by Jarett Kobek
This is how the world works.
A young man moves to New York City at eighteen years of age, desperate to abandon the American Middle West. He walks to Alphabet City, where a vague acquaintance resides in a squat. The experience turns out badly. While he is in the squat, the young man meets a girl. On his first night in the city, he moves into her dorm. They become best friends. They become inseparable. This friendship is one of great consequence, leading to the young man’s attendance at New York University, leading to his career as a writer. The young man ends up well regarded, preparing for the release of his new novel in the fall of 1996.
This is how the world works.
*
On March 16th, 1996, Angel Melendez heads to the corner of 43rd Street and Eleventh Avenue. He struts up to the Riverbank West, a luxury high-rise where Michael Alig lives in an apartment paid for by Peter Gatien. The rent is $2,400 a month. Angel floats through the courtyard, past the fountain. He is waved in by the doorman and rides the elevator up to Michael’s floor.
Melendez has fallen on hard times. He had a brief burst of glory, dealing drugs in the Limelight and Tunnel. He’d been on Gatien’s payroll. When the hammer of the NYPD began pounding the clubs, Gatien fired Melendez. Angel bummed from place to place, with no fixed address. One of these temporary homes was Michael Alig’s apartment. He kept his money and his drugs in a junky’s home.
Michael ripped him off, stealing a few thousand dollars and some unknown amount of drugs. A story went around that when Angel realized what’d happened, he’d taken off his shoe and battered Michael Alig’s head. This may or may not be true.
Angel exits the elevator and confronts Michael Alig. The two-bedroom apartment is stocked with a wide library of VHS tapes. Michael has all two hundred of MPI’s Dark Shadows compilations. He has every episode of I Love Lucy. He has a wide collection of horror and slasher films. Before the drugs destroyed his life, Michael Alig was making ten thousand dollars a week. He could afford anything.
In one of the bedrooms, a club kid named Freeze is sleeping beside Paul Auster’s Son. Freeze is a junky. Paul Auster’s Son is also a junky. Earlier that day, Paul Auster’s Son overdosed. Michael recognized the symptoms. He gathered cocaine from Angel’s stash and blew it up Paul Auster’s Son’s nose. Paul Auster’s Son woke from the black oblivion of death. The bells of cocaine rang in his head.
Angel and Michael argue. Angel strangles Michael Alig. Michael is bashed against a glass curio, which breaks and gouges a deep wound into his neck and shoulder. The noise rouses Freeze. He enters the living room. He sees the mayhem, hears Michael crying out for help. Angel is on top of Michael. Angel is biting Michael, teeth sunk into the junky’s chest.
Freeze’s dope-saturated primary motor cortex sends out neural impulses to his body. He picks up a hammer. He hits the back of Angel’s head. Three times. The final blow breaks bone.
They gag Angel. They believe that Angel is dead from falls of the hammer, but it is the suffocation which kills him. The body is brought into the bathroom and put into the waters of the bathtub. Michael Alig pours Drano into Angel’s mouth. Or injects it with a syringe. Freeze asks why. Michael says that he is trying to embalm the body. There is a bloodied, destroyed mess of a human, filled with Drano, in the bathtub. Throughout this process, if a corpse can retain ownership of anything, they are stealing drugs from the corpse’s stash.
Michael Alig calls a bevy of acquaintances. He tries to call me. I’m not home. He doesn’t leave a message. Michael tells everyone that he talks to about having killed someone. He says that he has a body. He asks for help with disposal of the corpse. No one offers any aid. No one calls the police.
They leave the apartment. They visit the queen Olympia. They get very high.
Days pass. The body stays in the bathtub. It bloats with water. Michael takes Angel’s money and refurnishes his apartment. People visit, Michael entertains. The bathroom is blocked from guests. There’s something wrong with the toilet. This is believed, in part, because of the odor.
After a week, Michael Alig tells Freeze that he’ll take care of the body if Freeze gives him ten bags of heroin. Ten bags of heroin is a bundle. Freeze agrees. Michael sends Freeze to Macy’s. Michael tells Freeze to buy the proper cutlery. Freeze returns with two large knives and a meat cleaver. Michael injects heroin. Michael goes into the bathroom and dismembers Angel’s corpse. He cuts off the legs. After a week of being under water, the meat is disgustingly tender. He cuts off Angel’s genitals. Just because.
Michael and Freeze put the legs in two garbage bags. They throw the legs into the Hudson River. The bags sink.
In the basement of the Riverbank West, Freeze finds an empty box. The box was used to package a television. Michael and Freeze tape Angel’s legless body inside the box. They ride with the box in the elevator. In front of the building, they hail a cab. The cabdriver helps lift the box into the car’s trunk. The driver brings them to 25th Street and 11th Avenue. They are very close to Tunnel. They wait for the cabdriver to pull away. They carry the box to the Hudson River. They throw the box in the water.
Unlike the legs, the box does not sink. Angel’s torso floats away.
This is the official story, which will calcify after confessions and transform into convictions. There are other versions. Paul Auster’s Son, whisked away by Paul Auster after the murder, will later meet with family friend Robert Morgenthau, the septuagenarian District Attorney of New York. Paul Auster’s Son will tell Morgenthau that Freeze and Michael Alig plotted to rob Angel. Paul Auster’s Son will tell Morgenthau that Michael lured Angel to the apartment. The invite for the previous year’s Bloodfeast party, featuring a hammer and a club kid with his brains bashed out, along with text about legs being cut off, will be remembered.
Paul Auster’s Son will plead guilty to stealing $3,000 of Angel’s money. Morgenthau will not put Paul Auster’s Son on the stand to testify against Michael Alig or Freeze, believing that junkies make unreliable witnesses. In 2003, Siri Hustvedt, the stepmother of Paul Auster’s Son, will write a baldly autobiographical novel touching upon Angel’s murder. Titled What I Loved, Hustvedt’s fictional analogue speculates that the fictional analogue of Paul Auster’s Son has never been truthful about the murder.
Four men are present in Michael Alig’s apartment on March 16th. The poorest person receives three hammer blows against his skull. The best-connected person receives five years’ probation.
This is how the world works.
APRIL 1996
Peter Gatien Fires Michael Alig
In April, Peter Gatien fired Michael. I discovered this by reading “La Dolce Musto” in the Village Voice. Item #1: Alig was locked out of his apartment at the Riverside West. Item #2: Alig blamed Gatien’s wife, Alex. Item #3: Alex hates Michael and thinks that he slept with Gatien. Item #4: Michael went to rehab on Gatien’s dime. Item #5: The Limelight is still hosting Disco 2000. Item #6: Michael is starting a second Disco 2000 at Expo.
I had no idea how to get in touch with Michael. I called James St. James at his place in Alphabet City. I asked if he’d seen Alig.
—Girl, he said, you don’t want anything to do with Michael. You were right to get away. Trust me, Baby, that is one itch you do not want to scratch. Things are so dark right now that I won’t even gossip. Go back to your books and pretend like you never met us.
—Are they really doing Disco 2000 without Michael?
—You remember his assistant, Walt Paper? That annoying little bald-headed bitch? Guess who’s running the show? Anne Baxter for the new millennium!
—Thanks, Jimmy, I said. I’ll see you around.
—Oh, Miss Thing, you will. I’m a heavenly fixture.
We hung up. I didn’t call anyone else. When James St. James warns you off, you stay warned off.
But I did decide to go to Disco 2000. I was curious about the spectacle without Michael. Besides, it
was Tuesday. I only need wait a day.
I attempted for the fifth time to read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Two months earlier, the thousand-page magnum opus had been published to broad acclaim. Much of the praise centered on Wallace’s postmodern mechanism, employing over three hundred footnotes, which apparently ruptured the text.
That was the 1990s. The publishing industry spent the first half of the decade attempting to incorporate outside voices into Literature. Homos, women of color, the poor. When the great game proved resilient, New York City’s editorial class retooled and published straight white guys who’d intuited that postmodernism was only a return to the same old bullshit disguised through cloying formalist devices. Five full years of footnotes and drawings of staplers.
Infinite Jest came like the tablets of Moses, a prefab masterpiece acknowledged well before its appearance in stores, as unavoidable as the political candidates produced by a two-party system. I’ll admit to slight jealousy.
Saving Anne Frank was not manufactured for that particular success. It wasn’t in my blood. I was from the wrong family. I was too queer, too fucked up, too science fiction. An unfortunate lack of a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. The only things that I had going were my pair of gonads and a dangling cluster of erectile vessels.
For David Foster Wallace, the role of serious writer was an irrevocable birthright. People think of Literature as if it were a natural occurrence revealed through the honesty of post-Enlightenment expression. Horseshit. Literature is a long-standing market construction of the late 1800s that details the social progress of the upper middle classes.
In America, this means WASPs. Any deviation is judged with modifiers. A woman who wrote Infinite Jest, word for word, comma for comma, superfluous adjective for superfluous adjective, couldn’t have had the same reception. She would have been a Woman Writer who produced a fascinating oddity. Much discussed among a certain academic class. The same is true of Black Folk. Infinite Jest would have been shelved in African American fiction and lost to the world.
This mirrors the text of Infinite Jest, a book that never fails to identify its racial and cultural minorities by their deviation from whiteness and straightness. Black people are so black that they’re blue. As long as David Foster Wallace cared to write giant books about young honky geniuses who played metaphorical tennis at academies run by their overeducated parents, the mechanism would receive his output.
I’d been asked to review Infinite Jest for Sloat & Taraval, a San Francisco literary journal. The editor was Bob Glück, the New Narrative poet and novelist. Glück liked Trapped. Given the vague science fiction overlay of both books, Glück was curious about my thoughts on Wallace’s masterpiece.
When I told Parker about the review, he threw a chair across his office. Brickley thought that one writer reviewing another writer’s work was nothing but trouble. Publish something negative and suffer the social consequences. Publish something positive and you’re lumped together for life. If Parker Brickley understood only a single thing, it was the impossibility of predicting a writer’s path. Why dilute your brand through association with an unknown commodity?
But I was flattered that Glück had asked. I said yes. I’d engage with David Foster Wallace. I’d been trying since February. I’d even asked Adeline if she’d attend Wallace’s reading at Tower Books.
—Baby, replied Adeline, I simply can’t stand these authorial events. It’s more than enough steeling one’s self for the inevitability of your dreaded moment, so why in the blazes would I listen to the half-baked yammerings of a dude in a bandanna?
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get past the first few paragraphs. I’d stumble on the atrocious second sentence. “My posture is consciously congruent to the shape of my hard chair.” Consciously congruent! How could I go for a thousand pages? But I must make the effort.
By Wednesday morning, after about two hundred pages, I realized that Infinite Jest couldn’t be read. The thing could be apprehended only as an object, as an ultra-kitschy, giant-sized pastiche of The Crying of Lot 49.
If you excluded the timeless books, the special ones, then the reception of writing was little more than a contest of dick size. An atavistic component of the human psyche is always overwhelmed by the huge. We loved the biggest houses, the biggest cars, the biggest skyscrapers. Why not the biggest book? The longest cock. Quality is irrelevant. The reading public are a bunch of size queens. And I know size queens. All that matters is length and girth.
*
I left a message for Regina, saying that I’d be attending Disco 2000. I hadn’t seen her in months, not since she’d started going with this bull dyke from the Bronx. I assumed that Regina was embarrassed by either me or her girlfriend. Possibly both. Queen Rex wouldn’t make her appearance at Disco 2000, but what was the harm in asking?
Limelight was a ghost town. I didn’t even see Walt Paper. The clueless few in attendance were candy ravers in their phat pants. Phat pants. Whither gone were the boiler suits of my youth?
I left after ten minutes, standing on Sixth Avenue, waiting for a notion to strike. There wasn’t even a line. No one wanted to be at Disco 2000.
—Hey, Baby!
It was a friend of Michael’s, a blonde junky named Gitsie. She was nineteen years old and from Miami. Gitsie saw Michael on Geraldo and ran away to New York City, showing up somewhere around 1992. She’d come fresh faced, a bit on the chubby side. A goofy teenybopper in questionable leather vests. Every town in America had a Gitsie.
The drugs ate away the weight and her youth. I’d heard stories about how she made her money. They were unpleasant.
—I’ve been looking for Michael, I said.
—I haven’t seen him for a few days, she said. He’s staying with Brooke at the Chelsea.
—Too bad he got fired.
—It’s so unfair, she said. How could Peter do that?
—It happens to everyone, I said. Employment is the socially acceptable term we employ to describe the state of waiting for the axe.
—Are you looking to score? she asked.
—What do you have?
—I’ve got diesel, she said. I’ll sell you two bags for forty dollars.
I had no particular moral objection to the drug, but heroin always seemed so scummy. Buying it from a nineteen-year-old with visible track marks did not lessen this impression. Still, why not? It wasn’t like I’d shoot it.
Twenty dollars a bag was criminal, but I always was an easy mark.
Back at my apartment, The King of France had eaten all of his gourmet food. He’d been put on a special diet after developing an allergy to store-bought brands. Anything with too much grain and he’d vomit. Before we found a prescription brand that he could digest, the cat lost two pounds. The vet said this amount was significant.
I scooped the wild thing into my arms and flipped him on his back. He purred and put his paws on my mouth.
For all of the moments in my life that I’d watched people doing heroin, my strongest impression was from the film Bad Lieutenant. Harvey Keitel empties his heroin onto strips of tinfoil. A prostitute lights the bottom. Keitel, using a straw, sucks the smoke into his mouth.
He’s a really bad lieutenant.
I went across the hall. I rarely talked with my neighbor, but whenever we did speak, she seemed more than pleasant. Her name was Deborah. I think she’d said that she worked for David Letterman.
—Do you have any tinfoil? I asked.
—How much do you need?
—Two or three sheets.
—What are you cooking?
—I’ve got my grandmother’s recipe for garlic brown sugar chicken.
She closed her apartment door and came back with three sheets.
—When’s the next book coming out? she asked.
—A few months, I said. You’ll have to come to the relea
se party.
—I’ll definitely go for sure, she said. Let me know.
—Thanks again, I said.
I balanced a sheet across my knees and poured out the powder. I bent over the tinfoil, straw hanging out of my mouth, and flicked my lighter. The smoke tasted like the odor of street vendors selling cashew nuts. Burning tinfoil.
The drug bubbled and turned a tarry black. I smoked the first bag.
An immediate rush at the back of my temples. Unlike any other that I’d experienced, like a warm hug from the inside. I returned to the familiar place of doing a drug and liking the first five minutes and then realizing that I’d be like this for hours. Unsure what to do with myself, I decided to watch a film that I’d rented at Kim’s. Blow-Up by Michelangelo Antonioni.
Motor control issues getting the tape into my VCR. My quest was not aided by The King of France, who rubbed against my ankles and mewled, drawing my attention from the task at hand.
I was outside and inside myself. I’d always presumed that nodding off was the result of a loss of will, that being on the nod was a weakness. Now I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I caught glimpses of the film, flashing in and out. A fashion model on the floor. Other fashion models. A man in a car. Mimes. Very white pants. Cubist paintings. Stoners in an overly ornate house. A junk shop. Black-and-white photography. Jimmy Page. Silent tennis. Wind in trees.
Each time that I’d catch a glimpse, I’d go back on the nod. I could see everything, perfectly. Me on the couch. The King of France beside me. The television playing, but the scenarios would shift. David Hemmings stared at me from inside the television, saying, Oi, Baby, you poof, where’s your poodle? Then I saw black dogs, running through the apartment, stomping on my body, tormenting my cat.
I couldn’t make it to the bathroom. I leaned over the side of my couch and projectile vomited. It landed in a spot where The King of France had previously thrown up. My expulsion was consciously congruent to the shape of his mess.