is it possible that he considers me his work, that he's hoping greater media exposure and \"the chance to tell his story\" (huge book deal) will lead to a life in which he doesn't have to fly back and forth to and from the slope, living in a rented house with a dozen other men, shivering his ass off with a wrench in his hand You bet your frozen titties.\n\n Warrior\n\nhe drove me by the rinks where he played hockey growing up.\n\n Levi was exceptionally good at hockey. And in hockey country. Freshman varsity, junior nationals, college scouts. Called \"a game changer\" by his coaches. He skated the last game of his junior season on a broken tibia and helped win it. Earlier he had scored both goals in a 2\u20130 upset that was called Wasilla's \"most significant victory in a decade.\"\n\n He took me to his backyard, where there was a square depression in the grass, as if an older cabin had once stood there. Every winter the water truck would come and fill it up, and the yard would freeze. Lots of people do this up there, he said. As it froze, you leveled it with a hot brush. Levi's father played goal, and Levi would skate up and down and fire the puck all day. The yard was full of horns and antlers and the jawbones of other animals.\n\n When he says, \"I hung up my skates,\" which is an odd thing for a 19-year-old boy who had just been playing hockey at the peak of his abilities to say, there's something to it. I don't know what, but he's not self-mythologizing. He never brags, in fact, about the hockey. What do I tell you Levi has chambers.\n\n About the hunting he is more open. One night we were discussing the possibility of his starring in a hunting-themed reality show, an idea for which I did not have to fake the enthusiasm I showed. People had already come after him for Survivor, for Who Wants to Date Levi This seemed much less degrading. Plus I imagined Tank in the show, too. Tank being guided by the surly white redskin Levi on these polar adventures, a hallucinogenic skewing of the whole jive-ass colonialist Tonto narrative!\n\n Levi told me that in his estimation, he possessed \"as much fishing, camping, and hunting experience as anybody my age in the country, if not more.\" I asked how he could possibly know this. \"I'm 19 years old,\" he said, \"and I've never done anything but hunt and fish and camp. I don't see how any of them could get more.\"\n\n He left out the hockey completely.\n\n He did not even skate his senior year. Tripp was born about the start of the season.\n\n The previous year he'd been in a homeschool scenario. Alaska boasts the most lax homeschooling rules of any state in the union, in the sense that they have literally almost no rules. Levi was doing his learning online, through a Brigham Young University program. Unsupervised, at the Palins' house, where Bristol Palin was homeschooling, too.\n\n \"May I ask if that's how Tripp came into the world\"\n\n He did not kiss and tell. He did however shrug and smile.\n\n Summons to the South\n\ntank called and said we were going to Seattle. CBS wanted Levi for The Early Show the next morning, to film an answer interview at the studios there. Bristol, they said, was scheduled to appear with Todd and Tripp on NBC's Today Show. CBS would screen her footage for Levi, then get his thoughts.\n\n Levi was happy because the anchorwoman chosen to interview him, Maggie Rodriguez, was someone he found highly attractive. He'd met her before, in New York. He'd already been on a mini tour of his own, you see, doing The Tyra Banks Show, among other things. It seemed this latest move of the Palins, to have Bristol embrace the spotlight, had been made at least partly in answer to Levi's appearances, during which he'd complained in a mild and nearly subverbal way about wanting more parental time with Tripp. So there was a tit-for-tat aspect to all of this. Plus, one suspects, a desire on the Palins' part to control the Bristol-and-Levi narrative or position it for minimum damage to a 2012 presidential bid.\n\n Tank explained to me that Levi was not Levi when he left Alaska. He transformed into a personage called Ricky Hollywood. Tank had nicknames for everybody. Levi's younger and equally good-looking sister, Cede (pronounced like Sadie, short for Mercede), is Jessica Brooke, a combination of Jessica Simpson and Brooke Shields. Their mom is Puffy, since she's constantly smoking. If you reach Levi's voice mail, you hear Tank saying \"Ricky Hollywood\" in a high, crazy voice. Levi wears flannels and Carhartts and chews Copenhagen. Ricky wears jeans and nice, large, hip sunglasses and chews less Copenhagen. Ricky is more versatile than Levi.\n\n Back through the Anchorage airport we walked. I'd been in the state only a few days, and here we were headed to Seattle! Ricky Hollywood did it like that.\n\n In the airport restaurant, where a waitress walked up to Tank and said, \"Hey, Shaq!\" we ate our chowder. I read aloud a copy of the National Enquirer, which had a piece about Levi and Bristol in it. We'd seen it at the newsstand. Tank was laughing at the gossip, but Levi's face was tense and got harder the more I read. When I stopped, he said, \"Some of that's true.\"\n\n \"Which parts are true\"\n\n He wouldn't tell me that\u2014Tank had taught him a few things already\u2014but he did say, \"There's stuff in there that's true that only a few people know.\" Someone was selling stories, in other words, someone extremely close to him this time. He looked genuinely troubled. He put the Ricky shades back on.\n\n On the plane, Tank requested a seat-belt extender. Levi slept. While he was asleep, I looked over at him and saw that he had a child's face.\n\n I woke up at the hotel, and the back-to-back interviews had begun. Bristol was on first with Matt Lauer, \"promoting abstinence\" for something called the Candie's Foundation. Candie's is a company that makes slutty shoes and clothes for primarily tween-age girls. They've created a propaganda wing to help smooth over the fairly clear problematical side of that.Bristol was, I suppose, the perfect spokesperson. A favored Candie's slogan runs \"Be sexy: It doesn't mean you have to have sex.\" Bristol came on to say, in essence, \"I had sex and got this beautiful baby, whom I love, and I'm on TV: Don't have sex.\" There's precious little consistency in this world; it's proper to mark and honor it when you see it.\n\n I bopped channels. Levi was on now. I could see that Maggie Rodriguez, for whom his teen-on-cougar infatuation had only deepened since coming back south, was interviewing him from New York. That is, remotely. He'd assumed they were flying her in. I knew he'd be disappointed. It's safe to say Levi's type is a well-put-together petite brunet with strong mom qualities and a flirty side. Maggie was a Latina Bristol, a Bristolita, and Levi had already mentioned, in this connection, that his dad is Mexican, or half Mexican. Levi wore a long-sleeve black T-shirt that Cede had chosen for him. It had a silver word across it in a heavy-metal font. I couldn't make it out, but I knew it was code for versatile.\n\n Levi's message Abstinence is \"unrealistic.\" Therefore we must \"enforce condoms.\"\n\n Kennedy/Nixon it hadn't been. After the taping, we watched clips from the two shows together in Tank's hotel room. Levi seemed a little deflated. Or rather, he was Levi again. Ricky Hollywood had left the building. Levi was getting texts telling him he'd done well, and it was true he'd come across this go as somewhat less \"hostile in his unhelpfulness\"\u2014the phrase one viewer used to describe his Larry King demeanor. Maggie Rodriguez, that lynx, had coad him out a tiny bit, even through the telescreen. Still, you felt that somewhere close to the core, he wished he weren't part of this, that he and Bristol weren't talking about each other on TV like this. It was unmanly on his part, unseemly on both of theirs, but seemed like the smart thing to do.\n\n On the cable news channels, they were already reporting on the \"war of words\" between Levi and Bristol. It was the first time I'd been able to observe this process, described so well by Daniel Boorstin in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), from inside the mechanism, as it were. First, the networks had generated the news: called Bristol and Levi, engineered a difference of opinion (did Bristol even know what abstinence means Not three months earlier on Fox she'd called it \"not realistic at all\"), then aired the segments one right after the other. Now, with Levi slouched there watching, other networks were reporting it as a thing that existed independently, outside of the media sphere. There's a conflict, there's gossip, we must cover it. Later tonight, on other shows, ones with angrier male hosts, we'd already be on to the backlash narrative, \"Can we please shut up about Bristol and Levi Who are they What have they done Let's see these pictures of them again. Why are we showing these pictures\" The whole time, loads of companies and advertisers were making money on the never failing wattage of teen sexuality. I fit into it, too, somehow. Levi was new to the business.\n\n After the taping, we wandered through Seattle. It was entertaining to let myself trail a little behind, watching people stare at Tank and Levi walking together, like an old couple. The ones who recognized Levi looked the most baffled.\n\n Levi wanted to text Bristol. Tank thought he should. Of course I said he should, spreading vulturous wings. \"Screw it,\" he said. \"I'm doing it.\" He texted her while Tank and I watched over his shoulder. \"You looked great on TV,\" he typed with his thumbs. A few blocks on she texted back, \"Thanks. You too! I tried to call you on your birthday.\" They went back and forth some more. Tank and I gave them their privacy.\n\n After that, something changed\u2014Levi started being funny. We walked into a fancy cologne store, the two of us following Tank. The owner was a very beautiful old Iranian woman, but very pushy with the cologne, and she was spraying us all over before we could get away. She told me I was \"conservative, like Cary Grant,\" and blasted me with something on the neck. \"Ach!\" Levi burst out. \"That smells like insect repellent!\" Staggering onto the street, he held his wrists in the air and groaned, \"I smell like a French whore!\" This was Ricky Hollywood talking. Walking by a fancy design store, he nearly stunned me by commenting on a black chair inside, which he liked. \"Nice seat,\" he said. A few more blocks and he saw something else he liked, something a bit less surprising, an American-flag bikini on a lithe peach-colored female mannequin. \"That's what I'm talking about,\" he said. \"That and some pink cowboy boots.\"\n\n \"Not my style,\" Tank said.\n\n \"That's 'cause you ain't 'Silla,\" Levi said.\n\n __\n\n Interview with a Man-child\n\non the flight back up to Alaska, Levi and I sat together. Tank was in another row. I could talk to Levi. He couldn't go anywhere.\n\n As throughout my stay, I was dazzled by the devotional nature of his relationship with hunting. Back in Wasilla, he'd led me around a huge chainy outdoorsy store where they displayed stuffed specimens of more or less everything you could kill in Alaska (excluding varmints). It amused him how wowed I was. Where I'm from, you hunt deer, bear, and turkey. If you're demented, you hunt boar. In Alaska you hunt deer, lynx, musk ox, Dall sheep, black bear, brown bear, grizzly bear, mule bear, polar bear, bison, moose, wolverine, porcupine, fox, wolf, caribou, elk, muskrat, mountain goat, coyote, and large alpine rabbit, and you're just always doing it, shooting and skinning and cooking and mounting.\n\n The shelves where they kept the ammunition were still empty, six months after the election. The day Obama won there was practically a riot, folks buying it up. Now I understood: They weren't preparing for a race war. They were making absolutely sure they could go on hunting. Taking bullets from these people would be a straight cruelty.\n\n There was no way to do this except abruptly. \"Levi,\" I said, \"this is none of my business. Or it is my business but probably shouldn't be. Do you still love her Do you still love Bristol Because I won't lie, it seems like you do.\" It was the story everyone wanted to be true. Young love triumphing over power and greed, Levi as the Mat-Su Montague.\n\n He rubbed at his jaw for what seemed an extremely long time. Tank was three rows up. The giant headphones on the sides of his head looked like two bulbs stuck into a pumpkin.\n\n In Alaska you heard two competing takes on the Bristol-Levi affair. One was the \"under the bus\" narrative, held to by the Levi camp. In this story, Levi loves a girl, she gets pregnant, he gives up high school and hockey so he can provide for her and the baby. When it suits their political purposes, the family embraces him and essentially puts him forward as a son-in-law. When his meager political value is spent, they do what most normal parents would do and discourage the daughter from marrying him, in hopes that she can get back on with her future. He's frozen out of the family. They won't let him see the baby except for a few hours at a time. They won't let the baby sleep at his house. His visits at the Palins' are awkward. He can't bond with the baby. He'd said to me,\n\nJust going over there makes me pretty damn uncomfortable. I would call and say, \"Can I pick him up\" It was, \"No, you can't have him, but you can come see him.\" Just going over there, and Todd and Sarah sitting there staring at me, doesn't do it for me. Todd never says anything, really. Sarah, I don't know. She's a politician. She knows how to throw in a fake smile and look happy. They're pretty good at that.\n\nCamp Bristol tells a different tale, needless to say. In this one, Levi's essentially a reprobate, unprepared for fatherhood. He needs to get a job and care for his son, stop going on TV and spending time with media a-holes like me. Time to \"man up,\" as they say. And the reason the baby can't sleep at your house is your mom's a drug dealer.\n\n If I'd learned anything from the battle in Seattle\u2014Sexy Teen No Sex vs. Enforced Condoms\u2014it lay in the two-sides-to-every-story line. But could Levi at least help me arrive at a synthesis\n\n \"Did she dump you, or did you dump her\"\n\n He gives me the thing about how it was mutual. \"Mutual\" means nothing. Levi, what happened\n\nI would have to say, like, right when we got back from the [Republican] convention, things got crazy. When the convention was going on, I think it was probably like\u2026 I think that's when we all felt the most comfortable together. We spent a lot of time together down there. It was going great. Then we came back. And when it really hit the fan, I think, is when Sarah lost, and they came back and everything was just kind of\u2026just getting weird.\n\n What did he mean, \"weird\"\n\nEverybody was kind of like, we didn't talk as much anymore, you know, and we just kind of like drifted apart, as far as me and Sarah and Todd. Then me and Bristol just started fighting more and more. I thought it was, like, 'cause she was pregnant, she was moody and that kind of thing. So I was dealing with it and stuff. But it didn't stop after she had Tripp. Things got worse. So I was like, \"All right.\"\n\nWhat did he mean, \"All right\"\n\nI left and went back home. Every time we talked, we just weren't feeling it. We were fighting a lot. We kind of knew it was coming. Then eventually we were just, like, we were just friends and that kind of thing.\n\nIs that what you said \"Let's just be friends\"\n\nIt was like, maybe we'll get back together, and we just need a break.\u2026 That's not how it turned out. It's been a long break.\n\nDid you get the sense that her parents were pressuring her\n\nI know that her parents didn't want us together. I really don't think they did. So they probably put a little pressure on her. But at the same time, they told us they wanted us to get married when they found out Bristol was pregnant. Whether they put pressure on her for the breakup\u2014I don't know what the deal was.\n\nDid you love her\n\nI think we were in love. I wasn't one to stick with a girl for three years if I wasn't. I'm pretty sure you can call it love, but it's just amazing how fast it can change like that. We were together every day. The feeling we got when we were with each other, it was just totally gone.\n\nThink you'll ever get back together\n\nNah, I don't think that's gonna happen.\n\nDo you want it to happen\n\nThat's just not even in my mind.\n\nBut she's beautiful, and she's the governor's daughter and the mother of your child.\n\nThere's lots of pretty girls.\n\nShe's rich.\n\nMoney doesn't mean a whole lot.\n\nWhat about Tripp\n\nI'll always have my son.\n\nDoes it piss you off that you changed your whole life for this future and now they've shut you out\n\n He put down his glass of Coca-Cola and said, \"Yes.\"\n\n I folded my wings. Then he laid back his head and went to sleep again, in the Ricky Hollywood sunglasses.\n\n When we'd first boarded the plane, a woman in first class had grabbed his arm and whispered urgently, \"You hang in there.\" The man in front of her said loudly into his cell phone, \"Guess who just got on this plane, wearing the same black shirt he had on this morning!\"\n\nTarmac\n\nwhat did mccain say to him, that day when they met last September\n\nJust, \"You're doing a great job. You're doing great.\"\n\nBut there's one picture where he's almost sort of holding your hands and looking at them and saying something. Do you remember that\n\nWhen he grabbed my hands\n\nYeah. Was he looking at the Bristol tattoo\n\nNo. He said, \"You have good hands. Those are good working hands.\"\n\nEnding, Pursued by a Bear\n\n there's a lens through which, when it snaps into place and you look at the whole situation, Sarah Palin comes into focus as probably an excellent mother. She's looked out for her own blood in her own way. If there's been something Machiavellian in the manipulation of it all, of the timing\u2014if the obstacles through which she has guided her daughter in keeping her from a much narrowed destiny have included her own ambition and hunger for power\u2014\n\n one forgives the animal its nature, as much the political as any other. Bristol is on the cover of People as I write this, wearing her red graduation cap and gown, declaring peace (or, she being a true Palin, nonexistence of war) with Levi and the Johnstons. Lots of unmarried teen mothers have gone on to find success, but Bristol may be the first teen to find success for being an unmarried mother.\n\n The last time I spoke with Levi, he agreed that things are better. Actually, what he said was, \"I can't say they're lying when they say that things are better.\" The day before, Bristol had dropped off Tripp, who had spent four hours with Levi's mother and sister while Levi was out on a boat. Levi also mentioned he'd been on yet another bear hunt. This time the muzzle-loader had misfired and the bear had charged him. \"I pulled out the .44 and dropped him. I dumped five in him,\" Levi said. Another black bear, six feet three inches. Levi is a menace to the bears of Alaska! I call out to you, TV producers: If you don't give that boy a hunting-themed reality show, you forfeit all credibility.\n\n I never got to see the bear hide curing. The taxidermist had gone to Fairbanks.\n\n Levi gave me no dirt on the Palins. He is dirt on the Palins. He is what they are pretending to be.\n\n Live, Levi!\n\njohn jeremiah sullivan is a gq correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/levi-johnston-sarah-palin-bristol?currentPage=2>