Michael Alig used to be more of an expert in the press. The 54-year-old’s death from an apparent heroin overdose on Christmas Day (and in the midst of a presidential coup attempt) threatened him with the loss of news and he should definitely have waited until after the inauguration.
This kind of dark thinking is hardly inappropriate for the club leader / killer, who lived to arouse attention and get attention by any means necessary. In 1996, as he became even more drugged and less supervised, he and his roommate Freeze (Robert Riggs) got into an argument with his friend / drug dealer Angel Melendez, which led to their horrific killing. to Angel and dismember the body to remove it. (Alig pleaded guilty to murder and was released from prison in 2014).
No doubt he had seen lightning on his dark side. In fact, in 1991 I wrote to Voice of the people, “The bad seed of cha cha heels, Alig will do anything to get an answer, even if that answer is the deafening sound that accompanies projectile vomiting. He’s an arrested boy who should be arrested … a little sweet guy who ends up biting your head. ”
But the Indian-born clubbie loved fighting boredom, complacency and bourgeois values and had organized some attractive events over the years, such as a “Filthy Mouth” contest, where contestants threw four letters to win prizes. and his “King and Queen of New York,” messy shows where his favorite clubs were elevated to royalty. (His story became a 2003 film starring Macaulay Culkin as Alig, Party monster, which was based on the book by James St. James, Bloodbath disc.)
We applauded him as he ran away from the cops who broke one of his “outlaw parties,” annoying events held in unsuspected places where he was partying quickly because out of necessity they didn’t last long. Some kids at the club also point to Alig’s kind side and the fact that they all fit into a family that wasn’t always Manson; it gave them a place in LGBTQ nightlife, away from any harsh and negative reality, for better or for worse.
With 12 “heels and war paint, the kids at the club stepped in to fill a void. In 1987, Andy Warhol, the deity of all Downtowners, died, and I went on to proclaim” The Death of Downtown “in a Voice cover story, denouncing the recession of the creative club, even though it was passionately open to a kind of new wave.
Once again, I must have been a psychic, because I ended the play by writing: “The new center will have nothing to do with the disco and everything to do with outrage and surprise. Maybe it will be an angry rebellion that will take the stick out of everyone’s asses. Well, Alig and his band of alienated and strenuous shit were the new wave, and they paid me to cover it up, doing it in an immersive way, as my column “La Dolce Musto” was a first person that didn’t it had a filter.
Alig and I interacted well. In a talent contest at the multilevel club Danceteria, Alig had offered me “Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll” if I voted for him, but I didn’t, disabled by the bribery attempt and also by the fact that, as a dancer of gogo, he had no perceptible talent. His gift turned out to be to lead, promote and annoy, in addition to throwing (once he tried to force me into a pool set up in a nightclub) and pushing (he blatantly pushed the pills into the mouth of a club boy), get away with more and more demonic acts as time went on.
“With Alig at the helm, external rules barely existed, as long as he was fabulous and willing to flaunt it every night.”
A legion of costumed children, who wanted to be famous, followed suit as they came of age at a time when one could not have sex or was supposed to. But with Alig at the helm, external rules barely existed, as long as he was fabulous and willing to show off every night.
I remember he launched a gigantic attack when he was asked to pay $ 5 for an AIDS benefit, though he shouldn’t have broken me when he launched a party advertised as “HIV-negative only”. Similar to Howard Stern, Alig used satire to perfect the political correctness of people like me, and each time he set foot in the trap.
After all, I was there at their incredibly wrong events, like the Disco 2000 Wednesday at the church converted into a drug rehab center — rehab-turned into a Limelight dance club. The night hosted Unnatural Acts Revue, which featured a boy drinking his own urine, and a girl riding the prosthesis and stump of a dancing amputee. Part of me wanted to shower, while another part felt that Alig celebrated anyone different or perverse in a way that the promoters of oppression should allow to do.
In daytime talk shows like Geraldo Rivera’s, I was the expert, trying to find a balance between mocking Alig’s cunning while maintaining the puritanical, homophobic wave he wanted to put a stake in the groin. Years before he reached into his pants to adjust the microphone, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani was on a 1990s crusade to crack down on nightlife and remove all strangers from the demons’ drink, which seemed to make Alig be even more determined to be a bad night boy.
And it spiraled, seeming barely consistent when I went to his apartment in the late ’95s for a club-related meeting that never happened. In April 1996, I published a mention of a missing club in the Alig sphere and followed it up with my blind article showing the buzz about the death of Martell and Drano, and the equally horrific aftermath.
Page six I picked up my items and one New York of the magazine and made it the main theme, “Mystery of the Missing Club Kid.” Later that year, the body came to the surface and Alig and Freeze were handcuffed, as the carmanyola brigade lamented Angel’s life and his own lifestyle.
In 1997 I interviewed Alig at the Metropolitan Detention Center, where he was imprisoned at the time. “Heroin cures boredom,” he told me. “If I took heroin, I could look at this chair for eight hours without needing any other stimulus. But I am convinced that, once I am out, I will stay clean ”. But he didn’t. It didn’t even stay clean inside.
Once free, he kept tweeting me, saying he wanted to reunite, but I have to admit I flew him. When I met him on the set of a movie, he looked the same as before: messy, restless, and talking about his press. He even claimed that, contrary to my blind article, Drano was not used during the murder, but it was a good story, so I had always followed him. It would be like Alig, but I didn’t buy it, as using Drano was like him too.
In 2016, I agreed to participate in an independent film called Vamp Bikers Three, in which Alig played a zombie named God and I was a crazy doctor named Hedda Hopper. Our interaction immediately revived our old joke rhythms (with an underlying discomfort, of course), and I only saw him fly on the set once. The fact that it made me pop a stack of DVDs related to the murder I had by chance (like Murder of toolboxes) was brutal, but he showed that he still had that urge to irritate and horrify.
In 2016, Alig spoke with Anthony Haden-Guest in a Daily Beast interview about his release from prison. “I thought that going home would solve all my problems and I would be happy. But I came home and I wasn’t. I went home and realized that it really doesn’t matter if I’m here or I’m there. I am the same person! ”
Haden-Guest asked Alig if the prison had changed him. “It simply came to our notice then. Now I know who I am. ”
“Of course, I’m sorry. But that seems trite. No word can make a difference anymore. They are actions.”
– Michael Alig
“Of course I’m sorry,” he said of his involvement in Meléndez’s murder. “It simply came to our notice then. No word can make a difference anymore. They are actions. There is a beneficial element in all my projects ”.
Reporter Ernie Garcia had been part of Alig’s circle, playing the role of Clara the Carefree Chicken on the 2000 album, when she was known as Ernie Glam.
Garcia told me, “I invited Michael to stay in my guest room when he was released from prison in 2014 and spent 16 months with me. I took it mostly for free rental, to help him get back on his feet. I considered Michael my soul brother. He was very generous with me and I loved his creativity and his perverse sense of humor. Unfortunately, he was a deeply flawed unhappy man who carried many painful and self-destructive impulses.
“His demons had led him to drug addiction, which led him to commit a depraved crime against my friend Angel Melendez. I did my best to help him avoid his toxic past after he he was released, but the horror and guilt of his crime haunted him and he went into abuse in 2016. In recent years, I avoided spending time with him because I was saddened by what I saw, even though we exchanged texts and emails. I will miss him, but I am relieved that his anguish is over. I hope Michael’s death will help close Angel’s family members and friends who are still suffering. “
Alig showed varying degrees of remorse over the years, telling me that he had had imaginary conversations with Meléndez, some reassuring, some disputed, although Alig told another clubbie who visited him in prison: ” Oh, no one liked Angel. ” Alig’s amorality was challenged by annoying guilt nuisances, along with her understanding that she would never be fabulous again. The open bar had officially closed.