Lohan had in fact “seen” Lindsay at the soccer game, but it was through the window of a black BMW, which immediately pulled away. Lohan told his driver to follow. They caught up at a light. Lindsay was inside—but, to Lohan’s improbable surprise, so was Dina. Technically speaking, Lohan had followed, or “chased,” his wife. Just two weeks later, he again violated the order of protection, this time by allegedly pulling into his estranged wife’s driveway in Merrick, Long Island. Fed up, the judge set bail at $1 million, required half to be paid in cash (which Lohan did not have), and expanded the order of protection to Lindsay and her three younger siblings.

Lohan was sentenced to 28 days at Conifer Park, an upstate treatment facility for alcohol and substance abuse. As he prepared to depart, he joked that he was in a straitjacket. The arrest, he said, far from being detrimental to his career, had in fact heightened the interest in his TV-production endeavors. He was even thinking about taping an episode of a reality show from within the rehab facility.

But the one reality show he actually had in the works had just moved twelve steps further from fruition. “It looks like the fucking show ain’t gonna go,” said an exasperated Dietl just two weeks after the pilot taping. “I can’t be involved with this guy.”

When Michael Lohan calls me upon his release from rehab in January, he sounds almost mellow. “Paxil is amazing. It’s a wonder drug. If you don’t think I felt it inside me, how hyper I was . . .” He pauses. “You have to be inside someone’s head to feel that.”

We arrange to meet at his parents’ home in Huntington, Long Island, where he has been staying since his release. When I see him, he does seem less manic, but he wouldn’t be Michael Lohan if he didn’t seize an opportunity to set the record straight. In the computer room upstairs, he sketches out a map like a fifties movie prisoner plotting an escape: There’s his former home in Merrick, and there’s the straight line down the street to show he never pulled into the driveway. He had an arrangement, he says, to pick up some of his clothes with a police escort; he didn’t pull in because the escort had not yet arrived. “It’s all a setup,” he says, perpetrated by his brothers-in-law, who he claims were in cahoots with—actually in one of the patrol cars with—the police. When he’s finished making his case, he calls downstairs: “Mom!”

Since Lohan now has no driver’s license, his pleasant and, one imagines, long-suffering mother—she has not seen her grandchildren since the Communion fight in May 2004—has to drop us off in town as if we were a couple of teenagers. On the way, she worries: Perhaps Michael shouldn’t be giving interviews. “You’re not my lawyer, Mom,” he says. “I’m going to do what I want to do.”

Over burgers and Diet Cokes at JD’s Restaurant on Main Street, we discuss Lindsay’s first pop single, “Rumors,” the lyrics of which (“I’m tired of rumors starting / I’m sick of being followed / I’m tired of people lying”) could have been penned by her father. “It sounds like she wrote it for me and her,” he says. “I wonder if she did, and Dina just didn’t want to tell anyone.”

He speaks of Lindsay in almost the same way that reasonably intelligent people sometimes indulge in speculation about celebrities they don’t know. “Lindsay has a good head on her shoulders,” he says. “She was forced to grow up too quickly, but she uses the knowledge she’s gained to the best of her ability.”