Not Afraid of Life (20 page)

To be sure, I didn’t get up from that chair and—suddenly—life was fixed. I still had to deal with all of my problems, which would actually even get much worse. But the difference wasn’t between a troubled life and then a miraculously carefree life. Rather it was the difference between struggling against my problems alone and with Christ who loves me and has forgiven me.

When I got up from the recliner, I felt lighter and more hopeful. I’d need that extra strength soon enough.

A
round this time, apparently, Levi had gotten hooked up with some “handlers.” Handlers, for those of you who don’t live in California, are people who try to help you milk all you can out of your temporary fame. Like agents, but not as choosy. One was Rex Butler, the same attorney who helped Levi’s mom with her drug charges. (Yes, I realize as I write that sentence that my life had become a
Jerry Springer
episode, and a bad one at that.) Rex represents people charged with drive-by shootings, homicides, personal injury/auto accidents, and drug dealing. The motto on his website is “Playing defense, the law and you.” He also is a black Democrat and told the press that my mother’s policies on African American issues could be summed up in this phrase: “Don’t need them, don’t worry about them.”

Rex’s partner, Sherman Jones, is an enormous, meticulously dressed African American whom you could totally imagine as a bodyguard or a nightclub owner. (He’s also known as Tank.) He wears pinstripe suits, large watches, hoop earrings when he’s dressing up, and velour sweatsuits when he dresses down. His website reads: “Who I’d like to meet? You . . . If you believe that your signigicant [
sic
] other is having a fling . . . We’ll unleash the truth.”

Rex and Tank—and suddenly Levi—wore Bluetooth headsets and carried BlackBerrys. They started calling themselves “managers” of his career, our hometown “the ’Silla,” and Levi “Ricky Hollywood.” In fact, once I called his phone and it went straight to voice mail, which said, “Riiiiiicky Hollywood is not available right now.” Rex, Tank, and Levi became inseparable.

Levi usually wears flannel shirts, boots, and Carhartts with a ring on the pocket from his Copenhagen tobacco. He hunts and fishes, but could barely carry on a conversation in Wasilla. But Rex and Tank convinced him to be more exciting when talking to the media. Even though the first suit he ever wore was the one he was loaned at the GOP convention, he began wearing sweater vests, skinny jeans, deep Vs, and sunglasses.

While I was taking Tripp to doctor’s checkups, trying to arrange for child care, and breast-pumping in the car before school, Levi was scheming with these guys about how to take advantage of his new opportunities. Tank famously said to the
Anchorage Daily News,
“So now what do he do? Go work at McDonald’s? So people can ask him, as he makes $8 an hour, ‘Hey, how’s Sarah Palin? How’s Bristol?’”

No, Levi, Rex, and Tank had their eyes set on the money of fame, and they set out on a media tour. Imagine how embarrassing it was to go to school while Levi is talking about your sex life on national TV!

“Hey, did you see the Tyra Banks show?” a friend in the hall asked me in April. He was referring to the fact that Levi and his sister went on that show, on which Tyra Banks asked him if we practiced safe sex.

Though I tried to stay away from all of that, I found out all the details. Levi told Tyra Banks that we did, in fact, practice safe sex. Then she pressed him, since a child had resulted from our sex lives. “Well, what happened? Did you have a wardrobe malfunction?”

“I guess.”

“Every time, you practiced safe sex?” she asked.

In the background, his sister starts shaking her head no. (I think if a sister knows about her brother’s frequency of contraception use, the relationship is way too close!)

“Every time?” Tyra asked, with disbelief in her voice.

“Most of the time,” he said.

“There ya go!” she exclaimed like she’d won at the slot machines. Everyone in the audience laughed.

This was my life. Online courses at home, balancing a baby on my hip, while the most intimate details of my life were shared on national television. Almost everything Levi said was false, but the facts didn’t stop him. Later in the year, he posed for a
Vanity Fair
piece, posed completely nude in
Playgirl
magazine, and starred in an extremely stupid pistachio commercial.

Yes, a pistachio commercial, along with Tank. Levi’s commercial had his “bodyguard” making sure the coast is clear before he breaks open a pistachio. Then a voice-over comes on and says—wink, wink—“Now Levi Johnston does it with protection.”

I
n the meantime, I got a chance to use my situation to warn other teen girls about having sex before they’re married. The Candie’s Foundation contacted me and asked me to become one of their ambassadors. It was an opportunity for me to talk about an issue that I realized all too well had real-life, far-reaching implications. If I could help one teenager avoid a similar situation, then it would all be worth it. And that’s how I joined the discussion about one of the most important issues in our nation.

Many people didn’t like it. In fact, those on both ends of the political spectrum objected to my new Candie’s gig, saying I was a hypocrite giving “unrealistic” advice.

My mom got irritated at all of the criticism—she is a Momma Grizzly, after all! In her book
Going Rogue,
she summed it up nicely by writing, “Bristol isn’t trying to write a Sex Ed policy.” Which was a nice way of putting it. I just wanted to let girls know it’s best to wait until marriage, and that life is too valuable to take a gamble on.

As the Candie’s teen spokesperson, I appeared on television and in magazines to talk about waiting to have sex until marriage. I simply wanted to tell American teenagers that saving sex for marriage was the only way to be 100 percent certain that you won’t get pregnant. That’s all. In the meantime, when I’d appear on television to talk about these issues, the media would invite Levi to comment on my statements.

He also appeared on
Larry King Live
(and other shows)
,
along with his sister and mom. It was such a weird interview, because it’s so hard to get Levi to talk about anything. He was inarticulate to the point of being painful, as Larry King struggled to fill in the conversational blanks.

When Larry King asked Levi if he had an attorney, he said no. Then, after the commercial break, he said, upon further reflection, he did. It was an entire interview of one-word answers and half-truths. Then Levi said, “Bristol doesn’t trust my sister.”

Though Sadie would give a ridiculous excuse (“Bristol and I don’t see eye to eye, mostly because I have friends that Levi has dated”), Levi was right. I didn’t trust her. And I no longer trusted a guy who used to be my snowmachining buddy but now had a spray tan and bedazzled skinny jeans.

Many completely false accusations came from his “media tour.” He said that Mom called Trig “retarded,” that she knew we were having sex, that she didn’t know how to shoot a gun, that she put her career above family, and that he and I had sex in the Governor’s Mansion!

After all of the lies he’d told me over the course of our relationship and the lies concocted about Mom on the campaign trail, I thought I’d lost the ability to be shocked. But I was completely floored.

The most easily debunked myth was the accusation that I wouldn’t let him see the baby. I would’ve welcomed his help, and I’d asked him to help. I wanted to at least fix this part of the lies.

Let’s get together and make a relationship happen between you and Tripp

I texted in May. It had been months since Levi had seen him, even though I repeatedly asked him to see Tripp. (On the advice of my attorneys, I kept records of all these attempts.)

When I didn’t hear back from him, I went to my lawyers and we drafted a very generous agreement. I offered to let Levi have Tripp every Wednesday and every other weekend. Since this was an enormous amount more than he was currently seeing him, I thought he’d be pleased.

But we never heard back about the offer. After a week or so had passed, I texted him to find out if he’d even seen it. He texted:

Yeah, but I’m not agreeing to it, I want him 50% of the time.

Okay

I texted back, a little surprised.

Please come get him now because I have class.

Of course, he was busy
at the moment
. . . and every other time I asked.

On May 14, I got my chance to move slightly away from all of that custody drama by finally walking with my class in our Wasilla High School’s commencement ceremony.

I had always dreamed of this graduation day. I’d seen the fun celebrations so many times in movies, the inspirational speeches, the way the principal moves the tassel from one side of the mortarboard to the other after handing you the diploma, tossing the hat in the air in unison. . . . It seemed so meaningful, so poignant, so wonderfully sad. I imagined my lifelong friends promising to go off somewhere together—and vowing to all be roommates. . . .

Okay, so maybe I’d built it up too much in my mind. After all, it had been a struggle. Going to school and taking online classes wasn’t easy when I had a little, precious, screaming baby on my hip the whole time.

O
ur graduation was held at the Wasilla Sports Complex, and I was fine with
People
magazine covering my graduation. I wanted this accomplishment to define me more than my mistakes.

At the rehearsal the day before, I didn’t really talk to anyone. I suddenly realized that my friends had moved on without me. They had boyfriends, I had a baby. And I was too embarrassed to make conversation with my guy friends. They didn’t care that Tripp had puked on me before I walked out the door. To make matters worse, we were practicing our commencement march when I noticed that the girl in front of me with her lip pierced was one of Levi’s girlfriends. (He’d even sold a story about how they were dating.)

On the night of graduation, we loaded up a bus at Wasilla High and drove to the Sports Complex. The cameraman from
People
somehow managed to sneak on the bus with me, and I laughed.

At the Sports Complex, as we were about to do the march, I approached Sammy. We’d been looking forward to walking together for years.

“I decided to walk with someone else,” she said.

It devastated me, and I went into perseverance mode and just focused on getting through this night.

We marched in by walking around the track at the top of the facility. It was a huge event, and the place was packed. But all of the joy slowly drained out of the experience.

Since everyone wore the same red gowns and hats, you couldn’t pick me out of the crowd. But as I watched all of the photos go by on the slideshow—photos of my friends goofing off and having fun—I felt like a total stranger who’d just come off the street to force herself into the festivities.

When I went onstage to get my diploma, I figured I’d look at my principals and have warm memories of coming of age under their wisdom and guidance. Nothing could’ve been further from the truth.

All of the drama that surrounded life in Wasilla really soured the way I felt about them. First of all, they had kept my former uncle Mike on the coaching staff after he called me—and other students—profanities. Second, they’d given quotes to magazines about me, which seemed like a particularly unusual and unethical thing for principals to do . . . especially since they mysteriously told one publication that I’d been absent from school and transferred to a different school. Third, they let reporters come to our school and offer money to the students on school property to talk about me.

“Hey, do you have any dirt on Bristol Palin?” one British tabloid reporter asked a friend. When she said that she didn’t, he replied, “Want to make something up? I’ll pay you.”

But graduation was supposed to stop all of this nonsense. Mom was the speaker at Track’s ceremony, and I was looking forward to hearing her speak at mine. But two weeks before our big night, they canceled their invitation. The principal said he didn’t want the night to be about politics.

As it came time for me to get my diploma, I looked out into the audience to find my family. They were sitting in the first two rows, but I didn’t see Tripp. I was worried that he’d scream, that he’d need his diaper changed, that he’d make a commotion when he saw me on stage.

“Where’s my baby?” I whispered to Mom. She pointed back to the door, where Aunt Heather was holding him and feeding him a bottle. When I saw that precious bundle in my aunt’s arms, I realized that he meant so much more to me than this ceremony or piece of paper. Still, that diploma was the first step toward a better life together. I waved at him before striding across the stage to get my diploma. I had a 3.497 grade point average, which kept me just shy of being an honor student.

Not bad for an unwed teen mom.

The next week, I was on the cover of
People
magazine, with my baby on my hip and a diploma in my hand. I was the only teen mom to graduate with my class.

Chapter Eleven

Already Ben There

E
ven though I was a proud high school graduate, I walked around town with a scarlet letter on my chest. At least that’s how I felt. I’d read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel in tenth grade but had only recently developed a newfound appreciation of poor Hester Prynne’s struggle to create a new life for herself after getting pregnant outside of marriage.

After all, who could ever want me? I felt damaged, tied down, and unworthy of anyone’s love.

But I remained hopeful, and when my friend Ben came over to borrow some snow pants of Track’s, I felt like maybe I could find love.

I happened to be home, so I answered the door. When I saw him, it was like no time had passed, even though it had been a year since I’d run to him with a broken heart caused by Levi.

Our chat turned into hanging out, and it felt so good to be seeing him again. He even broke up with his girlfriend, which I took as a sign that he was really interested in me. Ben and I went to Kenai with my family on a fishing trip. We’d always scour Craigslist for houses. Not necessarily to live in, but I always wanted to find a good deal for investment purposes. Though I thought things were progressing nicely, I realized I was wrong. He went to the prom with one of my former best friends, Chelsea.

There was another guy, Gino. When we started talking, he broke up with
his
long-term girlfriend, too. He took me to Whittier on a family fishing trip and I so loved his family. That’s when I thought,
Why would God bless me with someone this good?
Again, I took the fact that he broke up with his girlfriend as a sign that he was really interested in me, too. (Oops! Wrong about that as well. After we started dating, he actually was with his ex-girlfriend behind my back.)

Though nothing was serious with either of these guys, I enjoyed hanging out with them and loved the feeling of being “single” after so many years. Well, I loved the idea of it more than the feeling. When I found out both of these guys had been hanging out with other girls and even Levi at the time, it devastated me. I felt like there was no place to run, to get out of Wasilla’s tangled web. It was the most fragile I’ve ever felt. With very little sleep, a demanding infant, and a lot of shame, I felt so down in the dumps.

But like most teen moms in America, I didn’t have time to wallow in my emotions. I had to put one foot in front of the other and figure out my life. Immediately, I enrolled for the fall semester in nearby Mat-Su College for three hours a day and took a public speaking class, which just happened to be a required course. That semester, the instructor asked us to do a presentation, so my PowerPoint was called “How to Properly Swaddle a Baby” . . . a valuable lesson Dad had taught me after Tripp was born. My part-time college schedule allowed me to go to school and work two or three days a week at a local coffee stand. I was starting to slowly build a future for myself, but I longed for a place of my own. It’s not like my home was unpleasant or uncomfortable. I’d outgrown my childhood room now that it was stuffed with a crib and baby toys. Because I was a mom, getting older, and didn’t want to rely on my parents, I wanted to try living on my own.

“Hey, Bristol,” Mom said one morning as we ate breakfast. “We’re going to build a shop for Dad.”

He’d always wanted a place to store his plane and our snowmachines, and our family—with the addition of Trig and Tripp—was quickly outgrowing our house.

“Cool!” I said. “Build me an apartment, too!”

Amazingly, Mom didn’t blink an eye. She and Dad thought it would be a great idea to add a living space next to the shop. That would give Tripp and me a place to live, and it would help me take care of Trig, Piper, and Willow, since I was the only sibling who had her driver’s license.

They let me design the layout for my 1,500-square-foot apartment.

“I want the bed here, the kitchen here,” I remember saying happily. I planned two bedrooms right next to each other, a deep sink so I could bathe Tripp in it while he was an infant, and a big bathtub for his baths when he got older. It would be such a blessing to have a place to stay and I was thankful!

And then, out of the blue, Levi texted me.

Hey, can I have Tripp?

It sounded suspicious. He never asked to see his son unless he was up to something. In May, he had asked to see Tripp, only to have me find out a few weeks later that
GQ
had been in town for a photo shoot. Levi had posed, shirtless of course, while changing Tripp’s diaper. The camera took the photo when Tripp was completely naked. Not just cute “baby bottom” naked, but complete frontal nudity of my innocent baby son. I was furious!

So when Levi wanted to see Tripp, I immediately texted back,

What magazine’s in town?

Sure enough, he had planned on using our son as a prop in yet another photo shoot. It was almost too much to bear. Levi was constantly drumming up drama, pretending to be a good father for the cameras and leaving me with the diaper bill. However, I couldn’t spend too much time dwelling on his shortcomings. Instead, I simply hugged Tripp a bit closer at night and tried to focus on being the best mom I could be.

I
n the middle of June, Mom called with great news that really lifted my spirits. “Bristol, what would you think if I was done with being governor?”

I didn’t have to think twice. When Mom went back to Juneau after the campaign, she’d been absolutely bombarded with false lawsuits, ethics violations, and accusations. Her administration was hit with hundreds of “fishing expeditions” in the form of Freedom of Information Act requests for months of e-mails among Mom, Dad, and her staff. The people requesting the information weren’t concerned citizens worried about transparency in their government. Instead they were Mom’s political enemies looking for something—anything—that might make Mom look bad. One of these requests created twenty-four thousand individual sheets of paper, due to the necessary printing of the e-mails, copying them for the attorneys and governor’s staff to remove confidential information from them before organizing and reassembling them. That’s just one of the FOIA demands. There were hundreds, and they kept coming.

Suddenly, Mom and her staff were buried in expensive paperwork . . . to the tune of $2 million of taxpayer money. Now, if Mom would “unbudget” a chef that could make gourmet grilled cheese in a single bound, she wasn’t going to stand by for this kind of waste. Even though every ethics charge filed against Mom was either tossed out or found no wrongdoing, a cloud hung over her head.

Normal citizens didn’t understand these dynamics. Why would Mom have such high legal bills if she was innocent?

The key was this: anyone anywhere could file an ethics complaint for absolutely no money, illegally leak the complaint to the press, and then sit back and watch the destruction—at no personal cost. However, each complaint had to be formally processed, and Mom had to pay for her own legal defense. (It cost Mom and Dad $500,000.) Her approval rating dropped from nearly 90 percent before she went on the campaign trail to 56 percent.

So when she asked me what I thought about her stepping aside and letting the lieutenant governor take over that last lame duck year of her term, I was all for it. As far as I was concerned, we’d lived through that chapter of our lives and it was time to move on. In fact, everyone in my family and Mom’s true friends agreed that stepping aside was the right decision for the state.

It was a sunny Fourth of July weekend when she held a press conference in our backyard. There was one microphone on a makeshift podium, a bunch of press, and an audience of friends and family wearing short-sleeved shirts. Dad stood beside her wearing jeans, while Piper held Trig. Baby noises could be picked up through the microphone that would broadcast this speech—one of her last as governor—to millions. She had eighteen months left in her term, and they all came to an end in an eighteen-minute speech.

“I polled the most important people in my life, my kids, where the count was unanimous,” she said. “Well, in response to asking, ‘Hey, you want me to make a positive difference and fight for all our children’s future from outside the governor’s office?’ it was four yeses and one ‘Hell, yeah!’ And the ‘Hell, yeah’ sealed it.”

That “Hell, yeah” was probably me.

The nation, once again, was shocked by my mother.

T
hat summer I was working at my job at the coffee shop with my cousin Lauden. Because I made only $7.25 an hour, it was hard to also pay a babysitter. So that day—as she did when class wrapped up and I worked in Anchorage—Aunt Heather kindly agreed to watch Tripp for me, before she went to her job. Lauden and I had poured many skinny mocha lattes that day, when a woman came and placed her order. On her way out, she said, “Hey! We’re looking for a receptionist at my father’s dermatology clinic and spa. If you’re looking for a different job, we have an opening.”

“No way!” I said, hardly believing my ears. “That would be so much fun.” Her father was Michael Cusack, a successful dermatologist who’d been practicing in Anchorage for decades. He had even owned the Alaska Aces hockey team in Anchorage at one time.

“Bring your résumé and we’ll have an interview,” she said as she took her espresso and put it in her cup holder. “By the way, we pay $15 per hour.”

And with that “by the way,” my heart soared. With that kind of salary, I could afford to pay a babysitter and have a regular schedule. I went into the Alaska Dermatology and Laser Center at nine o’clock in the morning and shook the hand of Dr. Cusack, who was such a fixture in the medical community of Anchorage that his office had more than ninety thousand charts.

He knew who I was. You can’t live in Alaska—or anywhere now—with the last name of Palin without people recognizing you. He told me what he was looking for and asked me what I wanted to do. “Listen,” he said kindly. “I’ve seen what you’ve been through, and I want to help you create a stable income for yourself. If you do good work, you can move up in seniority here. When can you start?”

“Tomorrow?” I responded. My public speaking class had just wrapped up, and everyone in the class now knew more about swaddling babies than they ever wanted to know. Plus, I had also developed speeches about the benefits of waiting for marriage to have sex, about Down syndrome, and about the steps for decorating a house! That allowed me to start at the clinic immediately, and I was on the road to a much more stable life.

The ladies who worked there became my instant friends. Marina was a medical assistant in her mid-twenties, Crystal was the office manager in her early twenties, and Janice, in her forties, darted around doing all kinds of things in the office. I was told I’d also do whatever was needed at the time. Though all of us were so different, we shared a serious commitment to having fun.

All kinds of people came into the office—for skin cancer issues, rashes, rosacea, Botox, skin peels, and microdermabrasion. We had exam rooms, and I’d bounce around to each room helping everyone. After people signed in, I’d frequently be the one to take patients back to the exam room to ask some basic questions, like their name, their medical history, and why they were coming in that day. After I’d leave the room, Marina would come in to check their ailment.

Sometimes, after I was safely out of earshot, they’d ask her, “Is that Bristol Palin?”

Marina would lean in conspiratorially and say, “She gets that a lot.”

I could deal with a lot of issues—cysts, stitch removal, rosacea, eczema. But the first time I learned about Botox injections, it was a little too much for me to handle.

“So when we hit the bone, we hear a sound like this,” the doctor was explaining to me as he showed me the process. When I heard the needle go in and make that sound, I got a little light-headed.

“Oh no,” said Marina. “She’s having a vasovagal reaction.”

I didn’t know what that was, but it didn’t sound—or feel—good. They took me by the arm, and I had to go lie down in Dr. Cusack’s office with my feet elevated. It wasn’t the last time I’d be embarrassed at the office. One night, I dyed Willow’s hair but didn’t wear gloves. The next day, my hands were absolutely purple, like plums. And nothing would get that stain off—bleach, peroxide, alcohol wipes, nothing. So for two weeks, I had to endure the jokes of my coworkers as I worked in the dermatologist office with hands as purple as Grimace from McDonald’s.

The questions became even more hushed. “Is that Bristol Palin with some strange skin disease?”

People didn’t realize that the daughter of Todd and Sarah Palin would work at an eight-to-five job, doing normal things . . . as if the RNC would suddenly pay for my electric bill and ever-growing diaper expense! So we had a lot of fun with my easily recognizable face. Dr. Cusack would call me by a different name to throw people off. He’d say, “Susie, please go get those charts.”

Since Dr. Cusack was very set in his ways, we’d pull pranks on him. He always wore blue surgical masks while doing procedures. Once, Janice drew a smiley face on the outside of it, so he put on his mask and had a big Sharpie-induced grin on his face without knowing it.

He also had a favorite Chinese restaurant that made a waffle house look like a gourmet restaurant. I couldn’t believe that someone as sophisticated as the doctor would purposely choose to eat there.

“Hey, want to go to lunch?” he’d ask us. “Just follow me, I know a really good place.”

Every single time, no matter how much we complained, we’d end up at that old dusty restaurant, where the waiters knew exactly what he’d order and we’d sit on the glass-covered porch and try to grin and bear it.

M
y mom is always preaching “Man was created to work!” And that certainly rang true for me throughout this entire time. For the first time in my life, I felt stable because of going to work every day. There’s something about having a job and a schedule that made me proud to be setting a good example for my son and affording his clothes and toys.

Yet there was one loose end, and after so many months of trying to make a steady visiting schedule for Levi and Tripp, I decided to file for sole custody of my son. After all, I was the only parent with a job.