Michael Alig used to be more experienced in the press. Dying, at 54, of an apparent heroin overdose on Christmas Day (and in the midst of an attempted presidential coup) threatened to leave him lost on the news, and he definitely should have waited until after his inauguration.
That kind of gloomy thinking is hardly inappropriate for the club kid leader / killer, who lived to mess with the shit and get attention by any means necessary. In 1996, when he became even more drugged and less supervised, he and his roommate Freeze (Robert Riggs) got into a fight with friend / dealer Angel Melendez that led him to horribly kill Angel and dismember the body to be deleted. (Alig pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was released from prison in 2014.)
I had certainly seen glimpses of its dark side. In fact, in 1991, I wrote in Village Voice, “The bad seed of high heels, Alig will do anything to get an answer, even if that answer is the deafening sound that accompanies the projectile’s vomit. He is a trapped child who should be trapped … a cute little doll that ends up taking its head off with a bite ”.
But the Indiana-born clubbie loved to fight boredom, complacency and bourgeois values and had staged some compelling events over the years, like a “Dirty Mouth” contest, where contestants spat out four-letter words for prizes, and his “King and Queen of New York” shows – confusing contests where his favorite clubs have been raised to royalty. (His story was turned into a 2003 film starring Macaulay Culkin as Alig, Party Monster, which was based on the book by James St. James, Disco blood bath.)
We applauded him as he ran away from the police who arrested one of his “outlaw parties”, uncomfortable events held in unsuspecting places where you were partying quickly because they didn’t necessarily last long. Some kids at the club also point to Alig’s gentle side and the fact that they all fit into a family that wasn’t always the Manson type; it gave them a place in LGBTQ nightlife, far from any harsh and restricted reality, for better or for worse.
With 30 cm heels and war paint, the boys from the club came on the scene to fill a gap. In 1987, Andy Warhol – the deity of all downtown residents – died, and I continued to proclaim “The death of the downtown” in a Voice cover story, criticizing the fall in creative clubs, although I was passionately open to some kind of new wave.
Again, I must have been a psychic, because I finished the play by writing: “The new center will have nothing to do with disco and everything to do with indignation and surprise. Perhaps it is a furious rebellion that will take the dick out of everyone’s ass. ”Well, Alig and his band of alienated and hardworking looters were the new wave, and I was paid to cover it, doing it in an engaging way, since my column,“ La Dolce Musto ”, was a first-person prank without filter.
Alig and I became interactive, right. In a talent contest at the multilevel club Danceteria, Alig offered me “Sex, drugs and rock and roll” if I voted for him, but I didn’t, discouraged by the attempt at bribery and also because, as a gogo dancer, he didn’t had no discernible talent. His gift ended up being leading, promoting and irritating, as well as pulling (once he tried to pull me into a pool set up in a nightclub) and pushing (he flagrantly put pills in a club boy’s mouth), escaping with more and more acts demonic as time passed.
“With Alig in charge, external rules barely existed, as long as you were fabulous and were willing to show them off every night.“
A legion of children in costumes, wanting to be famous, followed your example when you came of age at a time when you couldn’t or shouldn’t have sex. But with Alig in charge, the external rules barely existed, as long as you were fabulous and were willing to show them off every night.
I remember him having a massive crying fit when he was asked to pay $ 5 for an AIDS benefit, although I shouldn’t have been angry when he threw a party advertised as “just for HIV negative”. In Howard Stern style, Alig was using satire to pierce the politically correct of people like me, and I fell into the trap every time.
After all, there I was in its totally incorrect events, like Disco 2000 on Wednesdays in the church that became a drug rehab center that became a Limelight nightclub. The night gave way to Unnatural Acts Revue, which featured a guy who drank his own urine and a girl who fitted the prosthesis and the stump of an amputee dancing. Part of me wanted to bathe, while another part felt that Alig was celebrating anyone different or perverted in a way that anti-oppression promoters should be allowed to do.
In daytime talk shows like Geraldo Rivera’s, I was the analyst, trying to strike a balance between mocking Alig’s wickedness while holding the Puritan and homophobic wave that wanted to stake his groin. Years before he reached into his pants to adjust the microphone, then Mayor Rudy Giuliani was on a ’90s crusade to suppress nightlife and eliminate all freaks from the demonic drink, which seemed to make Alig even more determined to be one. night bad boy.
And he fired, looking inconsistent when I went to his apartment in late 1995 for a club-related meeting that never happened. In April 1996, I mentioned a missing person from the club in the sphere of Alig, and followed this up with my blind item presenting the buzz about death by hammer and Drano, and the consequences so dire.
Page Six got my items and a New York magazine article and reached the main item, “The mystery of the lost boy in the club”. Later that year, the body surfaced, and Alig and Freeze were handcuffed, while the lunchbox brigade mourned Angel’s life and his own lifestyle.
In 1997, I interviewed Alig at the Metropolitan Detention Center, where he was incarcerated at the time. “Heroin cures boredom,” he told me. “If I was taking heroin, I could look at that chair for eight hours and I wouldn’t need any other stimulus. But I am convinced that, once outside, I will be clean. “But he didn’t do that. He didn’t even get clean inside.
Once free, he continued to tweet me, saying he wanted to be with him, but I have to admit that I ignored him. When I met him at the photo 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 was not used during the murder, but it was a good story, so he always agreed with it. It would be just like Alig, but I didn’t believe it, because using Drano was just like him.
In 2016, I agreed to play a role in an independent film called Vamp Bikers Three, in which Alig played a zombie named God and I a crazy doctor named Hedda Hopper. Our interaction instantly brought back our old playful rhythms (with an underlying strangeness, of course), and I only saw him explode on the set once. The fact that he showed me a pile of DVDs related to murders he happened to have (like Toolbox murders) was disgusting, but proved that he still had that evil desire to irritate and horrify.
In 2016, Alig spoke to Anthony Haden-Guest in an interview with the Daily Beast about how he was released from prison. “I thought that coming home would solve all my problems and be happy. But I came home and I wasn’t there. I got home and realized that it doesn’t really matter whether I’m here or there. I am the same person! “
Haden-Guest asked Alig if the prison had changed him. “Back then, I used to be who I said I was. Now I know who I am. “
“Of course, I’m sorry. But that seems trivial. No word can make a difference. They are actions.“
– Michael Alig
“Sure, I’m sorry,” he said of his participation in the Melendez murder. “But that sounds trivial. No word can make a difference. They are actions. There is an element of charity in each of my projects. “
Reporter Ernie Garcia was part of Alig’s circle, playing Clara the Carefree Chicken at Disco 2000, when he was known as Ernie Glam.
Garcia told 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 received him almost without paying rent, to help him recover. I considered Michael my soul brother. He was very generous to me and I loved his creativity and wicked sense of humor. Unfortunately, he was a deeply flawed and unhappy man, who carried many painful and self-destructive impulses.
“His demons 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 was released, but the horror and guilt of his crime haunted him and he sank into abuse in 2016. In recent years, I avoided spending time with him because I was sad with what I saw, even though we still exchanged text messages and emails. I will miss him, but I am relieved that his anguish is over. I hope that Michael’s death will help end Angel’s family members and friends who are still in pain. “
Alig has shown varying degrees of remorse over the years, telling me that he has had imaginary conversations with Melendez – some calming, others contentious – although Alig told another clubbie who visited him in prison, “Oh, no one liked Angel.” Alig’s amorality was challenged by uncomfortable pangs of guilt, along with his realization that he would never be fabulous again. The open bar was officially closed.