The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin (6 page)

Mercede is a stunningly attractive young woman, all blond hair and white teeth and tanning-salon skin. And Sherry, for all her problems,
has kind eyes, a genuine smile, and the sort of resigned tranquility that can come from living with chronic pain.

Neither has anything very helpful to tell me, but I find them utterly without guile. I like them and I’m sorry about their circumstances. I leave, after two hours of conversation, wanting to find Levi and give him a good hard shake and tell him to forget about his sputtering career for half a second and go home, because his mother needs him.

This is what happens in Alaska. People are so open and giving and trusting, and eager to help you in any possible way, that you quickly come to care about them and to want to help them in return.

Sherry Johnston will be confined to her home for three years for selling thirty Oxycontin pills for $800, after having been set up by a police informant. But in January, Todd Palin’s thirty-six-year-old half sister, Diana, received a suspended sentence and was released into a residential rehab program after pleading guilty to multiple break-ins at a Wasilla residence from which she stole more than $2,600. And she’d brought her four-year-old daughter along for the crimes.

Diana Palin used the child as part of her MO. As the
Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman
reported in January 2010, “Investigators found that Palin had been doing similar things before in her own neighborhood, sometimes using her daughter as cover. For instance, the girl would ask to use a person’s bathroom, which would give Palin a pretext to get into the house and find prescription medications and other things to steal.”

It looks like there may be two standards in the Valley: Johnston justice and Palin justice.

Prior to her sentencing, Diana Palin had been in court twice, both times as a victim of domestic abuse. In addition, she’d first sought treatment for her methamphetamine addiction in 2007. In January 2010 her husband (who was not accused of domestic abuse) filed for divorce, seeking custody of the four-year-old child who’d been used in the burglaries.

“I really love dysfunctional families,” Diana wrote on her MySpace page in 2009. “Especially mine.”

Sarah certainly seems to have married into one. Before his current marriage to Faye, Todd’s father, Jim, was married to Todd’s mother, Blanche Kallstrom, and, before that, to Diana’s mother, Elayne Ingram. Kallstrom and Ingram, both part-Native, were from Dillingham, the largely Native town in western Alaska where Todd grew up.

Elayne Ingram was married three times. In a 2001 interview with the Center for Alaska Native Health Research, she said, “I got married at age nineteen and had my first daughter at age twenty … I still don’t feel like I was an alcoholic at that point in time, but I was definitely a battered wife. The beatings were so bad that I weighed ninety-six pounds, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, my mind was racing. We finally divorced after three kids.”

Then she married Jim Palin. “He could provide better financially and I was looking for security. And I found it. Then I worked on the pipeline. When I became financially secure, I left him. By then, it was alcoholic drinking for both me and him.” It was during her alcoholic marriage to Jim Palin that Elayne gave birth to Todd’s half sister, Diana.

Jim later married Todd’s mother, Blanche. He divorced her and married Faye, who was not a Native. Blanche wound up in court after accidentally serving a child a lye-based detergent that she said she thought was fruit juice. Meanwhile, Todd’s full brother, J.D., was involved in a hit-and-run accident after a drinking binge.

“Crazy thing is,” Diana Palin wrote on MySpace, “the more you go through—the better it gets.”

And Todd and Sarah are worried about having
me
for a neighbor?

THERE’S A POUNDING at my door. I sit up in bed. Seven thirty
AM
. The pounding continues. I walk through the living room, into the kitchen. I see somebody filming through my window with a television camera. It’s ABC News. I tell them to leave or I’ll call the police.

I check my e-mail and the Internet. The world has gone mad. Sarah called Glenn Beck’s radio show at 6:00
AM
Alaska time.

“He’s stalking you,” Beck says.

“He’s an odd character, yeah, if you look at his history and the things that he’s written and the things that he’s been engaged in.”

Beck asks why the owner of the house rented it to me. “Todd was trying to get ahold of her all winter long,” Sarah says, “because the house was vacant and we were going to rent it and even ask if we could purchase it, for fear of something like this happening, and couldn’t get ahold of the neighbor, and next thing you know there are new tenants in it—a new tenant.”

“Shame on Random House,” says Beck. “Do you feel, as a woman, do you feel violated?”

“I feel more protective than ever in terms of my kids. Any mom would. Just wantin’ to bring your family even closer and wrap your arms around ’em and not let the infringement on their rights and privacy be so overwhelming as to make us not enjoy our life up here.”

In a warning tone, she adds, as if speaking to me, “You better leave my kids alone.”

Beck is starting to choke on his outrage. “Here’s a guy doing a book on your family who is now able to look into Piper’s bedroom! He’s a voyeur! The only reason why he moved there is to be either a Peeping Tom and watch your family over the fence or (b) watch the comings and goings of your family. This is harassment! This is stalking and harassment! Leave my family, leave people’s families alone!”

“A very classless thing that Random House is doing,” Palin says, “and if I find out that Random House is the one actually renting this place for their author to be able to sit here over our shoulder for the next five or six months, that would be pretty disturbing, too.

“Let me tell you something practical that happens in Alaska. We don’t have air-conditioning, so you leave your windows open all summer long, it’s the only way to keep cool under the midnight sun,
because the sun essentially doesn’t set for many of the days in the summer. Leaving the windows wide open—well, now that’s gotta change, because the guy’s sittin’ right there; we’re not going to let him overhear our children’s conversation or anything else, so, practically speaking, a real pain in the butt, a real inconvenience and disturbing thing, but—”

“I don’t wish anybody harm,” Beck interrupts, “but I think Todd deserves a medal for why he doesn’t go over there and punch that guy in the face. I mean, that is not the way to handle things, but as a man, and you are screwing with my wife and my children … it would take everything in me not to do that.”

“Well, amen, yeah, but that’s what he wants. He so wants a reaction like that from Todd so he can jot it down or he can call the cops and jot that down as a chapter in his book.”

It doesn’t matter that Alaskan mosquitoes pose more of a threat to Sarah’s children than I do. In Palinland, as in war, truth is the first casualty.

I HEAD FOR Wasilla City Hall to have coffee with the mayor. In 2008, Verne Rupright succeeded the woman who succeeded Sarah in the office.

A Vietnam vet, Verne grew up as a blue-collar brawler from the hard-nosed Saugus/Lynn/Revere area of Boston’s North Shore. He came to Alaska with the military in 1972. After returning to Massachusetts to acquire an associate of science degree in law enforcement management and administration from North Shore Community College, he came back to Alaska to stay. He received a bachelor of arts in justice from the University of Alaska Anchorage and embarked on a career as a state prison corrections officer. Ten years later he got a law degree from Creighton University in Nebraska. He worked as a criminal defense attorney in Wasilla until his election as mayor.

He doesn’t mention it in his official biography, but Verne once served as recording secretary of the Alaska Independence Party, the secessionist group to which Todd Palin belonged before his wife’s career required him to change his voter registration to Republican.

He’s a thrice-married pack-a-day smoker, and is seldom the first man to leave a saloon. His office uniform most days is blue jeans, running shoes, and a polo shirt.

I met Verne last fall. I think the world of him and I’m glad to see him again. He’s a hall-of-fame bullshitter, but there’s something genuine behind the façade, which can’t be said of all recent mayors of Wasilla.

“Do you want a gun?” is the first thing he asks me.

“Do you think I need one?”

He considers. “Mmmm, probably not. I think most of the threats are coming from Outside. People around here don’t give a shit about Sarah anymore. They’re burned out on all her drama. Do you have much experience with handguns?”

“None at all.”

“Then I think you’re better off without one. You’d be more likely to hurt yourself than anyone else. You’re probably not in serious danger, but I just hired a new police chief, brought him up from Texas, and I’ll talk to him this afternoon. I don’t care who you are, you move into my town, you’re entitled to feel safe, and you’re entitled to respect until you show you don’t deserve it. You pay your rent on time and you don’t violate any city ordinances, you have a right to live wherever you want.

“Even so, you should put a chain across the end of that road so if somebody does shoot you, at least it won’t be a drive-by. And if you change your mind about a weapon, let me know.”

I’M BACK AT the house when Nancy calls. Fox News is having a discussion about whether I can be criminally prosecuted for stalking and
harassment. They show the picture of me talking on my cell phone while facing toward the woods and away from the Palin property.

“Looks like he might have binoculars there,” one of Fox’s legal experts says.

“He’ll be watching her children, watching her gardening, on and on it goes. She will have no privacy now,” says another.

Regrettably, says a third, I cannot be arrested for stalking, because under Alaska law “stalking” means “to recklessly place another person in fear of death or personal injury,” and, as she concedes, “We’re probably not there yet.”

But how about a civil suit for invasion of privacy? All that takes is evidence of “intentional intrusion on someone’s solitude, seclusion or private affairs,” to a degree that “a reasonable person would find highly offensive.”

Even that is a stretch, one of the legal experts says, “unless he points those binoculars in her direction.”

“Which he will.”

“Well, we think he’s going to.”

I have not held a pair of binoculars in my hands since I watched a horse race at Saratoga in 2004. But hysteria does much more for ratings than the unexciting truth.

“She should go forward and say to a court, ‘I need an order of protection, this is getting absolutely insane.’ If they have pictures of him using the binoculars, peering into these children [
sic
], I think a court would take that extra step and say, yes, here’s an order of protection against him.”

“The children add a whole new element to it,” says another.

They sure do. Suppose I kidnap one? And who’s to say that’s not what I’m plotting? Once you’ve cut the cord that tethers you to reality, anything goes.

Comments on right-wing websites show how far things already have gone:

I have lunch with a friend at a Thai restaurant on the Parks Highway. (Note to self: don’t let anyone persuade you that a Thai restaurant
in Wasilla is “really not that bad.”) After lunch, we go to Lowe’s and buy a chain to put across my driveway.

Catherine Taylor calls to suggest I change the locks because Todd still has keys from when he rented the house.

“I’m sure he’s a gentleman,” I say. “I’m sure he’d never use those keys now that there’s someone else living in the house.”

“I’ve known him a long time,” Catherine says. “I’ve had dealings with him. Change the locks.”

I GO OUT to the store in early evening. As I’m relocking the chain upon my return, my nearest neighbors from the other side come over to introduce themselves and to apologize for the way the Palins have treated me. They say they’re pleased that I’ll be living next door and that if there’s anything I need, all I have to do is ask. A very typical—and welcome—Alaskan gesture.

I spend a pleasant evening on my deck. A few voices of sanity have emerged. In the
Washington Post
, Dave Weigel writes, in regard to Sarah’s Facebook post, “Can somebody explain to me how this isn’t a despicable thing to do?” He points out that “no one has ever challenged the facts” in my
Portfolio
piece about Palin’s AGIA initiative, adding, “not that this has prevented every other media outlet from typing up Palin’s Facebook post like some lost Gospel. But assuming he’s rented the house near the Palins for some period of time, assuming the Palins know he’s there and that he’s writing a book, then what, exactly, is wrong with this?”