The Life and Crimes of Micheal Alig

Glory Daze in the Limelight!

Micheal Alig was one of those people who spent a very unhappy childhood in South Bend, Indiana because he couldn’t fit in. He was bullied, humiliated, laughed at beaten and so forth.Back then you either went to LA or New York. He went to the latter just that he could be his real-self. Problem is it must have probably work too well, too fast because Alig became totally unhinged and it all ended in a ”Disco Bloodbath” for Angel,  the ”Spiritual-Super-Drug-Hero-Dealer” who’s body was sent floating on the Hudson by Alig and Robert “Freeze” Riggs, dismembered so that he could fit in a cardboard box. The river’s current usually sends everything to the ocean but a climate change had reversed the process and that’s how the body washed up on Staten Island instead.  He was lucky to be found at all.

Alig could be described as a devilishly appealing guy from the Midwest who took the ’80s/’90s NYC clubs by storm with his subversive energy. Michael Alig always talked quickly, injecting a cackle between phrases, as he cooked up all sorts of mayhem and provocation. With aggression, smarts, and an anything-goes sense of creating fun, he quickly rose up the ranks of nightlife, becoming the darling of major domos like Rudolf Pieper and Peter Gatien, who later found that Alig was also a demon who could whip up tons of trouble as easily as he could dream up an open-bar party or a nutty performance art review.

He managed to create a scene that was totally surreal, crazy, glamorous yet not at all the same time. This was VERY profitable and it just kept on getting better and better. Alig’s notorious “Outlaw Parties”, which were thrown in various unconventional places including a Burger King, a Dunkin’ Donuts, abandoned houses and a subway, helped to revitalize the downtown New York City club scene which Village Voice columnist Michael Musto declared had atrophied after artist Andy Warhol died in 1987. Alig’s parties also became notorious due in part to his own “bad behavior”. Alig would throw $100 bills on crowded dance floors just to watch people scramble for them. In other instances, he would urinate on clubgoers or urinate in their drinks and stage falls wherein he knocked others to the ground.

As Alig’s popularity in the club scene grew, so did his drug use. He was arrested several times for drug offenses and entered rehab, but continued to use drugs. In 1995, Alig’s boss Peter Gatien sent Alig to rehab once again.  Alig later claimed that after he completed his stint and was released, Gatien fired him.
Some of Alig’s behavior could be explained by a personality disorder; he was diagnosed with histrionic personality disorder. He stated that “The doctor said I was the most extreme case he’d ever seen. Everything has to be completely over the top and exaggerated. It worked well for my job – I was a promoter.At first Alig was totally against drugs and thought that anyone who was using was an absolute loser. Well that surely changed radically and soon Micheal Alig became a very heavy user of every drug you can possibly imagine, sinking low into depravity but always managing to have brilliant ideas and promoting what would become a way of life in itself: The Club Kids were born.

Now of course Micheal Alig had realised than drugs were bringing a lot more money than the admission entrance and the alcohol so he thought it would be stupid to let anyone else than him benefit from the profits generated by his parties so he created some sort of super hero figure that would be a guardian angel, offering you the boost you need to feel on top of the world again!! So he created Angel, a guy all dressed in white or silver wearing giant angel wings, able to offer you whatever drug you need whenever you need it. Of course in exchange of making Angel the official drug dealer of what was the hippest ”clientele” of  the New York Scene, Alig could ask for almost whatever he wanted up front and largely benefitted from this arrangement, until the debt became a too high a problem….

Andre “Angel” Melendez was regular on the New York City club scene and worked at The Limelight. He also sold drugs on the premises. After the bar was closed by federal agents when an investigation found that Peter Gatien was allowing drugs to be sold there, Melendez was fired. Shortly thereafter, he moved into Alig’s apartment. On the night of March 17, 1996, Alig and his friend Robert “Freeze” Riggs murdered Melendez after an argument in Alig’s apartment over many things including a long-standing drug debt. Alig has claimed many times that he was so high on drugs that his memory of the events is unclear.

After Melendez’s death, Alig and Riggs did not know what to do with the body. They initially left it in the bathtub, which they filled with ice. After a few days, the body began to decompose and became odorous. After discussing what to do with Melendez’s body and who should do it, Riggs went to Macy’s to buy knives and a box. In exchange for ten bags of heroin, Alig agreed to dismember Melendez’s body. He cut the legs off, put them in a garbage bag and stuffed the rest into a box. Afterwards, he and Riggs threw the box into the Hudson River.

In the weeks following Melendez’s disappearance, Alig allegedly told “anyone who would listen” that he and Riggs had killed him. Most people did not believe Alig and thought his “confession” was a ploy to get attention.

I told you the main lines of the story but I just wanted to make sure that if you were caught up in the story that you would watch ”Glory Daze: The Life and Times of Micheal Alig”, a recent very well made documentary on the subject.

In 1999 a memoir written by James St.James ”Disco Bloodbath: A Fabulous but True Tale of Murder in Clubland” was released and Disco Bloodbath has since gone out of print but was re-printed in 2003 under the title ”Party Monster – The Fabulous but True Tale of Murder in Clubland”. It was also made into a movie that you can also watch, it’s quite easy to find.

We must not forget the fact that this man killed and dismembered a human being and if it come across as a side note in this story, I am deeply sorry but it is not that I do not care about the horrible torture and death that Angel suffered. I just wanted to let people decide for themselves by watching the documentary, the  shockumentary, the movie or reading the novel. Micheal Alig is out since May 5th, 2014. Will he be able to reinvent himself and create something new and funny and healthy and cool and…. or not?

”FEED MY MORBID CURIOSITY. LIFE IS A BLOOD BATH, ADD SOME GLITTER & PLAY IN THAT SHIT”