Disco Bloodbath is, among other things, a chilling reminder of the lengths people will go to get their hands on a few lousy drink tickets. Michael Alig glued blue dots on his face and embellished and exposed his genitalia. He was, however, not the first drink-ticket exhibitionist. Rollerina threw on a wedding dress and a pair of roller skates and suddenly free drink tickets rained down like the coins in the coronation scene of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. The Studio 54 management lubricated her with drink tickets because she made their less adventurous patrons feel good about themselves: In her presence they could experience vicarious kookiness–and ultimately relief that they were not obliged to spend their evenings roller-skating around a dance floor in a smelly old wedding dress. Rollerina was a Dada party catalyst, a court jester with a schizo wardrobe. She was the precursor of Michael Alig. According to my Disco-Sociology research files, it all started in the early 80’s, when clubs became huge and numerous (the Palladium, the Tunnel) and there were not enough groovy people to fill them. Naff people started hanging out at the groovy clubs and outnumbered the groovy people and the groovy people went to Nell’s instead. So rather than risk losing the naff people as well, club entrepreneur Peter Gatien employed renta-freaks–a.k.a. the Club Kids–and then plied them with the aforementioned free drink tickets. The Club Kids "shoved strawberries up their nose and ran around swinging an alarm clock above their head–and called it ‘a look.’" Everything was fine until they became dope fiends, which was the death knell for the great tradition of drink-ticket exhibitionism: Now all the Club Kids cared about was getting high and getting on Geraldo. The Club Kids always struck me as pushy and intimidating and twitchy and negative and desperate for another bump. I picked up Disco Bloodbath with every intention of loathing it. I knew whereof I spoke. I am a disco veteran of the Suzanne Bartsch generation, and, yes, Lady Hennessy Brown had lactated on me at Bentley’s. But, quelle surprise, I was blindsided by the pure poetry of Disco Bloodbath: It is the best book I have ever read. Who cares if the Club Kid "looks" were phoned-in and ersatz? James St. James’ take on the whole Michael Alig epic is so hysterically funny that I, an Evelyn Wood reject, finished it in a weekend. It’s Our Lady of the Flowers with thigh-slapping humor. It’s Liberace’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. It’s an appalling account of what happened when exhibitionism and drugs collided with 80’s materialism, celebrity culture, and general piggy behavior. What can possibly be funny about such an appalling milieu? I have a list. Bloodbath is basically about James St. James, not Michael Alig; more specifically, it’s about the author’s addiction to ketamine hydrochloride–"Special K," the animal tranquilizer and funster drug. Mr. St. James spins a heartwarming yarn, taking us from his 1984 arrival in New York ("I was a kicky, corn-fed lass, with a song in my heart and a rosy hue on my cheeks") to the point where he "had vomit chunks in [his] underwear." He provides endless insights into the initial joys of Special K, which makes everybody look like Mrs. Butterworth–"all clear and brown and syrupy slow." Gradually things turn horrid, and Mr. St. James spends too much time in a "K-hole": "[W]ho knew there were so many reasons to just start sobbing? And You and Rational Thought parted ways some time ago–probably before the three peyote buttons, but definitely after you sucked off the crack dealer on the corner." The author forces us to watch as he and the Club Kids claw their way to the bottom and become manipulative K, smack, crack-addicted lunatics. "For almost nine months in 1990, I wore a bloody wedding gown and glued flies to my face." He decides to keep a K-diary and agonizingly scribes the entries while high. The next day he is appalled by the Jenny Holzeresque minimalist insanity of his sentences: "If letters had eyebrows, these would be arched" ; "Evil must be baked at 650 degrees." You think he’s weird? Wait till you meet the other Club Kids. The Alig acolytes are indescribably unsavory, but Mr. St. James describes them, anyway. Christina, "an abomination of nature, like those frogs born with eyes in their throats," has "testicles falling well below her hemline" and "pointy stretched-out boobies from past hormone dabbling." Ida pushed a battery pack up her bum into her small intestine. Why? Why? Mr. St. James will tell you why: "Ida stripped naked and pulled a full string of LIT CHRISTMAS BULBS, one at a time, out of her ass." By far the most haunting Club Kid is "a palsied old lesbian named Mavis." Mavis visits New York having read about the Club Kids and wants to get inside their heads and find out what makes them tick. Mr. St. James hatches "a wonderful Life Plan for Mavis. She was going to invest all her life’s savings in a bunch of cocaine. She would quit the job she loved–managing a health food store in Boston–sell her house, move to New York, AND SHE AND FREEZE WOULD BECOME DRUGDEALERS!" And indeed, Freeze and Mavis form "a Mom-&-Pop-type drug cartel." Mr. St. James and Mavis spent weeks together, high as kites, talking about nothing. "It turns out Mavis was an endlessly fascinating woman. We spent days exploring the intricacies of each other’s minds. I don’t remember drawing any conclusions, though. But I have dozens of pie charts that explain it all, if you care to look." Mr. St. James made me fall in love with Mavis, that "spiky-haired lesbian tofu vendor from Massachusetts." He was unable to make me fall in love with Michael Alig. Michael Alig and drug-dealer Freeze murdered Angel Melendez in March 1996 and cut his legs off. They stupidly put his severed bits into a cork-lined box, which floated and was found. As if that were not bad enough, Mr. Alig also let his own cats die of neglect. Mr. St. James seems reluctant to paint a glamorous three-dimensional picture of his former collaborator. Is this genteel reticence or the vestiges of a sisterly rivalry? We’ll never know. Either way, Mr. Alig emerges as one of the less compelling characters in the book, and there is definitely something guess-you-had-to-be-there about his unfunny Clockwork Orange-esque language: "skroddle," "skrink la da," "slogger blagging," "scrod-hopping," etc. What the hell was he talking about? Mr. St. James does his best to give credit where credit is due: The young, pre-drug Mr. Alig demonstrates a high level of creative, entrepreneurial moxie. His "looks" are amusing, if occasionally derivative of the great dot-wearing Leigh Bowery–"he eventually stopped painting those damn blue dots on his face! FOUR YEARS OF BLUE DOTS! And he is still convinced that it might catch on any day now." Mr. Alig gave fashion direction to the Club Kids with hauteur worthy of Vreeland, and they took it, and who can blame them? "Butt cracks, areolas, and gangly testicles should all be allowed the same fashion options and subsequent media coverage as the rest of the body!" Mr. St. James allows Mr. Alig a few triumphs: an outlaw party at Burger King on Times Square, which ends in a bloody confrontation with a taxi driver; a Club Kid rendezvous in a homeless village made of cardboard boxes, etc. Mr. St. James stands by Mr. Alig’s innate creativity and originality: "You shone so brightly. You were a genius." He professes to be emotionally devastated by Angel Melendez’s demise: "[T]his whole murder thingie REALLY … UPSET … ME … " It did? "So," Mr. St. James writes, "if it’s superficial that my response to [the] murder is to stop wearing false eyelashes–then goddamnit–SO BE IT." Knowing about the murder puts a damper on his nocturnal joie de vivre, and when he tells Mr. Alig about these feelings, Mr. Alig cries. When I read this, I couldn’t tell if the author was being serious or not. But Mr. St. James goes on to present a compelling case for his own emotional unreadiness to deal with violent crime. He reminds us that he is the kind of person who spends hours agonizing over the phrase, "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear." By this point in Bloodbath, Mr. St. James has already trained us to laugh at the most heinous skroddles and skrink la das imaginable. He has debunked and self-deprecated his way through so many appalling incidents that when he gets serious about the murder, I felt as if I probably needed to be in a K-hole myself in order to fully comprehend his finer feelings about mortality. Disco Bloodbath is a lovely and horrible discourse on death: the death of Angel Melendez; the death of spontaneous drink-ticket exhibitionism; the death of esoteric style (now everybody knows how to set their pubic hair on fire and the act has lost its resonance); the death and fortunate rebirth of Mr. St. James’ own spirit. The last chapter finds our author rehabbed and fully functional, a resident of California with a writing career in the offing and a bittersweet view of life’s vicissitudes: "Why, oh why, must we always go through pigs to get our truffles?"

Who brought the Cool Kids Down......

When a movie begins, "Based on a true story," duck. That epigraph has become a warning that lies and distortions are about to be thrown on the screen–whether it’s the sappy Seabiscuit or the ultra-hip Party Monster. This film treats the deplorable story of Michael Alig, the New York nightclub party promoter–dubbed "celebutante" by the fawning media–as if it were little more than an amphetamine fairytale. Writers-directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato seem to think it’s necessary for us to share the Indiana native Alig’s dissociated, drug-induced, big-city debauchery. They use digital-video blur, a generally facetious tone and such self-conscious narrative devices as Alig (played by Macaulay Culkin) and his friend and biographer James St. James (played by a nasally Seth Green) both addressing the camera. Bailey and Barbato imply that a simple presentation of facts and behavior are insufficient for understanding events that led to Alig killing his drug-dealing roommate. "It’s a morality tale immorally told," is the nonsense explanation Barbato slung in HX magazine. Like I said, duck. Isn’t it late for Bailey and Barbato to think they’re bringing fabulousness to moviemaking simply by not telling a story straight? They make no commitment to the truth. Instead, they approach filmmaking as if promoting a party (the duo were in fact part of Alig’s nightlife scene, performing in the mid-80s as the musical act the Fabulous Pop Tarts). By the early 90s, when Bailey and Barbato launched drag performer RuPaul’s pop assault through a delirious and challenging set of music videos, they seemed able to balance sub-cult excess with social goodwill. Their Back to My Roots video for RuPaul remains one of the last decade’s cultural landmarks; it redefined the "dirty south" as the "flirty south" and advanced a sprightly case for identity politics through specific cultural customs such as hairstyles, nail sculpture and Southern Fried Chicken. They celebrated unabashed hedonism as a route toward achieving community and acceptance. How different from an early scene in Party Monster where Alig mangles the William Blake quote, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Bailey and Barbato themselves seem confused. Perhaps that all-American, multiracial, ambisexual sentiment of their early videos was actually RuPaul’s personal message (caricatured in the hit "Superstar" but sincerely expressed in the very good dance track "House of Love"). Without RuPaul to provide an ethical basis, Bailey and Barbato wind up justifying Alig’s perversity. If Party Monster honestly rated the appellation "morality tale," it would offer some insight into why Alig, from a working-class, fatherless background, and trustfunder St. James (nee Clark) both went so far in their deliberately transgressive behavior. Seeking attention through rebellion, these boys chose outrageousness over responsibility. "I didn’t want to be like all the drearies and normals," Alig moans, suggesting desperate flight from social conventions that had either betrayed or ostracized him. (His backstory includes being molested as a child–a joke to Bailey and Barbato.) The makeshift family he creates among New York nightclubbers wasn’t an adequate alternative to the dull, middle-class ideal. It was composed of other young desperadoes as well as Peter Gatien (played by Dylan McDermott), the shifty, eye-patch-wearing older businessman who owned the Limelight club (a deconsecrated church) where Alig threw his parties and whom, the film suggests, Alig would eventually betray. Despite this new pre-fab urban family, Alig apparently never demonstrated trust, reliability or caring, the basic traits troubled adolescents are said to desire. Bailey and Barbato show Alig’s fondness for The Rocky Horror Picture Show (he repeats Frank N. Furter’s advice "Don’t dream it, be it" to a group of wannabes), but they don’t admit that vanity and self-satisfaction were at the root of his climb. Alig adopted the fantasy of Rocky Horror as a lifestyle but refused to regard it critically; that’s the same incapacity Bailey and Barbato demonstrate when they merely indulge being outre as a postmodern conceit. (Producer Christine Vachon should consider that her true-life films about gay male criminals are always whimsical, but only Boys Don’t Cry, a film with a female victim, dares solemn judgment.) Party Monster exploits the fearless righteousness young gay people assert when flocking to big cities. Their desperation gets distracted into impromptu subway parties and mob scenes at burger joints. By presenting Alig as a kind of warped, deluded hero (a gay Holly Golightly), Bailey and Barbato fail to recognize Alig’s political error–he mistook license for liberation. While Alig played at imitating Warhol, he never produced anything substantive, let alone approximating cultural revolution or anarchy. His special-k-fueled soirees were merely an exercise in privilege. Exploitative gossip columns coddled Alig as he played Pied Piper/drug dealer to New York’s "club kids." Bailey and Barbato further perpetuate this rank mythology that keeps them from achieving the tough, informed perspective of Alex Cox’s 1986 Sid & Nancy. Cox gauged the distance between rebellion and sheer insolence in modern bohemia; Sid and Nancy also worked as a love story, because its characters’ emotional needs were openly displayed, not hidden behind attitude. A credible, unsettling account of punk as social phenomenon resulted. Bailey and Barbato ignore what was pathetic and alienating about the club-kids spectacle by staying enthralled with Alig’s social aggression. The one moment Alig relents–when he falls for the Asian clubber Keoki (Wilmer Valderrama)–Bailey and Barbato withdraw from the serious implications of their romance. ("Are we going far?" Keoki asks. "All the way, I hope," says Alig.) The burst of fireworks that conceals their hook-up in a dumpster is strangely dishonest. It’s Bailey and Barbato’s cute way of implying gay audacity while inexcusably avoiding the social frisson of Alig and Keoki’s attraction. Alig’s earlier neophyte’s plea to St. James ("I want you to teach me how to be fabulous") only confessed a shared sense of privilege, but his affection for Keoki was the essence of his social transgression. It lifted him onto a new level of social/racial power relations he was too excited by to respect. Alig’s willingness to exploit and manipulate his coterie (including Keoki and the doomed Latino drug dealer, Angel Melendez) was the distinctively New York aspect of his phenomenon–it’s why his ascent (eking out a reputation as a downtown celebrity while renting a hovel in the Bronx) was also a descent. RuPaul might have pointed out this social irony as an aspect of the class and race biases that persist even in hipster subcultures, but Bailey and Barbato are too infatuated with the scene to analyze it. They trot out tired, tv-generation excuses: vacant-eyed clubgoers chanting "Money! Success! Fame! Glamour!," dressed as clowns, nurses, monsters, ghouls–a panoply of disaffected social roles. But exactly how high-living mixes with low-life gets lost in the revelry. Surprisingly, Culkin contributes the perfect, dull astonishment. He’s good at showing Alig was not clever, just determined to be noticed. His straight, dark brows, lanky blond hair and overripe lips are the portrait of a boy waiting to be despoiled. When Alig first looks at Keoki, Culkin melts into Valderrama’s warm brown eyes–a bolder ploy than simply playing swish, it reveals cross-cultural heat. This performance goes way beyond Bailey and Barbato’s cliche about a "poor, pathetic frightened little boy, too scared to face reality." Not Home Alone’s Kevin! Culkin seems to understand the essence of urban mischief, the secret resentment of the white boy lording his privilege–especially over a pair of dusky, susceptible lovers. Bailey and Barbato traduce Culkin’s realism when they depict the killing as a sped-up home-movie, including Alig injecting his victim’s body with Drano and then dismembering and discarding it. A murderous New York neurotic isn’t surprising, but to treat his crime matter-of-factly as k-hole inertia is horrifying. Party Monster ends on the cheap irony of the Feds caring more about getting Peter Gatien for drug infractions at the Limelight than they care about the death of Angel Melendez (played in a few brief scenes by Wilson Cruz). Fact is, considering the film’s emphasis on club kids’ folderol and the pathos of Alig’s small-time celebrity, Bailey and Barbato don’t care much about Melendez, either. They’re too fabulous to be appalled by murder.

Here are the Club Kids....

"Club Kids on the Skids"

Disco Bloodbath is, among other things, a chilling reminder of the lengths people will go to get their hands on a few lousy drink tickets. Michael Alig glued blue dots on his face and embellished and exposed his genitalia. He was, however, not the first drink-ticket exhibitionist. Rollerina threw on a wedding dress and a pair of roller skates and suddenly free drink tickets rained down like the coins in the coronation scene of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. The Studio 54 management lubricated her with drink tickets because she made their less adventurous patrons feel good about themselves: In her presence they could experience vicarious kookiness–and ultimately relief that they were not obliged to spend their evenings roller-skating around a dance floor in a smelly old wedding dress. Rollerina was a Dada party catalyst, a court jester with a schizo wardrobe. She was the precursor of Michael Alig. According to my Disco-Sociology research files, it all started in the early 80’s, when clubs became huge and numerous (the Palladium, the Tunnel) and there were not enough groovy people to fill them. Naff people started hanging out at the groovy clubs and outnumbered the groovy people and the groovy people went to Nell’s instead. So rather than risk losing the naff people as well, club entrepreneur Peter Gatien employed renta-freaks–a.k.a. the Club Kids–and then plied them with the aforementioned free drink tickets. The Club Kids "shoved strawberries up their nose and ran around swinging an alarm clock above their head–and called it ‘a look.’" Everything was fine until they became dope fiends, which was the death knell for the great tradition of drink-ticket exhibitionism: Now all the Club Kids cared about was getting high and getting on Geraldo. The Club Kids always struck me as pushy and intimidating and twitchy and negative and desperate for another bump. I picked up Disco Bloodbath with every intention of loathing it. I knew whereof I spoke. I am a disco veteran of the Suzanne Bartsch generation, and, yes, Lady Hennessy Brown had lactated on me at Bentley’s. But, quelle surprise, I was blindsided by the pure poetry of Disco Bloodbath: It is the best book I have ever read. Who cares if the Club Kid "looks" were phoned-in and ersatz? James St. James’ take on the whole Michael Alig epic is so hysterically funny that I, an Evelyn Wood reject, finished it in a weekend. It’s Our Lady of the Flowers with thigh-slapping humor. It’s Liberace’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. It’s an appalling account of what happened when exhibitionism and drugs collided with 80’s materialism, celebrity culture, and general piggy behavior. What can possibly be funny about such an appalling milieu? I have a list. Bloodbath is basically about James St. James, not Michael Alig; more specifically, it’s about the author’s addiction to ketamine hydrochloride–"Special K," the animal tranquilizer and funster drug. Mr. St. James spins a heartwarming yarn, taking us from his 1984 arrival in New York ("I was a kicky, corn-fed lass, with a song in my heart and a rosy hue on my cheeks") to the point where he "had vomit chunks in [his] underwear." He provides endless insights into the initial joys of Special K, which makes everybody look like Mrs. Butterworth–"all clear and brown and syrupy slow." Gradually things turn horrid, and Mr. St. James spends too much time in a "K-hole": "[W]ho knew there were so many reasons to just start sobbing? And You and Rational Thought parted ways some time ago–probably before the three peyote buttons, but definitely after you sucked off the crack dealer on the corner." The author forces us to watch as he and the Club Kids claw their way to the bottom and become manipulative K, smack, crack-addicted lunatics. "For almost nine months in 1990, I wore a bloody wedding gown and glued flies to my face." He decides to keep a K-diary and agonizingly scribes the entries while high. The next day he is appalled by the Jenny Holzeresque minimalist insanity of his sentences: "If letters had eyebrows, these would be arched" ; "Evil must be baked at 650 degrees." You think he’s weird? Wait till you meet the other Club Kids. The Alig acolytes are indescribably unsavory, but Mr. St. James describes them, anyway. Christina, "an abomination of nature, like those frogs born with eyes in their throats," has "testicles falling well below her hemline" and "pointy stretched-out boobies from past hormone dabbling." Ida pushed a battery pack up her bum into her small intestine. Why? Why? Mr. St. James will tell you why: "Ida stripped naked and pulled a full string of LIT CHRISTMAS BULBS, one at a time, out of her ass." By far the most haunting Club Kid is "a palsied old lesbian named Mavis." Mavis visits New York having read about the Club Kids and wants to get inside their heads and find out what makes them tick. Mr. St. James hatches "a wonderful Life Plan for Mavis. She was going to invest all her life’s savings in a bunch of cocaine. She would quit the job she loved–managing a health food store in Boston–sell her house, move to New York, AND SHE AND FREEZE WOULD BECOME DRUGDEALERS!" And indeed, Freeze and Mavis form "a Mom-&-Pop-type drug cartel." Mr. St. James and Mavis spent weeks together, high as kites, talking about nothing. "It turns out Mavis was an endlessly fascinating woman. We spent days exploring the intricacies of each other’s minds. I don’t remember drawing any conclusions, though. But I have dozens of pie charts that explain it all, if you care to look." Mr. St. James made me fall in love with Mavis, that "spiky-haired lesbian tofu vendor from Massachusetts." He was unable to make me fall in love with Michael Alig. Michael Alig and drug-dealer Freeze murdered Angel Melendez in March 1996 and cut his legs off. They stupidly put his severed bits into a cork-lined box, which floated and was found. As if that were not bad enough, Mr. Alig also let his own cats die of neglect. Mr. St. James seems reluctant to paint a glamorous three-dimensional picture of his former collaborator. Is this genteel reticence or the vestiges of a sisterly rivalry? We’ll never know. Either way, Mr. Alig emerges as one of the less compelling characters in the book, and there is definitely something guess-you-had-to-be-there about his unfunny Clockwork Orange-esque language: "skroddle," "skrink la da," "slogger blagging," "scrod-hopping," etc. What the hell was he talking about? Mr. St. James does his best to give credit where credit is due: The young, pre-drug Mr. Alig demonstrates a high level of creative, entrepreneurial moxie. His "looks" are amusing, if occasionally derivative of the great dot-wearing Leigh Bowery–"he eventually stopped painting those damn blue dots on his face! FOUR YEARS OF BLUE DOTS! And he is still convinced that it might catch on any day now." Mr. Alig gave fashion direction to the Club Kids with hauteur worthy of Vreeland, and they took it, and who can blame them? "Butt cracks, areolas, and gangly testicles should all be allowed the same fashion options and subsequent media coverage as the rest of the body!" Mr. St. James allows Mr. Alig a few triumphs: an outlaw party at Burger King on Times Square, which ends in a bloody confrontation with a taxi driver; a Club Kid rendezvous in a homeless village made of cardboard boxes, etc. Mr. St. James stands by Mr. Alig’s innate creativity and originality: "You shone so brightly. You were a genius." He professes to be emotionally devastated by Angel Melendez’s demise: "[T]his whole murder thingie REALLY … UPSET … ME … " It did? "So," Mr. St. James writes, "if it’s superficial that my response to [the] murder is to stop wearing false eyelashes–then goddamnit–SO BE IT." Knowing about the murder puts a damper on his nocturnal joie de vivre, and when he tells Mr. Alig about these feelings, Mr. Alig cries. When I read this, I couldn’t tell if the author was being serious or not. But Mr. St. James goes on to present a compelling case for his own emotional unreadiness to deal with violent crime. He reminds us that he is the kind of person who spends hours agonizing over the phrase, "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear." By this point in Bloodbath, Mr. St. James has already trained us to laugh at the most heinous skroddles and skrink la das imaginable. He has debunked and self-deprecated his way through so many appalling incidents that when he gets serious about the murder, I felt as if I probably needed to be in a K-hole myself in order to fully comprehend his finer feelings about mortality. Disco Bloodbath is a lovely and horrible discourse on death: the death of Angel Melendez; the death of spontaneous drink-ticket exhibitionism; the death of esoteric style (now everybody knows how to set their pubic hair on fire and the act has lost its resonance); the death and fortunate rebirth of Mr. St. James’ own spirit. The last chapter finds our author rehabbed and fully functional, a resident of California with a writing career in the offing and a bittersweet view of life’s vicissitudes: "Why, oh why, must we always go through pigs to get our truffles?"

 This has got to be the most popular pic of Michael.

From Michael Alig.....Prison Life: Boredom Behind Bars

Last week I was moved from Queen's House (yes, it's really called that) to the Manhattan Department of Correction (MDC). I was, along with 23 other inmates, moved to MDC due to much-needed construction at QH and not, as Michael Musto mistakenly wrote in his column, due to any sort of gang-related situation-or so they told us. One of the first things I've learned in here is not to trust or believe the officers in charge. For security reasons, they are instructed to lie to us in regard to the movement of inmates. We were woken up by officers screaming for us to pack all our belongings; we were moving. After putting all of our personal property into folded sheets, we waited five hours to be brought downstairs, where we were placed inside a holding pen. With 24 inmates and their property in a holding pen built for 12, we waited until 8 p.m. to leave. We were put on a bumpy, overcrowded bus and moved to MDC, where we were once again put in a holding pen. Here we sat until midnight, at which time we were taken upstairs to our lodgings-altogether 20 hours to move. We were taken to our cells and fell immediately asleep. May 26 Today was my first day here. There were lots of things to do. Every new inmate has to see the doctor upon arriving-tests done, X-rays taken and head/mind examined. By noon, all of this was done. I have the most depressing view from my cell window: a perfect view of the Manhattan skyline. Talk about adding insult to injury! At least I found out that there is cable TV here. Ricki Lake is queen of MDC. The rest of the day went by incredibly slowly. Dinner was served at 5:30. We watched The Simpsons, Married With Children and Martin and went (gulp!) to bed at 9:30! (Note: Sleeping and wake-up times are not enforced. We can get up or sleep whenever we want.) Tomorrow is a court date with my lawyer. Dinner: Beef stew, Rice, Bread, Kool Aid (called "juice" in prison) May 27 Court-yuck! Woke up at 6 a.m. Another thing I've learned in here is that you get woken up extra early for court. I waited until 11 a.m. to be taken there, where I waited until 4 p.m. to see the judge, who rescheduled my court date for June 18 because the DA wasn't ready yet. That took exactly 20 seconds, and back to the holding pen I went, where I waited until 9:30 p.m. to be taken back to MDC. There I was put in, yes, another holding pen-starving-until about midnight, when I was taken up to my floor. Eighteen hours. Dinner: nothing May 28 Today I was coaxed into joining all the jocks to lift weights with them on the roof. Yet another depressing view of the skyline. We were whisked upstairs to the roof-all 18 of us-in an elevator. (It was relatively fine going up, but returning-yuck! All those perspiring bodies squished together. Somebody needed Right Guard.) So that the entire afternoon was not a total loss-I did manage to lift 120 pounds 10 times! Upon returning to our cells, we had an unexpected pleasure: 30 huge officers were on our floor for a "surprise search"! A surprise search consists of a humiliating body search, then a very thorough search of your property-through your books, clothes, magazines, every nook and cranny. NOT fun. I fell asleep afterwards. How I wished I could sleep through the entire ordeal-but, most likely, that wouldn't be possible. I woke up to one of my favorite sounds: the cheering crowd at a basketball game! Yeah! Dinner was not worth the sickness I'd feel after eating it. Who would have thought I would ever look forward to an oatmeal cookie?! Dinner: "Beef" patty, Beets, Kool Aid May 29 Today was an exciting day. Word had it that there was chicken for dinner, and it was TRUE! I gorged for several minutes, and then it was gone. The day and evening were long. Spades and dominoes are not my forte. There's only so much reading one can do.... I did, however, as Musto pointed out, begin to read Crime and Punishment. Naturally, it hit home. One good thing about being here is that I feel as though I am being punished (and I am) for my reckless lifestyle, which culminated in the death of a friend. When I get really depressed, I try and think along those lines, and it is a very good healing process. Nobody will argue that I was a living, raging, full-fledged drug addict. Period. End of discussion. Sure I had lots of fun, but for all the good times there were also bad times, some worse than others. Reflection with a clean, sober mind can be a valuable process. My senses, once dulled by years of indiscriminate drug use, are once again sharply defined and tuned. Hopefully, I will once again be able to put those senses to use. Some days I think I will, some days I don't. Dinner: Chicken breast, Bread, Corn, Kool Aid May 30 Jail is NOISY. The doctor has put me on several medications. (Depakote, Addavan and some sort of sleep aid. Medication is given out twice daily.) I was awoken at the ghastly hour of 9 a.m. for my first dose of Depakote (the doctor diagnosed me as having a bipolar disorder, which Depakote supposedly takes care of)-that along with the constant TV sounds, the slamming of doors and, of course, those loudmouth inmates playing spades and dominoes. They act like they own the place, and they do. Each inmate seems to be some sort of caricature of either the loud, goofy or the quiet, insane type. One of them, called the Nose Digger, picks his nose and eats his boogers all day long, just as I've developed the habit of eating my nails due to constant boredom. There are SPAs (Suicide Prevention Authorities) who "guard" all the prisoners to try to keep them from performing hari-kari. At 35 cents an hour (seriously), they're some of the highest-paid workers! Speaking of noise, some nut is chanting some sort of Jamaican farewell eight doors down from me. Dinner: Fish sticks (Ã la Mrs. Paul's), Potatoes, Carrots, Kool Aid May 31 Today was exciting for two reasons: 1. Today was shopping day. We're allowed to choose from a "vast" array of choice, tasty items. From Ritz-type crackers to oatmeal cookies, we may spend up to $70 a week. Even if you bought one of everything, I don't think you'd spend $70. Absolute nirvana! 2. I got a visit from my friend Oitsy, who is leaving for Florida. After our one hour, which was done in a glass bubble to "protect" us from other inmates, and a teary good-bye, I waved to her and was taken upstairs, where even more "excitement" was found. Tonight was also Narcotics Anonymous. Speaking to an overcapacity, sell-out crowd, the speaker made all four of us stand up and tell the entire class what our problem was. After listening to other people lie about how long they've been sober, I went back upstairs and to bed. Dinner: "Hot dogs", Sauerkraut, Kool Aid June 1 Sunday. Bible study. The "church people" convinced me to go and get some "soul food." I consented to go, but later on was "saved," as this activity was canceled. (Note: Being in protective custody, as I am, means you're not allowed to walk around without a constant captain's accompaniment, so a lot of services are never called on our floor because they're too lazy to walk us there.) I tried (and succeeded) in finding four other older inmates to join me in a game of "$20,000 Pyramid." I was the MC, wrote up the "Things a Stewardess Might Say" categories and was amused until bedtime. Dinner: Hamburgers, Fries, Salad, Kool Aid. Club promoter Michael Alig is currently awaiting trial for the murder of Angel Melendez.

A word from Michael Alig......Missed Signs.... 

There is no excuse for killing someone, no reason to justify being wholly or even partly responsible for the death of another human being. I have never been a violent person. I don't even like sports. To me, capital punishment is even wrong, but the fact remains that a Sunday morning about three years ago, which began like any other in my life, ended in the death of my friend Angel Melendez. I am now serving a 10-20 sentence for manslaughter. I am responsible for another's death, and though I do not endeavor to seek out an excuse, I do search within for some kind of explanation, some glimmer of understanding as to how and why something like this could have happened. Looking inside myself, I see roads that lead back to my past. To hope to understand the events of that tragic Sunday I must travel down those roads looking for signs. What strikes me first when I think about my past, especially now living the harsh reality of incarceration, is the total lack of boundaries. Pushing the limit was an exciting way to live, I cannot deny that. But the problem was that in a world of an unending supply of drugs, almost limitless amounts of money, and complete decadence and indulgence, a world of no boundaries is possible. To me, pushing the limits was a way to make a difference in the world, to hopefully change outmoded ways of popular thinking, to make some kind of cultural impact. The thought that this lifestyle would end up hurting someone else, let alone killing them, was the furthest thing from my mind. Looking back, though, I see that there were indications that my life, my friends' lives, were utterly out of control. I should have paid attention to the signs. After the first time I actually overdosed, I woke up in a small, dark, cramped room, filled with boxes. Somebody's storage room, or so I thought. But whose? It was such a tiny room, 6 feet by 6 feet at best. Where was I? Why was I alone? I felt a wet, sticky floor beneath my left arm. There was a bare light bulb on over me which shed enough light for me to turn on my left side and notice that the substance was blood! Where was it coming from? Feeling up and down my body for cuts, I soon realized it was my arm. It was cut all over with little shards of glass sticking out. Then it hit me. I didn't know who I was! This was some sensation. I mean, I felt "normal,'' other than the fact that I didn't know what my name was, where I worked, who my friends were, or where I was. I still knew what a lightbulb was, still knew blood when I saw it, but didn't have any consciousness of time-- past, present or future. I knew that I must have friends and family, but who and where were they? I got up. This was no "room'' after all--it was a walk-in closet. Even though the light in the closet was on, the lights outside the closet were off, and so my world consisted of that small space. Finally I got up the nerve to actually venture out of the closet, and into a vaguely familiar room. I fumbled for a light switch. I must not be too bad off, I knew what a light switch was! I felt along the walls until I found one, then turned on the lights, only to discover an entire dinner plate filled with cocaine on the floor! It looked as if it had been kicked, or bumped, because almost half the cocaine was spilled. Why was I bleeding? A broken glass on the floor of the closet answered that question, but more importantly, why was I naked? Had I been with somebody when this happened? If so, who was it? Did I even know this person? Instantly, the frightening thought of a stranger being with me had come to my mind. Was I sexually assaulted? I didn't exactly know where I was yet, but the room looked semi-familiar. I looked outside the window -- it was twilight -- the time that could either be dusk or dawn. But I didn't even know the date, or even the year, for that matter. A nearby digital clock read 6:15. Great. A.M? P.M? Either way, it scared me. Did I miss an entire day? Days? I walked into a bathroom. The bathtub was full of water, and there was a towel in the next room. Was I taking a bath? Before I could even answer my own questions, I bent down, picked up the plate of cocaine, and used some. Within the next minutes (or hours?) things slowly became clearer and clearer to me. Yes, I had been taking a bath. That much I did remember. Then, one by one, I remembered other things, too. I had gotten home from the Limelight after hosting my weekly Wednesday party Disco 2000. I had taken a bath to wash off the evening's fun, and was doing cocaine to bring me up from the Rohypnol I had taken upon leaving the club on the way to pick up more heroin. For the very first time ever, the overload of uppers and downers must have caused me to have a seizure, because I did remember feeling light-headed after rising out of the tub. Eventually my identity started to come back to me. I am known as the "King of the Club Kids,'' and I remembered my name. It is Michael. Michael Alig. People regularly ask me, "Didn't you notice what was happening to you? How did you allow yourself to fall into such a state?'' The answer to that is: No, I didn't realize what was happening. And when my family, friends and even my boss tried to warn me, I still didn't agree with them. As far as I was concerned, they simply didn't understand that I was in complete control. I believe there were several factors in my evading reality. The first were the usual Freudian defenses of denial, rationalization and intellectualizing, for me to subconsciously block out any unpleasantness. Then there was the actual physical addiction to heroin. My level of drug addiction isn't something that happened overnight--it took years to develop. It happened so gradually that by the time I realized it my body needed the heroin for nourishment, and it was too late. While some may misinterpret this next reason as a cop-out, I still firmly believe that, on one level, another significant reason has to do with my homosexuality. In my experience, the homosexual lifestyle in major cities is all too out of control, and willed by a subconscious desire to self-destruct. I dealt with that by medicating myself with drugs. However "politically correct'' it is to be gay, the reality is that it isn't actually correct, not in the daily existence, be it at work in New York City, where I operated my nightclubs, or in the average McDonalds in Ohio. Thus, there is this pain that is made easier to deal with by the formation of a gay subculture and also, in many cases, by the use of drugs, and the ability to "party your life away.'' I am not trying to point a finger of blame, as ultimately I have nobody to blame but myself. I am only trying to understand why. Just prior to my arrest I had sequentially overdosed four times with naloxone treatment in the emergency room, narrowly missing death. I didn't learn from those experiences (most junkies don't) and continued using heroin in a bizarre act of flirting with death. Actually, at that point I would have welcomed death, as being "normal'' again seemed so impossibly out of reach to me that life didn't seem worth living. Unfortunately, for me all of this ended in the death of my friend Angel, and my resulting incarceration. But in prison, with the forced end of a constant, affordable supply of drugs I realized that I had no choice but to stop. Heroin is widely available in most jails, especially Riker's Island, where its use is common knowledge among inmates and officers alike, but its price, questionable quality and inconsistent supply make it a highly priced smuggled commodity that can become a life and death game. The only way to stop was to allow them to lock me up in a solitary cell for several months, to ensure that I would not give in and use heroin. It was probably the most important decision of my life, because the alternative was death. In retrospect I realize that I didn't stop using heroin on the streets because of the protective shield drugs created, and their ability to make life worth living through their unnatural euphoria. At the time, life was just one great time after another, and I believed life wouldn't be worth living sober because a normal, mundane set of rewards and incentives wasn't enough to keep me happy. It was either being the abominable "pleasure junkie'' or just existing, and the latter I simply didn't think possible. Either way, I was a pleasure junkie, trying to derive as much pleasure out of life with as little work as possible. The urge to "feel good'' is universal. It's an innate drive to feel more complete, more satisfied than the moment before, yet the more things we discover, the hungrier we seem to be for more still. Little children have the right idea. Their entire lives revolve around simple pleasures like playing and eating. In fact, even when they cry they're seeking the pleasure of the mother's nurturing touch. Little children are allowed--even encouraged -- to lead a life of pleasure. This is, perhaps, one of the main reasons for my refusal to "grow up.'' It is why much of my adult life has been spent creating environments for myself and others, where adult responsibilities take a back seat to childlike wonder and surprise. I also regret the way this situation has affected the mainstream media's opinion of many people who lead alternative lifestyles. I hope that most people realize that the vast majority of individuals who choose to embark on a creative or alternative life path do manage to do so without killing anyone. Now, after over a year of sobriety I see that I was wrong. Once again, I'm experiencing life clearly through my senses and the clean way in which they are processed in my mind, enjoying a renewed, child-like innocence. A smile or a laugh isn't just a reaction to the most extreme situations anymore, but to my average daily experiences like eating a piece of sour candy, or seeing a fat boy in the prison yard with the crack of his butt exposed for everybody to see. I believe this is just the beginning. It will take some time for my brain to rewire what's important in my life, but the point is, I do see massive improvement in an area which I felt was hopeless. I am looking forward to a symbolic kind of rebirth that, I pray, a few years in prison will allow. Now, however, it will be the small, subtle life experiences that will be my reinforcement. Parties in jail are dangerous.

MICHAEL ALIG