Doll Parts

by Amanda Lepore

  It was always awkward. These people were older by this point, and it was sort of disrespectful to get them to show up for no reason. You could see it in their faces when they realized the whole thing was a scam. They were mostly very gracious about it. Except the Snapple Lady. That girl was pissed. I tried not to focus on the bad side, though, and enjoyed the fact that I got to mingle with celebrities.

  New York nightlife is a little incestuous. Once you start working at one bar, you start getting hired at all of them.

  I was dancing at this club called the Building, around the block from Limelight.

  The Building had a large staircase made of hollow, grated metal. I was walking fast, not holding on to the rail, and my heel got caught in the stairs. I fell forward into the railing, slamming my forehead really hard before falling down. My white dress was covered in blood.

  I crawled back up the stairs to try to find help. The first person I saw was James St James, who said, “Amanda, great look!” and walked away. I kept trying to get someone to call me an ambulance but they all assumed I was putting on an act. Covering yourself in blood was very “in” at the time.

  Richie Rich saw me, and luckily he had the same glam aesthetic I did and knew right away something was wrong. He took me to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where the doctor told me I had several deep cuts on my face. I’d need a bunch of stitches and I’d definitely have a scar. Richie Rich started crying and so did I.

  What was I going to do? My face was ruined. There would be a bandage on my head for months. I wouldn’t be able to leave my house. After all the time and work I’d put into my look, now I’d have a scar? I was seriously suicidal.

  Keni, Richie, and Armen gave me a sort of intervention, which was really just them helping me figure out how to wear my hair to cover the scar. I stopped bleaching and let my natural brown hair grow in (I couldn’t risk breaking it again and not being able to cover my face), and I started wearing more ponytails and thick bangs over my forehead.

  “Just get bigger breasts,” Keni said. “Nobody will even notice a scar on your face if your tits are gigantic.”

  Maybe he was kidding but that made a lot of sense to me. The hot look at the time was Pam Anderson—no ass or hips, just implants. I saw Dr. Reinhorn and told him I was ready for my second breast enlargement; he wasn’t surprised. “I had a feeling you’d want to go bigger,” he said.

  I went from a C to a D cup. While I was at it, I also asked him to make my lips as big as they could possibly be without looking bad. I knew that would draw attention away from the scar too. I did go a little overboard at first with the lips, but we fixed it.

  People weren’t doing lips like that back then. This was before Angelina Jolie. Guys went nuts. Nobody ever noticed my scar.

  Drugs were always around, but Disco 2000 wasn’t such a drug scene at the time. It was more about dressing up.

  Michael was rebelling against the generation before, the celebutantes and the Studio 54 crowd. Cocaine was tacky and tired; Michael was too creative to be gacked out of his mind. He’d pretend to be high and act like he was doing cocaine just to fit into the scene, but the party itself was Michael’s high.He didn’t need help from a substance.

  I never liked doing coke either, mostly because I didn’t want to mess up my nose job, but also because Mary Ellen’s death was a real cautionary tale for me. Sure, I’d do a tootie every now and then, but whenever a drug dealer would hand me a “free sample” baggie I’d hand it over to Armen, like a cat presenting a mouse.

  It comes as a surprise to many people that I can carry on a conversation and be as focused as I am, even in the midst of all the chaos that comes with a great party. It’s not easy to do, but after many years in the club scene I developed a gift for it.

  The big secret is a simple one: I am a preservationist.

  Being a drunken, coked-out mess while wearing high heels is one surefire way to end up bruised and scarred. And if I have to make a choice between wearing fuck-me heels and getting drunk or high, I’m making the choice that is more visually appealing.

  When I go out, if I want to drink, I’ll order a glass of champagne or a wine spritzer, and I’ll nurse it all night. Usually I’ll ask the bartender to serve me ginger ale in a champagne glass. That’s a trick I stole from Dean Martin, who used to drink Coca-Cola out of a scotch glass. He always had a drink in his hand; it’s part of the look. You seem out of place if you’re in a club all night without a drink. But being sloppy hasn’t been a good aesthetic since 1994, and I sincerely hope it’s not coming back in style anytime soon.

  I DIDN’T CARE ABOUT DOING THE COOLEST LOOK; I WAS DOING MY LOOK.

  “They could never have Club Kids in Ethiopia,” Michael said to me one day. We were having a picnic in front of the Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. I took a nibble of a turkey sandwich, removed the lettuce from it, and tossed the rest away.

  “Well, they have to worry about feeding themselves. In America we have the luxury of focusing on things that don’t really matter. Like lip gloss.”

  “Lip gloss does matter, Michael.”

  “Yeah, but it’s all satire, Mandy. We can afford to be helpless, act like children, carry lunch boxes and drink from baby bottles. We can create whatever character we want and be as big and extreme as we want.”

  “I don’t play a character, Michael. This is who I am.” I was wearing an Ungaro sweater, a head scarf, and large sunglasses, like an incognito movie star.

  “We all play a character. Haven’t you ever read Shakespeare?”

  I got to see the “normal” side of Michael, which no one else knew existed. It was like a split personality—the real Michael and the KING OF THE CLUB KIDS MICHAEL ALIG.

  We didn’t go to the museum. After he finished eating, we walked through Bed Bath & Beyond and discussed the surrealist political statement of the Club Kids. He got a kick out of seeing an entire store react to my day look with their mouths wide open.

  “Doing drugs and living like a decadent mess is the ultimate freedom, but it always implodes eventually. It happened with the hippies in the sixties, then the disco coke fiends in the seventies. People have wised up, but now there are other drugs controlling everyone. Consumerism, capitalism, fame, celebrity . . . they’re all a government conspiracy,” Michael said.

  “Oh, okay. That makes sense,” I said, while trying to pick out a shoe caddy. “You act even crazier than you really are on purpose, to force people to realize how absurd it is?”

  “Personality is all that separates us from the animals,” he said.

  Michael’s nightlife “character” may have been created deliberately, but it slowly started to take over his life, at about the same time he went from pretending to take drugs, to actually taking them. The environment demanded it. You can play a role for only so long before the role takes over.

  Kate Moss was the big model of the time. Calvin Klein was making heroin chic the new thing, and Michael Alig was all about the next big thing.

  It was easy to pretend to be tripping on E: just walk around like a hot mess and tell people you’re seeing colors. But to convince people that he was shooting up, Michael started actually doing it. Michael, along with a large portion of the Club Kid crowd, picked up H like sheep jumping off a cliff.

  Style changed along with the drugs. Grunge became a thing, and people stopped wearing bright colors and washing their hair. I kept on doing my Hollywood glamour look; people asked if I was from Texas, or California. But I didn’t care about doing the coolest look; I was doing my look.

  To even me out, Michael paired me with a new dancer from San Francisco, a fellow transsexual named Sophia Lamar. She had the style of Linda Perry and the body of Linda Evangelista.

  “Sophia is so on trend it makes you look even more like a caricature!” Michael said to me.

  “I’m not a caricature,” I told him. I hated when he said that.

  Photography by © Tina
Paul 1989–2006 All Rights Reserved

  Sophia just rolled her eyes and said in her thick Cuban accent, “Honey! Why do you care what some sheety faggot says about what you are and what you are not?”

  Michael cackled. “Is it true that you carried a live chicken with you on that raft from Cuba?” he asked. Sophia gave him the finger and off he went.

  I had a great time dancing with Sophia that night; we looked great next to each other. “Did you really come here from Cuba?” I asked her.

  “Yes, but there was no chicken. That’s some racist bullshit.”

  Sophia was super smart. I actually saw her reading a newspaper behind the DJ booth one night. I asked Michael to start pairing me with her every time we worked.

  While the drugs and fashion were changing, so was the music. It became darker and more aggressive. The Breeders and Blur were replaced by Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails. Every time I heard that “fuck you like an animal” song I’d stop dancing and look around.

  “What’s wrong?” Sophia asked one night as Trent Reznor screamed over the speakers. The lighting was a bloodred, and the crowd danced with a hard-eyed intensity that stopped me cold.

  “Why is everyone so angry?” I asked.

  “It’s the nineties,” she said. “You’d be angry too if you paid attention to anything besides makeup.” She kept dancing.

  Maybe she was right. Maybe I was clueless. But I could feel it in the air. Something awful was about to happen.

  I didn’t fully realize something had changed in Michael Alig until he brought me to a private party Peter Gatien was having at the Four Seasons Hotel.

  Michael had told me, “Peter wants pretty girls around, so you should go. Peter would love you.” I didn’t know Peter very well but I’d heard whispers about these hotel parties. From what I’d heard it wouldn’t be my scene, but I wanted to check out the Four Seasons; it sounded so nice.

  When we arrived at the presidential suite, Peter was locked away in the bedroom and about ten sleazy-looking people were sitting around silently. Michael introduced me to a few of them, then disappeared into a giant tepee-shaped blanket fort in the middle of the living room. He’d come back out and introduce me when someone new showed up, and pick up a lamp or a pillow and say, “Isn’t this nice, Amanda? Can you believe how fancy this is?” Then he’d disappear into the fort again. When a man is attempting to be extra attentive and failing miserably, it’s a good sign he’s up to no good.

  Most of the girls at the party were dancers I knew, but none of them were very friendly. I sat down between a couple of guys, and they both put a hand on my bare legs right away. I excused myself and went to the bathroom. Unfortunately it was covered in vomit, so I ran right back out and sat down again.

  SOMETHING AWFUL WAS ABOUT TO HAPPEN.

  A girl started screaming in one of the bedrooms. The door flew open, and Peter Gatien came running out, trying to open a little clutch purse, yelling, “I know you stole it, I know it’s in here!” He was followed out by a naked girl who was trying to get the purse back from him. But Peter got it open, took out a baggie of powder, threw the purse on the floor, and locked himself back in the bedroom.

  It seemed like a good time to go. I got on my knees to look inside the fort for Michael. There he was, talking to Jenny Talia about cotton balls versus Q-tips. I didn’t even know she was at the party; she had been hiding in the fort the entire time.

  Jenny was brand-new on the scene. Gorgeous. Even though she had shaved her head and pierced her cheeks, no one could deny she was a beauty. She was only fifteen, came from a rich Park Avenue family, had already modeled for Calvin Klein, and she loved getting into trouble with Michael.

  The two of them hadn’t even noticed me coming into the tent, so I backed right out the way I came in. I can talk about crystals and baubles for hours, but even I couldn’t get sucked into a deep discussion on the wonders of cotton balls. I sat back down on the couch and tried not to look too out of place.

  Around 8:30 in the morning I ordered ten steak-and-egg breakfasts from room service. I thought I could get all these people fed and on their way home, since this party was past its prime two days ago. Room service came (I put the $500 bill on the room), and nobody touched a thing.

  Peter came out of the room again, saw all the food, and flipped out. I pretended I had no idea who ordered it. He’d left the bedroom door open, and inside I could see two naked women on their hands and knees by the side of the bed, each with an overflowing plate of cocaine resting on her back.

  I crawled into the tent and told Michael it was time for me to go. His eyes were glazed, his focus was erratic, and he was sweating like a . . . well, like a crack addict. I asked if he wanted to come with me and sleep on my couch, but he told me he couldn’t, everyone was getting ready to go to some after-hours club like Save the Robots.

  During the cab ride home I thought about everything I’d just seen. I had just spent a sober night in the middle of a days-long drug party, and my good friend—the smartest guy I knew, the boy who was too busy changing the world to do drugs—was right in the thick of it.

  Michael had developed dual addictions to uppers and downers.

  Since I wasn’t doing drugs with him, he stopped hanging out with me as much. Jenny Talia took my place as his new It Girl. I compensated by finding a boyfriend to keep me busy and out of trouble—a grungy blond guitar player named Chris. His dick was perfect; we’d fuck three times a day, minimum.

  Keni hated Chris because I screamed so loud when we were fucking. “How am I supposed to get any work done when I hear you moaning like a fucking poltergeist all day and night?” He’d taken on a new job compiling vintage clothes for designers. He was back on his feet and didn’t need my help anymore, so I moved in with my walking hard-on of a boyfriend.

  Chris worked a day job at a hotel that gave him a free room. It was close to where I’d lived with Rose, near the Key, and I thought it was so glamorous, living in a hotel. He was a good boyfriend; he proposed to me the first night I moved in with him. He was straitlaced, anti-drugs, and he hated that I was out at the clubs so much. And he hated it even more when I did a shift at the Key. Richie Rich, Sophia Lamar, and Armen Ra would come over and get ready to go out with me, and Chris would just mope around and try to keep me from leaving. It was sort of pathetic.

  “Listen, Dick,” Armen would say, “Amanda’s a grown woman. She doesn’t need you keeping a leash on her.”

  “My name’s not Dick, it’s Chris.”

  “I know what your name is.”

  I loved it.

  I guess Chris was a little controlling, but it was good for me at the time. It gave me an excuse to leave the club early every night. Kept my nose clean.

  Michael stopped showing up for work. I barely ever saw him anymore, except when he’d stop by the hotel to “borrow” $100 from me now and then. He looked terrible, and I knew he was using the money for drugs, but I couldn’t say no to him.

  Then came Michael Musto’s “blind item” in the Village Voice.

  Apparently rumors had been circulating that Michael Alig had murdered a drug dealer named Angel. I hadn’t heard about it, probably because if someone says the word “murder” I’ll beeline from the conversation, but once that column came out, there was no escaping the talk.

  I didn’t know Angel at all, except as a rude guy who always wore these huge-ass white wings that would hit people in the head as he walked by. He never said hello, he wasn’t social like the rest of the Club Kids, and I thought he always seemed out of place, like he had just thrown on some wings to try to fit in. But one day Angel wasn’t around anymore, and for some reason people were saying Michael had killed him.

  I thought the whole thing was a publicity stunt. Peter Gatien was supposedly financing some Spanish film, and I was sure they were hiding Angel away, just to get the press. I forced myself to believe that to be the case. The alternative was too terrible to think about. The club was supposed to be a break from the
realities of the world, and yet there I was, bombarded with the details of another murder in my midst.

  This didn’t stop people from partying. If anything, it made Disco 2000 more popular. People wanted to party at the place where it all went down. Michael showed up one night with the word GUILTY written on his forehead. The whole thing felt really gross.

  Photography by © Tina Paul 1989–2006 All Rights Reserved

  The city and Mayor Giuliani were trying to shut down Peter and all the big nightclubs that were swarming with drugs. Limelight was on its last legs. I started taking on other jobs, go-go dancing five nights a week and even stripping at a titty bar in the Financial District (short-lived once my jealous coworkers found out I was transsexual and told all my clients).

  Chris tried to take this opportunity to get me to stop working. “You shouldn’t have to work so much,” he said. “You’re surrounded all night by losers and drug addicts; you need to get out of that life. Let me take care of you, and you just worry about looking good.”

  Guys always think they need to save me from my work.

  “I can take care of myself,” I told Chris. “If you really want to help me out, you can take me to YSL.”

  Always let a guy take you shopping, but never let him pay your bills.

  I was dancing at Twilo one night, shaking my ass onstage while I looked through the crowd for Sophia. There she was, in the DJ booth with Larry Tee. I waved to her and she waved back, beckoning me to her.

  I climbed down and met her. “They found Angel’s body,” she said. “Michael really did kill him.”

  “Oh.” I just stared at her and Larry Tee. They stared right back. I didn’t know what to say. “Poor Michael.”