Michael Alig used to be better at the press. The death, at the age of 54, of an apparent heroin overdose on Christmas Day (and in the midst of an attempted presidential coup) threatened to lose him in the news and he certainly should have waited until after the inauguration.
This type of black thinking is not really inappropriate for the leader / killer of the club child, who lived to attract attention and attract 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 a fight with his friend / drug dealer Angel Melendez, which led to their horrific murder. on Angel and dismembering the body for elimination. (Alig pleaded guilty to murder and was released from prison in 2014).
I must have seen glimpses of his dark side. In fact, in 1991, I wrote in The voice of the village, “The bad seed in the cha cha heels, Alig will do anything to get an answer, even if that answer is the deafening sound that accompanies the projectile’s vomit. It’s an arrested child who should be arrested … a cute stroller that gets to bite your head. ”
But the Indiana-born club enjoyed fighting against discontent, satisfaction, and bourgeois values, and organized some compelling events over the years, such as a “Dirty Mouth” contest, where contestants put out four words with prizes. , and “The King and Queen of New York” shows – messy contests in which his favorite clubs were raised to royalty. (His story was turned into a 2003 film starring Macaulay Culkin as Alig, Party monster, which was based on the book of James St. James, Disco blood bath.)
I cheered him up as he ran away from the police who arrested him at one of the “outlaw parties”, unpleasant events organized in unexpected places where you happened quickly because, out of necessity, they did not last long. Some kids in the club also point to Alig’s kind side and the fact that they all fit into a family that wasn’t always Manson-esque; it gave them a place in LGBTQ nightlife, away from any harsh, unexpected reality, for better or worse.
In 12 “heels and war paint, the club’s children stepped in to fill a gap. In 1987, Andy Warhol – the deity for all Downtowners – died and I went on to proclaim” Downtown Death “in a Voice the cover story, denouncing the recession in creative clubs, although I was passionately open to a kind of new wave.
Again, it must have been psychic, because I finished the song by writing: “The new center will have nothing to do with the disco and everything to do with indignation and surprise. Maybe it will be a furious rebellion that will take the stick out of everyone’s ass. Well, Alig and his band of alienated and hard-working marauders were the new wave, and I was paid to cover it, doing so in a captivating way, because my column, “La Dolce Musto,” was a person who it had no filter.
Alig and I interacted well. At a talent contest at the multi-level club Danceteria, Alig offered me “Sex, drugs and rock and roll” if I voted for him, but I didn’t, stopped by the bribe attempt and also by the fact that, as a gogo dancer, he had no perceptible talent. His gift proved to be for driving, promoting and annoying, as well as for shooting (he once brutally tried to pull me into a nightclub pool) and pushing (he blatantly pushed the pills into the mouth of a club kid), getting rid of 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 fabulous and willing to flaunt him at night.“
A legion of children dressed in outfits, who wanted to be famous, followed his example as they came of age at a time when you could not have sex or you should not. But with Alig at the helm, the outside rules barely existed, as long as you were fabulous and willing to flaunt him at night.
I remember throwing a gigantic crisis when he was asked to pay $ 5 for an AIDS benefit, although I shouldn’t have slipped in when he threw a party advertised as “HIV-negative only.” In the style of Howard Stern, Alig used satire to pierce the political correctness of people like me, and I fell into the trap every time.
After all, I was at his extremely incorrect events, such as Disco 2000 on Wednesday at the church transformed into a drug-rehabilitation-center-transformed-dance club Limelight. The night hosted Unnatural Acts Magazine, which featured a guy drinking his own urine and a girl mounting a prosthesis and the butt of a dancing amputee. Part of me wanted to take a shower, while another part thought that Alig was celebrating anyone else or dangerous in a way that anti-oppression promoters should be allowed to do.
On daytime shows like Geraldo Rivera’s, I was the expert, trying to find a balance between mocking Alig, while keeping the Puritan wave, homophobic, that wanted to put a stake in my heart. Years before he reached into his pants to adjust his microphone, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani was on a crusade in the 1990s to counter the nightlife and eliminate all the oddities of demonic drinking, which seemed to makes Alig even more determined to be a bad night boy.
And he spiraled, seeming barely coherent, when I went to his apartment in late ’95 for a club-related meeting that never happened. In April 1996, I sent a mention of a missing club in Alig’s sphere and followed it with my blind object containing the buzz about the deaths of Hammer and Drano, as well as the equally horrific aftermath.
Page six took my items and a new York the magazine piece and turned it into the main article, “The mystery of the missing child of the club”. Later that year, the body came to the surface, and Alig and Freeze were handcuffed, while the lunch brigade mourned both 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 had used heroin, I could stare at that chair for eight hours and I wouldn’t need any other stimuli. But I am convinced that, once outside, I will stay clean. ” But he didn’t. It didn’t even stay clean inside.
Once free, he continued to tweet me, saying he wanted to meet, but I have to admit I blew it. When I met him at a movie, he looked the same as before – messy, agitated, and talking about his press. He even claimed that, unlike my blind object, Drano was not used during the murder, but it was a good story, so he always went with it. It would be the same as Alig, but I didn’t buy it, because Drano’s use was the same as his.
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 was a crazy doctor named Hedda Hopper. Our interaction instantly brought us back to our old mocking rhythms (with an underlying clumsiness, naturally) and we saw him explode once on the set. The fact that he threw me a bunch of murder-related DVDs that he happened to have (such as Toolboxes) was rude, but he proved that he still had that strange desire to irritate and terrify.
In 2016, Alig spoke to Anthony Haden-Guest in a Daily Beast interview about his release from prison. “I thought that 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 that it didn’t really matter if I was here or there. I’m just the same person! “
Haden-Guest asked Alig if the prison had changed him. “At that time, I used to be whoever I said I was. Now I know who I am. “
“Of course, I’m sorry. But that sounds trivial. No word can make a difference. There are actions.“
– Michael Alig
“Of course I’m sorry,” he said of his role in killing Melendez. “It simply came to our notice then. No word can make a difference. There are actions. There is a charitable element in each of my projects. “
Reporter Ernie Garcia had been part of Alig’s circle, playing the role of Carefree Chicken at Disco 2000, when he was known as Ernie Glam.
Garcia told me: “I invited Michael to stay in my guest bedroom when he was released from prison in 2014 and he spent 16 months with me. I took it most of the free rent to help him get to his feet. I considered Michael my soulmate. He was very generous with me and I liked his creativity and his perverse sense of humor. Unfortunately, he was a deeply flawed and unhappy man who carried many painful and self-destructive impulses.
“His demons had made him addicted to drugs, 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 went into abuse until 2016. In recent years, I have avoided spending time with him for that I was saddened by what I saw, even though I kept exchanging texts and emails. I will miss him, but I am relieved that his anguish is over. I hope Michael’s death will help shut down Angel’s family members and friends who are still suffering. “
Alig has shown varying degrees of remorse over the years, telling me that he had imaginary conversations with Melendez – some calming, some controversial – although Alig told another clubbie who visited him in prison, “Oh, no one I liked Angel. ” Alig’s immorality was caused by pain of guilt, as well as the realization that he would never be fabulous again. The open bar had officially closed.