Levi Johnston Is Everyone's First Boyfriend
John Jeremiah Sullivan’s GQ profile of Levi Johnston sounds like Sullivan wrote the entire thing as high as a kite…but in a good way. And although Sullivan implicitly indicts the rest of us for projecting too much onto the poor Alaskan teen, he’s successfully made Johnston into the Every-Ex.
Levi’s that guy in high school or maybe college, before you knew yourself or what you wanted, who was sweet and who loved you but with whom you really never had that much in common. For Levi, his thing is hunting — so much so that Sullivan keeps coming back to the idea that someone should give Levi a hunting show.
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!
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.”
But in all the hunting stories he’s told and tells to Sullivan, Bristol has only ever featured in one of them — about how he lost the ring she gave him and thus tattooed her name instead.