Friends and Traitors

by Jarett Kobek

  The doorman hailed us a cab. We climbed into the back seat. Mother barked at the driver. “Second Avenue and 7th Street!”

  I sensed that she wanted to talk more, to babble about the inessentialities that comprised her worldview, but she remained afraid that at any moment I might revoke the privilege of meeting Emil. There’d been a time when she possessed the power, when I was the one who followed orders. Now the authority was mine. There’d be a distant day when the same thing should happen to me, when Emil would venture into his own life and I would lose my hold. God help me, darlings, but I had empathy for the woman.

  The driver let us off on Second Avenue. Mother said, “Well, nothing seems very different on your block.”

  “A few new things,” I said. “Did you ever see Burp Castle? I’ve never set foot but I’m told that they dress like monks and only serve beer. This building here, if you can believe it, is an NYU dorm. I’ve resided on this street for years and never knew. Not until a few months ago.”

  Dread settled upon me. We walked up the stairs. There was déjà vu about the experience, about Mother on my steps, about Mother on 7th Street, about Mother invading my apartment. In San Francisco, one would climb a hill and sweat buckets of liquid whilst a cold wind blew through one’s clothes and a disgusting drip of mucus smeared down one’s face. I wanted to stop, to cry out, to put a halt to the madness. I expected the worst. That, darlings, is my tragic flaw. Adeline always expects the worst.

  Baby and Emil were on the kitchen floor, playing with an ancient wooden Fisher-Price circus set that I’d scavenged from the Salvation Army. The toys looked pathetic. I worried, and hated myself for it, that Mother would observe their paucity.

  She came in behind me, shutting the door. Baby tilted his head up, smiling. Emil didn’t look up at all, preoccupied with the giraffe.

  “Hello, Suzanne,” said Baby. “It’s nice to see you.”

  “Baby!” she said. “And look at this darling child!”

  She scooped Emil from the floor. He didn’t struggle against her. She held him to her breast, practically smothering the boy. He didn’t make a noise.

  There was my best friend, whom I loved more than I could possibly say, and my child, for whom I willingly would be set ablaze on a pyre of my own bones, and my mother, that ever-complicated being, standing with only a slight tinge of lunacy.

  Mother put my son on the ground and then she was on the ground beside him, her hands on him, her hands on Baby. What could I do, darlings, but get down on my own knees and join them?

  “Emil,” I said. “This is your grandmother. What should he call you?”

  “He can call me whatever he likes,” said Mother.

  MARCH 1996

  Baby Explains How the World Works

  This is how the world works.

  A young man comes to New York City with hopes of studying architecture at Fordham University. Architecture is the chosen profession of his distant father. Having escaped from South Bend, Indiana, from the nowhere armpit asshole middle of Bumfuck USA, this young man ingratiates himself into the de rigueur world of clubland. He starts off as less than nothing, a busboy at Danceteria, and works his way up. He becomes famous. His name in gossip columns, his face in magazines, an object of televised fascination.

  He adopts several overlapping drug habits. It starts with the easier stuff, the quicker stuff, the harmless stuff. He passes beneath the influence of Ulysses S. Grant. It ends with daily doses of crystallized cocaine and injected heroin. He descends into babbling incoherence, into cruelty and mean spirits. The glamorous act corrupts into the sallow image of a thirty-year-old junky infected with hepatitis nodding off in his own drool, pissing from balconies on the people attending events that he’s orchestrated. His brain twists from years of ketamine and Rohypnol.

  This is how the world works.

  A small boy and his family move from Colombia to New York City. The boy grows up with ambitions of becoming an actor, or maybe a filmmaker. He discovers his gayness and consorts with certain social scenes. In his early twenties, he is sucked into the Downtown demimonde. He meets famous people. Everyone is fabulous. Everyone is glamorous. This small boy, now a man, gains attention from the famous by supplying their drugs. He ends up unexpectedly close with one of our era’s great junkies. He crashes at the junky’s apartment, storing many of his possessions in the junky’s care, including money and a drug stash.

  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 he
lp 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.