THIS GUY

There's a story I read about a guy called Michael and a guy called Angel and a guy called Freeze and it fascinated me. It was set in the mid 90s in Manhattan and this guy Michael and this guy Freeze were wasted on heroin andhit this guy Angel over the head with a hammer and killed him dead. They called him Angel because he always wore wings when he went out clubbing. So after killing him, they wanted to make it look like an overdose so injected cleaning fluid into his body and chipped the body into their bath for a good 5 or 6 days. The smell was getting bad so this guy Michael took 10 bags of heroin and chopped this guy Angel's legs off, then this guy Michael and this guy Freeze put the torso in a box, headed down to the Hudson River and tossed in, never to be seen again, sort of.

It's a great piece of fiction set against the backdrop of New York clubbing at it's pinnacle, wild parties, sex, drugs, rock n roll, backstabbing and social hierarchy. Except that it's not fiction and this guy Michael Alig and his flat mate nicknamed Freeze killed their drug dealer friend Angel Melendez - you couldn't make this shit up. I have just finished reading the book 'Disco Bloodbath' written by Michael Alig's friend and New York clubbing staple, James St James. It charts his early 80s pouting in Manhattan's clubs with columnist Michael Musto who constantly appears on E! and VH1 commentating and giving pithy remarks about the stars du jour. It then tells how drugs were the done thing and a young upstart entered the NYC scene in the early 90s and quickly took over and created his own warped scene - having puppet chickens, looking like a car crash (literally) and being as outlandish as possible inspired all the misfits to join in and create a look of clubkids and wacky, outlandish style.

Alig reigned supreme and from James St James's book, had a pretty spectacular decline into drug hell. I was amazed at the lengths people would go to get a hit. For example, in one rather gruesome paragraph, Alig can't find a needle to inject some heroin so decides he'll cut his wrist open and dispense the heroin into his vein that way - now that's just crazy and fucked up. James gets mighty pissed that Michael rules the roost and it kind of paints him as the voice of reason but I think there's much more to him than meets the reader's cornea. He wastes no time in giving the explicit details of how Michael and Angel were fighting about drugs, they struggled, the other flatmate (a bleach blond hellacious looking drug dealer nicknamed Freeze) came in to the room, hammers were used and the rest is rather wild and not to mention messy history. It took months and months for Alig and Freeze to be arrested and both are serving 10 - 20 years for manslaughter. Now death is never comfortable but I can't believe that something like that actually happened - although it did.

The book has also been made into a movie with Macaulay Culkin and Alig and Chloe Sevigny plays one of the chick clubkids, it got panned but the whole thing is disturbingly fascinating in a morbid way - let's not forget the fabulous names, Angel Melendez? James St James? Freeze? Jenny Talia - it reminds me of the Blitz Kids of the 80s in London, all in a similar vein as Marilyn, Steve Strange, Boy George and my favourite name of all - Sheila Tequila!! The difference between the Blitz Kids and the Club Kids of 90s Manhattan is down to the screwed up drug fucked actions of Michael and Freeze and this guy called Angel.