The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin (5 page)

“Do you know who’s going to be over here? A gang of vigilantes, armed. Todd and Sarah are not going to just sit back and let this happen.”

“That’s ridiculous. This is Alaska: live and let live.”

“No. That is Alaska, starting at the end of your driveway. This is Palinland. And uninvited visitors are not welcome.”

THE WEATHER CONTINUES to be perfect. It’s the sort of day when the mountains beckon, when you want to pull on the hiking boots and head up a trail toward the tree line, leaving the cares of low altitude behind.

Not me. I head for Target and spend $250 on household supplies and groceries. In the late afternoon I call my wife, Nancy, in Massachusetts. She’ll be coming out for ten days on June 3. She hasn’t been here since 1976, when she worked as a reporter at the
Anchorage Daily News
while I researched
Going to Extremes
.

Then I call Levi Johnston’s mother, Sherry, and arrange a meeting
for tomorrow. It’s just after 5:00
PM
when I take my laptop outside. I listen to music while I go through my list of appointments. I’m about halfway through a run of a dozen Hank Williams songs when somebody walks around the end of the fence. I look up.

“Who are you?” the guy says. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m renting this place. I just moved in.”

I think it’s Todd Palin, but I can’t be sure. In the pictures I’ve seen, Todd had a moustache and small goatee. This fellow is clean-shaven. Then I notice his T-shirt. It says, in block letters across the front,
FIRST DUDE
. Yup, must be Todd.

“How long are you going to be here?” he asks.

“I’m not sure yet. Probably four months, maybe five.”

“What for?”

“Hold on. Let me come down and talk to you.” I don’t see any point in carrying on a Romeo-and-Juliet balcony scene. I walk down the steps from the deck to the yard. First Dude meets me at the bottom.

“I’m Joe McGinniss,” I say, extending my hand. He shakes it briefly and says, “Todd Palin.”

Then he says, “Wait a minute. You’re that guy that wrote that bunch of crap in that magazine about AGIA.”

He is referring to the cover story I did for the April 2009 edition of
Portfolio
that pointed out that, contrary to what she’d claimed at the 2008 Republican convention, Sarah’s Alaska Gasline Inducement Act (AGIA) had not brought about “the largest private-sector infrastructure project in North American history,” and that construction had not begun on “a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence.”

“That story was a bunch of lies,” he says. “It was a bunch of bullshit. And you were wrong. AGIA is working. That pipeline is going to get built.”

“I think reasonable people still disagree about that.”

“Bullshit. What are you doing here now?”

“I’m writing a book about your wife.”

“What for?”

“Because she’s a phenomenon. Whether you agree with her politically or not, she’s unlike anything seen before in American political history. She’s probably the most famous woman in the world. And a lot of people think she’s going to run for president in 2012. I’ve been writing about politics since 1968. I’m fascinated by what’s happening now. Why wouldn’t I want to write about her?”

Todd considers this. Then he says, “So what can we expect? Telescopic lenses hidden in the trees and secret microphones stuck under the fence?”

“No. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what won’t happen as long as I’m here. That’s not my style, Todd, as anyone who knows my work can tell you.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t like this,” he says.

“Listen, I’m a good neighbor. Ask anybody. Ask Roger Ailes at Fox News. Your wife is working for him now. Roger and I disagree about everything political that it’s possible to disagree about, but we’ve been friends for more than forty years. Have Sarah call him and ask what kind of a neighbor Joe McGinniss is going to be. He’ll tell you that you’re lucky it’s me renting this house and not somebody who would do the kind of stuff you’re afraid of.”

But the more I talk, the angrier he looks. Finally, he waves a finger toward my face and says, “We’ll just see how long you stay here.” Then he stalks back across my yard and around the bottom of his fence.

I return to the deck. Standing at the end farthest from the Palin house and facing away from it, looking at the woods on the other side, I call Nancy.

“I just met Todd.”

“How did that go?”

“Not real well. He remembers my
Portfolio
piece and he seems to think I’m here to snoop on Sarah.”

“And you told him you weren’t.”

“Of course.”

“What do you think he’s going to do?”

“What can he do? I’m here. I told him if he was worried about me, he should have Sarah call Roger Ailes. Roger can put her mind at ease. Obviously I don’t want any fuss. I hope they don’t either.”

In retrospect, it’s amazing that at the age of sixty-seven, having been a professional author and journalist for more than forty-five years, I could have been so naïve.

I’m heading for bed at 11:00
PM
when my phone rings. It’s one of my Anchorage friends.

“You’d better check out Sarah’s Facebook page.”

“How come?”

“You’ll see. And if you smell smoke tonight, it’s probably your house on fire.”

At 10:17
PM
, Sarah posted this on Facebook:

Along with her post is a photograph, taken from her yard, showing me at the far end of my deck, looking into the woods while talking to Nancy on my cell phone.

Beneath the picture, she wrote, “Hi, Neighbor! May I Call You ‘Joe’?”

“Todd went to introduce himself to the stranger who was peering in …”?

Peering in?

“Overlooking Piper’s bedroom …”?

Assuming Piper’s bedroom is one of the second-floor rooms that looks down upon my house, it would be she who was overlooking me.

“My little garden and the family’s swimming hole”?

What garden? What swimming hole? Does she mean Lake Lucille?

Fortunately, I have enough Splenda so that I won’t have to borrow a cup of sugar anytime soon. But whatever tomorrow brings, I don’t think it will include Sarah’s “homemade blueberry pie.”

THE STRING of impeccable spring days continues. Daylight arrives before 4:00
AM
, so I’m up early. It’s four hours later in the East, and I discover that the media carnival triggered by Sarah’s Facebook post has begun. By the time I’m back from breakfast at the Mat-Su Family Restaurant at 9:00, I’m being called everything from a pedophile to a spy secretly employed by Barack Obama.

Politico writes that Sarah has suggested I’m “really there to peep at her young daughters, noting that his property overlooks Piper’s bedroom.”

It doesn’t, of course, but it’s clear that facts are not going to matter for a while. After posting on Facebook last night, Sarah wrote to her Fox News colleague Glenn Beck, who read her e-mail on his morning radio program: “Unbelievable continued harassment. The reporter/writer who continually writes hit pieces from the east coast just moved in next door. He’s twelve feet away from me right now. Todd approached him on the deck of the neighbor’s house as he announced
he’d just moved in. He’s our new neighbor. He’s also here to write a book about me. I spotted him while I started mowing the lawn with Trig in my backpack. Things like that now are not going to happen until the guy moves out. This is a nightmare for my family.”

Beck called me “creepy” and “a stalker” and said Todd “should receive a medal for restraint.” He continued, “If your wife was treated the way she is being treated—if your wife was under constant attack like this … what would you be feeling? I think a guy who wrestles bears … with his bare hands, in a territory that is unlike anything in the Lower Forty-Eight—these are real people. I got news for you. In Alaska, you hassle my wife, you do these things, you just keep hounding my wife, you get your ass kicked. And I think you should.” He went on to say that until Random House “reined” me in and got me “under control,” he’d never again plug a Random House title on his show.

Anonymous commenters on various websites are urging violence against me, imploring someone to burn down my house and using Beck’s words
creepy
and
stalker
over and over again.

What I find remarkable is how Sarah’s overreaction and false statement (that I am “overlooking Piper’s bedroom”) and blatant sexualization (“shorts and tank top”) of a distinctly nonerotic event (my renting the house next door) has played into the fantasy lives of those who idolize her, triggering torrents of filthy comments and accusations.

Lunacy reigns. The photograph that Sarah posted clearly shows me at the end of my deck farthest from the Palin property, facing in the opposite direction as I talk on my cell phone. Yet some commenters claim I’m looking into bedroom windows with binoculars.

All day I hear hammering and sawing. Todd has about twelve guys throwing up a new fence that’s roughly twice the height of the old one. I’m all in favor of the fence. Maybe once it’s up, Sarah will chill and we can both get on with our business.

I VISIT Levi’s mother in the afternoon. I have to go to her home because she’s under house arrest, having pleaded guilty to selling Oxycontin in the parking lots of Fred Meyer and Target during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Her story is simple and sad. For years she’d been disabled by pain resulting from a botched hysterectomy and several subsequent surgeries. She couldn’t work. Then her husband left her. Then she got into a snarl with her insurance company, and coverage of the Oxycontin she received by prescription was suspended. By the fall of 2008 she was running out of money for food and electricity. On three occasions she sold ten Oxycontin pills to an old family friend named Junior Latocha, who had become an undercover police informant in return for a reduced sentence on his own drug-dealing conviction. She served several months in prison and was now a few months into a three-year term of house arrest.

Levi’s sister, Mercede, is at the house. She has to stay there in case Sherry is called for a random drug test. The testing facility is sixteen miles away, and Sherry must get there within an hour of being called. She can’t drive herself because of the pain medications in her bloodstream.

“It kind of sucks,” Mercede tells me. “I graduated from high school a couple of weeks ago, but I can’t even think about going away to college. I can hardly even go out on a date. Sometimes they call my mom for testing three or four times a week.”

“Doesn’t Levi help?”

“Levi? Forget it. He’s too busy being a star. I don’t even speak to him anymore. He’ll come to the house and I’ll be in my room and he won’t even bother to say hi. The Palins—especially Bristol—have ruined our relationship. Bristol tells him not to talk to me, so he won’t. He has to do what she says, or she won’t let him see his son.”