M.ichael Alig used to be more with the press. Dying, aged 54, of an apparent heroin overdose on Christmas Day (and in the midst of a presidential coup attempt), he was in danger of getting lost in the news, and certainly should have waited until after the inauguration.
Those kinds of dark thoughts aren’t inappropriate for the club boy’s leader / killer, who lived to stir the s ** t and get attention by any means necessary. In 1996, with even more drugs and less supervision, he and his roommate Freeze (Robert Riggs) got into a fight with friend / drug dealer Angel Melendez, which led to their gruesome murder of Angel and the body breaking up for disposal. (Alig pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was released from prison in 2014.)
I had certainly seen a glimpse of its dark side. In fact, I wrote in 1991 in the Village Voice“Chopping the bad seed into cha cha, Alig will do everything in his power to get a response, even if that response is the deafening noise that accompanies the throwing up of projectiles.” He’s an under arrest kid who should be arrested … a cute little doll that bites your head off. ”
But the Indiana-born club loved fighting boredom, complacency, and civic values, and had hosted a number of compelling events over the years, such as a ‘Filthy Mouth’ contest, where participants spit out four acronyms for prizes, and its’ King and Queen of New York Shows – messy parades where his favorite clubs were raised to royalty. (His story was made into a 2003 film starring Macaulay Culkin as Alig, Party Monster, which was based on James St. James’s book, Disco Massacre.)
We cheered on him when he walked away from the police who had rounded up one of his outlaw parties, nasty events held in unsuspecting places where you party quickly because they necessarily didn’t last long. Some club kids also point to Alig’s friendly side and the fact that they all fit into a family that wasn’t always Manson-esque; it gave them a place in the LGBTQ nightlife, far from all harsh reality, for better or for worse.
With 12 ”heels and war paint, the club kids came 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 Vote editorial, in which I denounced the decline of the creative nightlife, although I was passionately open to some sort of new wave.
Again, I must have been psychic, because I ended the play by writing, “The new downtown will have nothing to do with disco and everything to do with indignation and surprise. Maybe it’s going to be an angry rebellion that pulls the stick from everyone’s ass. Well, Alig and his gang of estranged and aspiring marauders were the new wave, and I got paid to beat it, in a compelling way because my column, “La Dolce Musto,” was a first person romp with no filter.
Alig and I interacted well. At a talent show at multi-level club Danceteria, Alig had offered me “Sex, drugs and rock and roll” if I voted for him, but I didn’t, rejected by the bribe attempt and also the fact that, as a gogo dancer he had no discernible talent. His gift turned out to be to lead, promote and annoy, as well as pull (he once brutally tried to pull me into a pool at a nightclub) and push (he blatantly shoved pills into a club boy’s mouth), getting away with more and more demonic acts as time went on.
“With Alig at the helm, there were hardly any outside rules, as long as you were fantastic and willing to show it off at night.“
A legion of kids in outfits who wanted to become famous followed suit when they grew up in a time when you couldn’t, or were not allowed to have sex. But with Alig at the helm, there were hardly any outside rules, as long as you were fantastic and willing to show it off at night.
I remember he had a massive hissing fit when asked to pay $ 5 for an AIDS benefit, although I shouldn’t have bothered when he hosted a party advertised as being for ‘HIV only negatives’. Howard Stern-esque, Alig used satire to break the political correctness of people like me, and I fell for the trap every time.
After all, there I was at his wildly incorrect events, like Disco 2000 Wednesdays at the church-turned-rehab-turned-dance-club Limelight. The evening hosted the Unnatural Acts Revue, with a man drinking his own urine and a girl fitting the prosthesis and stump of a dancing amputee. Part of me wanted to take a shower, while another part felt that Alig was celebrating someone else or kinky in a way that anti-oppression promoters should be allowed to do.
On daytime talk shows like Geraldo Rivera’s, I was the expert, trying to find a balance between mocking Alig’s cunning and holding off the puritan, homophobic wave that wanted to stick a pole in his groin. Years before he reached into his pants to adjust his microphone, then-mayor Rudy Giuliani was on a ’90s crusade to tackle nightlife and banish all the weirdos of the demonic drink, leaving Alig even more seemed to be more determined. a nighttime bad boy.
And he spiraled and seemed barely coherent when I went to his apartment in late ’95 for a club-related gathering that never happened. In April 1996, I had a mention of a missing club person in the sphere of Alig, and I followed that up with my blind entry with the buzz about death by hammer and Drano, and the equally gruesome aftermath.
Page six picked up my stuff and a New York magazine piece and made it their feature article, “Mystery of the Missing Club Kid.” Later that year, the body surfaced, and Alig and Freeze were in handcuffs, while the lunchbox brigade mourned both Angel’s life and their own lifestyle.
In 1997, I interviewed Alig at the Metropolitan Detention Center, where he was being held at the time. “Heroin cures boredom,” he told me. “If I was on heroin, I could stare at that chair for eight hours and I wouldn’t need any other stimuli. But I am absolutely convinced that once outside I will stay clean. “But he didn’t. He didn’t even stay clean within.
Once he was free he kept tweeting me saying he wanted to get together, but I have to admit I blew him away. When I ran into him at the shoot for a movie, he looked the same as before – messy, restless, and talking about his press. He even claimed that unlike my blind item, Drano wasn’t used in the murder, but it was a good story, so he always got it. That would be like Alig, but I didn’t buy it as the use of Drano was just like him too.
In 2016, I agreed to star in an indie movie called Vamp Bikers Tres, in which Alig played a zombie called God and I was a crazy doctor named Hedda Hopper. Our interaction immediately brought back our old teasing rhythms (with an underlying clumsiness, of course), and I only saw him explode once on set. The fact that he showed me a stack of murder-related DVDs he happened to have (like Toolbox Murders) was gross, but proved he still had that puck-like urge to annoy and gruesome.
In 2016, Alig spoke to Anthony Haden-Guest in a Daily Beast interview about his release from prison. “I thought coming home would solve all my problems, and I would be happy. But I came home, and I wasn’t. I came home and realized it doesn’t really matter if I’m here or there. I am just the same person! “
Haden-Guest asked Alig if prison had changed him. “At the time I was who I said I was. Now I know who I am. “
“I’m sorry, of course. But that sounds corny. No words can matter anymore. They are actions.“
– Michael Alig
“Of course, I’m sorry,” he said of his part in the Melendez murder. But that sounds corny. No words can matter anymore. They are actions. Each of my projects has a charity element. “
Reporter Ernie Garcia was part of Alig’s circle and played the role of Clara the Carefree Chicken at Disco 2000, when he was known as Ernie Glam.
Garcia said to me, “I invited Michael to stay in my guest room after his release from prison in 2014, and he spent 16 months with me. I usually took him in rent-free to get him back on his feet. I regarded Michael as my soul brother. He was very generous with me and I loved his creativity and perverse sense of humor. Unfortunately, he was a very flawed, unfortunate man who had many painful and self-destructive impulses.
His demons had turned him into a drug addiction, causing him to commit a vicious crime against my friend Angel Melendez. I tried my best to help him avoid his toxic past after he was released, but the horror and guilt of his crime haunted him, and by 2016 he was sinking into abuse. Over the years, I avoided spending time with him because I was saddened by what I saw, although we still exchanged texts and emails. I will miss him, but I am relieved that his fear is over. I hope Michael’s death will end the members of Angel’s family and friends who are still in pain. “
Alig showed varying degrees of remorse over the years, telling me that he had imaginary conversations with Melendez – some calming, others controversial – although Alig said to another clerk who visited him in prison, “Oh, nobody liked Angel. ” Alig’s amorality was challenged by nagging guilt, along with his realization that he would never be fantastic again. The open bar was officially closed.