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"FacebookPinterest\n\nyes, ladies, yes, this is Jon Gosselin, as seen on TV, yes he's  walking to lunch on Third Avenue in Murray Hill, much like  yourselves, and yes, if you do it quickly, you can take a picture of  him with your mobile device, but no, you can't take a picture with him. Because the Internet, that's why.\n\nMike Heller, who has been Gosselin's manager for about six  weeks, explains all this, and then one of the two women snaps her  consolation-prize.jpg, but you can tell she's just being polite.\n\n Because, come on: a photo of you and your best work friend with  Jon Gosselin, previously semiknown as the henpecked dad from  the TLC reality series Jon Kate Plus 8, now much better known for splitting with his wife, Kate Gosselin, squiring a 22-year-old around while attired in resplendently sparkly T-shirts, and generally jackassing it up like a man living out his own tabloid-hounded remake of Old School, a stock-footage midlife crisis that seemed as much like a failure of the imagination as a failure of character? That's something to show off at happy hour.\n\nA picture of Jon Gosselin alone, behaving himself, though? Waste of pils.\n\n\"We were going to make up a story,\" one of the girls teases as she walks away.\n\n\n\nwell, yes. Well, exactly. That's why Jon Gosselin and his team\u2014Heller and Matt Kirschner, who works for Mike\u2014agreed to this interview. For months, when everyone was talking about Jon Gosselin except Gosselin himself, nearly everyone made up a story, extrapolated from what other people's pictures seemed to say about him.\n\nGosselin's team doesn't deny that Gosselin has acted like a jerk. They don't deny that he was in the hot tub with the babysitter, at Michael Lohan's house with the Star reporter, on the yacht with the Ed Hardy guy\u2014everywhere but in the conservatory with the candlestick. They're here to acknowledge these facts\u2014or most of them\u2014in order to characterize and contextualize what happened, and to advance the notion that at some point Jon Gosselin awoke from his jerk-fugue, looked in the mirror, and didn't like the person he saw there.\n\nSo Heller and Kirschner and the new, contrite Jon Gosselin and I have lunch at an organic-food restaurant, and for the first ten minutes Gosselin sits quietly and blinks while Mike Heller, speaking on Gosselin's behalf, addresses some of the misconceptions that developed when Gosselin was unable to speak on his own behalf.\n\nHeller is 33, gravel-voiced and handsome. A former entertainment lawyer and \"nightclub marketer,\" he now owns Talent Resources, which\u2014among other things\u2014brokers outside-the-box endorsement deals for famous people. They helped CariDee English, America's Next Top Model winner and psoriasis sufferer, become a \"patient ambassador\" in Europe for Raptiva, a psoriasis drug that has since been pulled from the U.S. market, and arranged for Lindsay Lohan to be photographed carrying around packages of Ariva, a dissolvable tobacco substitute, which hasn't.\n\nHeller met Gosselin through Michael Lohan, Lindsay's father. Their relationship began with Heller looking into getting Gosselin compensated for wearing a certain designer's T-shirts or swigging a certain company's water\u2014things Gosselin was already doing, in public and on television, for free\u2014but these days he occupies a broader role in Gosselin's affairs: part publicist, part wartime consigliere, part surrogate brother. (Heller's father, Mark, is now Gosselin's divorce attorney; Gosselin refers to him as \"like, my pseudo-father\" and to the Hellers as his \"Jewish family.\")\n\n Gosselin and his people are used to spinning at TMZ speed. It's September, and by the end of the month the story will have changed\u2014TLC will announce plans to relaunch Jon Kate Plus 8 as simply Kate Plus 8, and Gosselin will go on Larry King Live and tell Larry that he wants to pull his kids off the show\u2014and everything they're saying now will seem a little beside the point.\n\nThat said: Heller tells me that Gosselin regrets going on Good Morning America and referring to the mother of his children as \"someone&amp;amp;that I despise.\"\n\nHeller wants me to know that Gosselin didn't cheat on his wife with Deanna Hummel, the schoolteacher he was snapped with this spring. Heller wants me to know that most of what happened this year happened because Gosselin lacked the sophistication to recognize when he was being used by people like Kate Major, the Star reporter who announced that she'd met and fallen in love with Jon and could not in good conscience continue to work as a journalist while covering his story, a development that seemed to indicate that this story was driving everyone who came near it insane.\n\nMajor, Heller says, was trying to exploit a brief (and, Gosselin says, nonsexual) relationship with Jon because she's an opportunist, much like the French designer Christian Audigier, who invited Gosselin and his new girlfriend, Hailey Glassman, the 22-year-old daughter of the plastic surgeon who gave Kate Gosselin a tummy-tuck a few years ago, to hang out on his yacht in the South of France in July, stoking rumors that Gosselin, who wore clothes from Audigier's garishly jewel-encrusted Ed Hardy collection almost exclusively during his jackass phase, was partnering with the designer on a clothing line.\n\nThere was never a clothing line, Heller wants me to know.\n\n\"He liked the shirts,\" Heller says, \"and Christian kept on sending them to him.\"\n\nGosselin looks up from his shrimp.  \"Actually,\" he says looking sheepish, \"I bought most of them.\"\n\n\"Oh, did you?\" Heller says, laughing. \"God\u2014I thought he was giving them to you for free. That's even worse.\"\n\n\n\nwhile the dissolution of the Gosselin marriage and Jon's bad-idea bender played out in the tabloids, TLC kept rerunning the old shows, in no particular order. You could tune in and watch things go from good to bad to good to worse; it was like (500) Days of Summer in sweatpants and mom jeans.\n\nIn some kind of order: Jon and Kate get married in 1999, when Gosselin's 22. She's diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome, which can make pregnancy difficult or impossible, but prayer and fertility-drug injections bring them the twins, Mady and Cara, in 2000. When Kate decides she wants another baby three years later, she has to talk Jon into it. From Multiple Bles8ings: Surviving to Thriving with Twins and Sextuplets, the 2008 best-seller that lists Jon and Kate as co-authors but is said to have been dictated to someone named Beth Carson: \"He was softening. He knew only one thing in this world would fill the aching void I felt, and that one thing was downy soft, sweet smelling (most of the time), and had the power to light up the whole room with one toothless grin.\"\n\nWhat happens, of course, is that instead of one baby, God gives them Alexis and Aaden and Collin and Leah and Joel and Hannah. The Gosselins are broke, unemployed, terrified. So when a documentary-film company approaches them, on behalf of the Discovery Health channel, about a TV special called Surviving Sextuplets Twins, they don't hesitate.\n\nThe special gets ratings, spawns a sequel, Sextuplets Twins: One Year Later. It plays like a time capsule expressly created for Gosselinologists of the future to unpack. It's about Jon and Kate, struggling with the demands of octoparenthood, but it's also about them getting stuff for free. Dr. Glassman has offered to give Kate, whose stomach looks like a Shar-Pei post-sextuplets, that free tummy tuck. We watch her prepare fifteen heat-'n'-serve meals for the family before going in for surgery; Jon doesn't cook, she explains. She tells the cameras that her family eats as organically as they can afford to. She talks about hiding vegetables in the meat loaf.\n\n The surgery itself is so graphic\u2014it's like watching somebody fillet a shark stuffed with Domino's pizza\u2014that the episode carries a viewer-discretion warning. (Discovery Health, after all, are the medi-ghouls who gave us Mystery Diagnosis and I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant.) But Kate recovers in time to get what passes for a glam makeover when the Discovery Channel is picking up the tab, including a trip to a salon called Bruno's, where a colorist says to her, \"We're going to give you a little bit more attitude&amp;amp;a lot more pizzazz.\" She is, maybe, creating a monster\u2014the situation on top of Kate Gosselin's head right now looks like what a hairstylist gives you when you ask for attitude and fucking pizzazz, goddammit.\n\nThe whole hour is a supermom fantasy that removes personal sacrifice from the equation\u2014you can have your prepregnancy body, your dream makeover, your vegetable-laced meat loaf, you don't have to choose \u2014and it's a template for what the show becomes. Jon Kate wouldn't have caught on without Jon\u2014people like watching a husband and wife approach parenthood as a series of logistical challenges to be managed through teamwork, good humor, and realistic, endearing bickering. But it isn't a show aimed at men; there's never a question as to who is the foil and who is the star.\n\nEven before it becomes a tabloid meta-trainwreck, Jon Kate Plus 8 ceases to be about a family just trying to get by and becomes about a family enjoying the perks of being on TV. The Gosselins are reportedly paid $22,500 an episode. The kids meet Emeril and the Harlem Globetrotters and appear on Oprah, twice. Jon gets hair plugs. Web sites like Gosselins Without Pity spring up, chronicling the freebies they've accepted, slamming Jon and Kate for exploiting their brood. The Gosselins buy a $1.1 million house on a twenty-four-acre Berks County farm. Gosselin quits his job as an IT analyst in the Pennsylvania governor's office. He stays with the kids while Kate goes on book tours, speaks in megachurches, starts empire-building.\n\nThey've stopped seeing eye to eye on a lot of things, including whether or not they should keep doing the show. Their bickering gets less adorable, shows up on The Soup way more. (Back then everyone thinks Kate's the one who's gone diva-mental. Everyone feels bad for Jon. The show becomes a slow-motion nightmare about waking up next to a woman you no longer recognize. I didn't sign up for this.)\n\n\"I always said to Kate, if we would've worked on the relationship, the TV stuff would have just come,\" Gosselin says.\n\nInstead, things go south in 2008. They renew their vows in August, on Maui. It's supposed to be a vacation; gradually, Gosselin says, TLC whittles the family's days away from the cameras down to zero. By the time the Maui episode airs, the marriage is effectively over.\n\n Near the end of the tummy-tuck special, Jon and Kate fold laundry while Kate talks about how her surgery has brought them closer together, \"like a painful second honeymoon.\" Cut to a wider shot; suddenly you can see that they're surrounded by kliegs and booms and bounces. All that reality-capturing equipment looms at the edge of the frame, like the pincers of a robot army, like predatory trees in a fairy-tale forest, like everything that's waiting.\n\n\n\n\"another thing\u2014and sorry to keep interrupting; I'm leaving soon\u2014is that some people seek to be reality stars,\" Heller says. \"What happened [to Jon] was, he was approached with an opportunity to better his life, and his children's life, and his wife's life. He wasn't thinking, Oh, I'm gonna become a superstar. And now he can't go back. People say, like&amp;amp;\"\n\n \"Get a job at Home Depot,\" Gosselin says. \"It doesn't work that way.\"\n\n\"He is famous,\" Heller says, \"so he has to find the next opportunity that has to do with the entertainment business.\"\n\nIf Team Jon's argument about Gosselin's Summer of Douche hinges on the notion that Gosselin's a simple country boy from rural Pennsylvania who chose his friends, his words, and his shirts poorly during a time of painful and confusing life transition, their argument about what Jon Gosselin needs to do hinges on this Home Depot thing. Sometimes they mention him not being able to go back to his actual old job, but otherwise it's always Home Depot.\n\nAnd okay, granted, it would be problematic, not to mention weird, if Gosselin did take a job at Home Depot. But the real reason he's not going to do that is that he doesn't want to, any more than Brad Pitt wants to become a coal miner. Gosselin's painted into a corner, but it's a pretty nice corner. For three-plus years, he was paid to show up in his own kitchen and act like Jon Gosselin, and he's convinced that if he can defuse his present infamy he'll be able to get another job that's at least kind of like that one.\n\nIn the Jon Kate Plus 8 episode that ends season four, Jon tells the camera: \"I can't be 'Jon,' I have to be 'Jon Kate Plus 8,' which is a real hard thing for me. I still haven't come to grips with it.\"\n\nHe still wants to be in the \"entertainment business,\" even now. It's as if he came to grips with his identity crisis and the crisis won. Ex-reality-TV people are the weirdest American tribe going; they're like people who've been hit by lightning, zombies of the Zeitgeist, attention-hungry ghosts. They all seem to forget how to live any way except performatively, as if they've internalized the genre's drama-cultivating mandate. (Think of Balloon Boy's dad\u2014how the whole nonsensical Falcon incident snapped into focus when it turned out the Heenes had been on Wife Swap. Twice!)\n\n\"He doesn't want to do reality anymore,\" Heller tells me a few weeks later, when I ask him what the future might hold. \"He'd still like to be in entertainment, maybe as a reporter. He likes extreme sports. Maybe he'll be the host of an extreme-sports show.\"\n\nMichael Lohan has also been talking up Gosselin's involvement in a new reality show called Divorced Dads' Club, but apparently the first rule of Divorced Dads' Club is that you don't talk about it, because no one mentions it until weeks later, when I ask Gosselin about it directly. \"Michael Lohan's out there and linking me to Divorced Dads' Club,\" he tells me, \"and I've never said yes or no to [it]. I knew him for six days. That's it. Let him ride my coattails, I don't care.\" (Gosselin says this to me on October 1. On October 11, Michael Lohan is photographed visiting Gosselin at his home in Wernersville. He tells the press that he was there to ask Gosselin to fight in a Celebrity Boxing Federation match, an offer Gosselin turned down. When asked about Divorced Dads' Club, Lohan says, \"It looks good.\" Set your TiVos!)\n\nHe's also started a charity, the Jon Gosselin Children's Foundation, in memory of his late father, a dentist who worked on poor kids' teeth for free. It has the usual nebulous goals. It'll help kids in need get medical care; it'll raise money, and also \"awareness.\"\n\nGosselin knows how it's going to look\u2014like he's working the cancer-kid circuit to launder his rep. He doesn't care.\n\n\"Actions speak louder than words,\" he says. \"Whether it's image rebuilding or not\u2014so what? I could save, like, a hundred lives. And the media can say whatever they want. But I can say, 'Look, I saved a hundred lives. What have you done?' \"\n\n When lunch is over, we walk back to the Talent Resources office. It's a converted town house with a war-room vibe; everybody works at laptops around a big dining-room table. Gosselin takes a phone call in the kitchen. I sit in the front room, looking at the giant autographed picture of Lindsay Lohan (\"I love U forever, thanks for being my fabulous big brother\") behind the couch. After a while, Gosselin comes back in to find his cigarettes, looking worried, and then he sends someone upstairs to look for Heller and disappears again. Eventually, Matt Kirschner tells me we're going to have to pick things up another time.\n\nWhen I get back to work, I find out what came up: Stephanie Santoro, the Gosselins' ex-nanny, talked to In Touch, and the story's just hit the Web. She says she and Gosselin had sex nine times when he was supposedly seeing Hailey. \"At one point,\" she says, \"he said, 'Whatever you do, don't fall in love with me, because it's going to be impossible for me not to fall in love with you.'\"\n\n\n\nwe reschedule for September 29, but that turns out to be the day Gosselin gets dropped from the show. Gosselin flies to Los Angeles, checks in to the Beverly Hills Hotel under the name Bruce Lee, and starts telling anyone with a working microphone that he believes it's wrong for his kids to appear on television. When people point out that this looks like an I'll-take-my-ball-and-go-home move, he alleges that if anybody's guilty of suspicious timing, it's the people at TLC, who made their Kate Plus 8 announcement on September 29 in order to bigfoot his appearance on Larry King Live, during which this exchange takes place:\n\ngosselin: Our life is our show, and our show is our life. I want it to stop. I want it to stop completely.\n\n king: You think maybe you shouldn't have started it?\n\n gosselin: Probably.\n\n king: I mean, you made a lot of money.\n\n gosselin: Yeah&amp;amp;\n\n king: In retrospect&amp;amp;\n\n gosselin: In retrospect, yeah&amp;amp;\n\n king: &amp;amp;we shouldn't have known about you.\n\nBy the time I get to L.A., Kate is making the talk-show rounds, tearfully accusing her husband of draining hundreds of thousands of dollars from the family's corporate account. The morning before we meet, Gosselin goes on The Insider, insists he took no money he wasn't entitled to, and gets knocked around like a cat toy by guest panelist Nancy Grace, a ringer so obvious you almost feel bad for him. He stammers some canned lines about trying to be a better man; Grace shoots back, \"Why is this always about you?\" (A week or so later, a court orders him to pay back $180,000.)\n\nLater that day: Gosselin's crossing his hotel lobby, barking into his cell phone.\n\n \"Hail. Hail. Hail! It was three married women with kids,\" he says, then steps into the elevator.\n\n (Hailey saw something on the Internet, he explains later, about him talking to women at the Chateau Marmont, and got mad. He'd been there for a meeting and to see the building, \"because I love architecture,\" and the women were fans of the show.)\n\nAll the Hellers are here\u2014Mike, apologizing, saying Gosselin needs a few minutes, and Mark, a more compact version of his son, in a shiny blue suit, and Mark's wife, Deborah. It's a weird parody of a family vacation: Here we are in the Larry King greenroom. Here we are under siege at the Ivy. Deborah can't get over the attention: \"We were in St-Tropez with Avril Lavigne, and there was a little bit, but not like this. I had no idea he was so popular!\"\n\nUp in \"Bruce Lee's\" room, Gosselin sits behind a desk strewn with papers and TV people's business cards, smoking cigarettes, toying with his fancy sunglasses.\n\n\"I'm the most photographed person on the planet right now,\" he says. \"I got sixty-five paparazzi following me and twelve at the bottom of the driveway. I have a bounty on my head. They're waitin' for me to mess up. It's not gonna happen, because I don't leave the hotel. I've been livin' in here.\"\n\n He's trying on a tough-guy act. The dad you love to hate. He's heard from an informant\u2014he actually says that, \"an informant\"\u2014that paparazzi were planning to send hookers to his room the other night, shoot him answering the door as if he'd ordered them up himself.\n\n I ask about Santoro. He says he never slept with her, that they were in the Jacuzzi together, which was a mistake, but that she lied to In Touch when she claimed they'd had sex nine times. (Through a representative, Santoro says she stands by the In Touch story.)\n\n I ask about the money. He says, \"I have nothing to hide, Alex,\" and shows me a rod page with two Susquehanna Bank ATM receipts on it. Two transactions, dated 9/29/09: $22,000 withdrawn from one account and deposited in another. It proves the money moved. It doesn't indicate if he took out other amounts of money that same day, or on different days, or whether that money was his to take. He says that he's entitled to draw a \"paycheck\" from the money TLC paid his family for doing the show.\n\nHe has documents for everything. Smoking guns. None of it seems to definitively prove anything; the e-mails from TLC's publicity person and the president of the network concerning their objections to his Larry King appearance, which he pulls up on his BlackBerry for me to examine, don't convince me that TLC is the repressive corporate behemoth he says it is, a machine onto whose gears Gosselin was morally obligated to throw his body in order to save his children. For someone who believes that he was thoroughly misrepresented by a reality-TV show about him and his wife feeding their kids breakfast, Gosselin seems to have an almost touching faith in objective truth; either that or he's been advised to cloud the public record with noise. When he says, \"I'm done with reality,\" he's talking about the TV genre, but he sounds almost like a philosopher.\n\nMark Heller's at the door.\n\n\"He's famous now, too,\" Gosselin says, \"so he needs to hide from the paps.\"\n\nHeller declines a drink from the minibar, starts digging in the other fridge, the one with the snacks in it. \"What, you want to eat my candy?\" Gosselin says. To me: \"Comes to my room, eats out of my minibar. That's a Jewish attorney for you.\"\n\nAs Mark Heller tears into a bag of caramel corn, I ask him if he's used to being pulled into the media frenzy.\n\n\"When I was about 30, I had the most famous case in America,\" he says. \"The Son of Sam. David Berkowitz. That was my first experience with the media frenzy.\"\n\nWhich side were you on?\n\n\"The side of justice!\" Heller booms. (This means he defended Berkowitz. Like all great attorneys, Heller has a touch of the mountebank about him. Earlier I watched him explaining to a segment producer from Entertainment Tonight that his being barred from practicing law in New York between 1994 and 1999 was what happens to all the great attorneys: \"You've heard,\" he said to her, \"of F. Lee Bailey?\")\n\nYou've got a real family feeling on this trip, I say to Heller. Your son, your wife.\n\n\"We really do love this guy,\" Heller says. \"He's like a brother to my son. How can you not be here to support him? That man sitting opposite you has changed 25,000 diapers. How bad a guy can he be? And I'm not criticizing her for doing it\u2014but when his wife went out on a book tour all over America, he stayed home. He was the original Mr. Mom. He stopped working and did what it took. And he didn't do it begrudgingly. He did it lovingly. Because it gave him an experience with his kids that he can never replace. You know the most famous musician in the world, John Lennon\u2014John Lennon was a stay-at-home dad. His son Sean is a friend of my son Michael. And the first couple of years of that kid's life, he had a Mr. Mom, and it was John Lennon. And thank God for that boy, that he knows what a father was, because he lost him later on. This man's children\"\u2014he points to Gosselin\u2014\"will always have that to hold on to.\"\n\n A breeze from the open window picks up the piece of paper with the ATM receipts on it, sends it fluttering to the floor.\n\n \"I was home,\" Gosselin says, \"and it was never filmed. She was promoted as this supermom. She can do it all. She does the laundry, cooks, cleans, goes on a book tour. Well, where was I?\"\n\n I say that the show seemed dedicated to that idea from the start. I mention the surgery episode, Kate cooking all those meals.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Gosselin says, \"but who do you think took care of her during surgery? Who do you think emptied her drain, which is the blood crap that comes out from that? Who do you think was the single parent\"\u2014he's getting angry\u2014\"when she was on bed rest in Hershey? Who brought her coffee in the morning, for ten years?\"\n\nThere's all the gossip-panopticon stuff, and then there's this: Dad who stayed home while Mom built a life that didn't require him. In the course of the conversations I've had with him, Gosselin has seemed bummed out and pissy, but this is the first time he seems hurt.\n\nMaybe it's a performance. Maybe trying to stop the show is, too\u2014maybe all he wants is to sink the boat he knows he's missed.\n\nAfter all, it's possible that\u2014as Kate's been saying\u2014the Gosselin kids cry about missing the TLC crews now that they're gone. And it's also possible that being followed around by cameras, even in this moment of traumatic upheaval, won't have any lasting negative effect on them. But would you take that chance? Especially if you were about to get divorced? If you were Jon Gosselin and you didn't have to look any further than your own life for proof that this kind of attention poisons everything it touches? If there was anything you could do to restore some degree of normalcy to your kids' lives, would you be able to not do it?\n\n Gosselin is terrible at being a celebrity. He may be worse at it than anyone else who's been thrust into the role in recent memory. As the act of a celebrity, his move against TLC seems like yet more bullshit. But it makes perfect sense as the act of a father\u2014which is one thing no one's ever accused Gosselin of being bad at.\n\n\n\n it's actually something he's really good at, is the thing. Or at least it's a world he knows, the way an IT guy knows how to repair your hard drive. A couple of weeks before I met Gosselin, my wife and I found out we were having a baby; today, when Gosselin asks me if I have any other questions, I tell him what's happening. It's not every day you get to talk to somebody who's had their hard drive repartitioned by parenthood the way Gosselin has; I figure I should ask the man who's changed 25,000 diapers if he has any advice for me.\n\n\"You want hints?\" he says. \"You're only having one baby, so I don't know what that's like. But first of all, go to every ultrasound. Go to every pediatrician appointment. Be a part of it. Talk to your child through her belly. I know it sounds weird, but it's true. That baby has to know your voice. Make sure you give your baby the first bath. Because your wife has already bonded with that baby, and you haven't. She has a connection to that baby. In terms of maintenance, it's gonna be six feedings a day, so make sure you do at least three of them, if you can. The other thing is\u2014\"\n\n\"It's amazing, huh?\" Mark Heller crows.\n\nIt is amazing. Gosselin's whole demeanor has changed. He's just rattling this stuff off. It's the first time I've heard him sound this confident, this unrehearsed. He's finally talking about something he understands.\n\n\"\u2014if you want to simplify your life, make all your bottles that day. Don't make 'em per bottle. Use Drop-Ins. You can go to Target and buy the generic brand. You drop 'em in the hollow bottles\u2014that way you don't have to do dishes. You just throw the Drop-Ins away. You just throw the bottles in the top rack, put the nipples in a container. And y'know, help out your wife as much as possible. Because no matter what, your job is no way harder than her job.\"\n\n\"That,\" Heller says, grinning, \"tells you who Jon Gosselin is.\"\n\nGosselin ignores him, keeps talking:\n\n\"Learn to change a diaper before you have your kid. Just get a doll. It all sounds dumb, but, like, prove to your wife that you're committed. Because that child is your legacy. I mean, that child will be the image of you in your life.\"\n\nThen this, more quietly: \"You just gotta do the best you can. As long as you love that child and you love your wife\u2014it'll work.\"\n\nLong pause. I feel sort of obligated to break the tension. I say, \"And keep 'em off the TV, right?\"\n\n Heller laughs. Gosselin says, \"Huh?\" He was somewhere else for a minute. \"Yeah. Probably a good idea,\" he says, but he doesn't laugh. Another pause.\n\n\"So,\" I say, \"Drop-Ins, huh?\"\n\n \"Yeah. It's just a plastic liner for the bottle. Oh\u2014and then, when they get to six months, they can have cereal. Buy the cereal bottles. You mix rice with formula. They start getting adjusted to solid foods, and then they start sleeping through the night. Because I'm telling you now\u2014you will not sleep when that baby's born.\"\n\nHe's up out of his chair now, standing over by the TV; Heller's smiling beatifically, laying it on with a trowel. \"I just wish my son could have heard that,\" he says.\n\n \"Make sure she breast-feeds,\" Gosselin says, almost to himself. \"Baby needs the antibodies. And there's always plastic surgery, so you don't have to worry.\n\n\"Call me,\" he says. \"I'll come babysit. I just walk around the city all day anyway.\"\n\nHe's holding an invisible baby on his shoulder now, like a little air guitar.\n\n\"Rock that baby, take that baby for a walk,\" he says. \"Do everything you can.\"\n\nHe asks how far along we are. I tell him about the first ultrasound, how I was disappointed. \"It didn't look like anything,\" I say. \"Just a spot on the map.\"\n\n \"Nah,\" Gosselin says. \"It looks like a  hurricane.\"\n\nalex pappademas is gq's staff writer."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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