by Jarett Kobek
—Take a seat if you want, said Brooke.
I sat on the least disgusting mattress. It was like stabbing yourself with the dullest knife.
—What’s up, Baby?
—Did you see the Voice?
—I only just woke up.
—Michael Musto. There’s a piece about a certain someone killing a drug dealer and then chopping up his body. I got the distinct impression that the certain someone was Michael.
—Oh fuck, she said. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck Michael fucking Musto.
—Where’s Michael? I asked.
—I haven’t seen him for a few days. Fuck. Fuck. He’s staying with this guy he met at Future. Fuck.
—Did Michael do it?
—I don’t know. It’s Michael. Who knows if it’s true?
—Did he tell you that he did it?
—Yes.
—What are you going to do? I asked.
—I don’t want Michael to get in trouble. I’m not going to be the one who gets him in trouble. I’m not the only one who knows. Everyone knows. He’s told everyone, Baby. No one’s sure whether or not they believe him.
One of the kids stirred.
—But don’t worry, said Brooke. It’s not like he killed anyone that matters. It was only Angel.
—The drug dealer?
—If you can call him that.
I stood up.
—I’m going to try and find Michael, I said.
—Before you go, said Brooke, do you want to buy any coke?
MAY 1996
Baby and Parker Play Pool
Other articles followed. In daily tabloids that did not hesitate to name names. Michael was outed in the news media as a murderer. There was no police investigation.
As a victim, Angel offered multiple deficiencies. Brown skin, Hispanic last name, gay, drug dealer. These comprised a mathematical formula for official indifference. The NYPD didn’t care.
Michael split town, embarking on a grand journey through the American Middle West. Denver, Chicago, even back to South Bend. A drug-fueled odyssey in a rented van through the badlands. He brought Gitsie as his copilot.
Back in New York, I dealt with the inevitable chaos of forthcoming publication, obsessing over every little detail. There were arguments about the cover. There were arguments about copy editing. There were arguments about typefaces. There were arguments about blurb quotes. There were arguments about jacket copy.
For the nine thousandth time, I thanked heaven for the angelic cataclysm of Parker Brickley. He rallied to even the most minor concern, screaming and cursing until it felt as though he’d shatter every window in Midtown.
The official indifference didn’t extend to Peter Gatien. In the early morning hours of May 15th, the DEA raided his apartment. Gatien was indicted on two charges of conspiring to distribute MDMA in Tunnel and Limelight.
At the obligatory press conference, Zachary W. Carter, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern United States, remarked: —Dealing Ecstasy was not just lucrative, it was the centerpiece of the operation. These clubs existed to distribute these substances. The drugs were the honey trap that attracted these kids to the clubs.
Despite their owner’s incarceration, both clubs remained open.
I couldn’t be bothered checking out the scene. Disco 2000 run by Walt Paper while Michael Alig was in South Dakota. Peter Gatien rotting for two weeks in the Metropolitan Detention Center before making bail. It was the definition of threadbare.
A few days after Gatien’s arrest, A. J. Benza published an article in the Daily News. Entitled “The Curious Case of the Club-Land Canary,” it detailed the hammer affair between Michael and Angel, but with a very specific twist. Benza insinuated that Michael had turned informant against Gatien, and that Alig’s exodus wasn’t about escaping his own heat but rather that he’d been tipped off by the DEA about the coming raid. The idea turned out to be prescient.
Some literate wag or another realized that Michelle Gila was based on Michael Alig. As an intellectual with an apparent insider’s view, I became a hot property. I fielded phone calls from beat reporters. Even Michael Musto called. A reporter for the Post asked me if the rumors about orgies were true.
—The orgies? What orgies? I asked.
—Word is, said the reporter, that Alig set up massive drug orgies for Gatien. These took place in hotel rooms. Sometimes they’d last a few weeks. Sometimes a few days. It’d be Alig and Gatien and hookers. Piles of cocaine, crack rock, Special K. You name it. They blew thousands each night. An unnamed source told me off the record that Alig overdosed at one of these parties. A different unnamed source said that Angel supplied the drugs. Can you confirm or deny?
—No comment, I said.
The indictment, and the subsequent reporting, focused exclusively on Tunnel and Limelight. I experienced a wellspring of pity for the Palladium. Gatien still owned it, but it was so incredibly passé that not even the DEA cared. I couldn’t hazard a guess about its regulars. Yet the club remained.
From nothing more than morbidity, I wanted to look at the club. I didn’t want to go inside. I wanted to observe it, to see what could possibly be happening at New York’s least interesting club while its owner sat in jail.
I called Adeline and asked if she wanted to play pool at Julian’s, the billiards hall that occupied the second floor of the same building as Palladium.
—Oh, darling, said Adeline, you know I’d simply die watching you be hustled by sharks, but I cannot. Honest and for true. I’m watching Frances’s daughter. Plus I have a suitor set to pay a visit.
—What? Who?
—Do you remember Jon, Baby? He and I ran into each other on St. Mark’s. I was walking with Emil. Jon was ever so pleasant a conversational-ist, and he was quite taken with my son. Can you believe it? The punk virtuoso finally completed his degree at CUNY. He takes his employ in a lawyer’s office, working for a bleeding heart on cases that no one else will touch. It’s positively cinematic!
We exchanged pleasantries and hung up. Life wasn’t anything but complications. The last time that I’d seen Jon, I’d beaten him with the hard-cover debut of a polymorphous pervert while a Bengali waiter cursed us.
But was that as bad as throwing period blood at his shoes? Somehow he and Adeline had reconciled. They’d collapsed back into each other. Maybe good faith can remove any obstacle. Anything is possible.
I called Parker and invited him to the pool hall. When he’d discovered the media’s interest, he’d wet himself in joy, encouraging me to dribble every tidbit of gravied information into the gaping maw of news journalism. Any publicity, said Parker, that occurs before a book’s release is a welcome thing. Get your name out there before the reading public.
I’d explained how very little I wanted my name associated with Alig’s. I needed time to figure it out. Parker wasn’t interested.
—Go hog wild, he said. If you want your book to succeed, you had better get acquainted with the media. You better get real good at using them before they use you. Otherwise those fucks’ll leave you as sore and sorry as a two-dollar whore who ran out of condoms. They’ll leave you banged and raw, Baby boy.
Parker agreed to meet. I arrived before him, standing beside the neon-lit entrance that read JULIAN BILLIARDS. My agent’s perpetual lateness afforded me time to watch all the has-beens and would-bes of clubland flowing into the Palladium. There was no door policy. It was all cash now, born of a desperation to raise Gatien’s bail.
Leviathan surfaced on 14th Street, trudging east from Union Square and maneuvering through the crowd of smokers. He ambled up and put his arm on my shoulder, his meaty paw buckling my knees.
—Let’s play some fucking pool.
Julian’s was one of those New York establishments where time itself has sunk into the surfaces, where the floor is a carpet of cigarette butts and the reeking smoke of decades has browned the paint. Photographs of Minnesota Fats hung on the walls. If ever there was antiquity in New Amsterdam, we’d found it.
There were a handful of the requisite old timers, the crazy gone ones who’d hustled pool since the ’50s. They drank from brown paper bags, nicotine clouds hanging above their heads. Most of the tables were occupied by the young. Not just men. Lots of women, too, playing flirtatious games with their dates.
Parker paid for our table, getting one by the windows. I racked the balls and Parker broke. He sunk a striped ball. I hadn’t played pool since my days in the American Middle West.
A guy on the track team had a table in his basement. Everyone had shot pool in the hours after practice. It became a social obligation.
To avoid boredom, I intentionally overread the game’s phallic symbolism, all those sticks and balls, and fantasized about my fellow runners. Yes, I was that guy, the one about whom Republicans warn us. I abused the locker room shower. I fantasized about the dicks that appeared before me.
—I don’t like giving advice, said Parker, because advice is like the past. It always comes and haunts you. But you had best prepare yourself for all eventualities. Your book could bomb. I’ve seen great books fail, and I’ve seen stuffed turkeys take flight and soar to the land of milk and honey. What if your book doesn’t tank? What if it succeeds? What then? I’m not sure you understand the effects of true success. Success can be a worse killer than failure.
—It’s still a few months away, I said.
—These days will pass like all your useless hopes and dreams. It might as well be tomorrow.
—I don’t even know why I started. Maybe failure won’t be so bad.
—No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money, and money is leaking out of your pockets. Speaking of, how’s the next book coming?
I hadn’t yet told Parker that I’d abandoned my novel of the American Civil War. I’d eked out about thirty thousand words before flying the white flag of surrender.
The idea had been to write from a grunt-level perspective that stripped away the bullshit glory of war, stripped away the mystical bullshit with which this country imbues every battle. It would be about the misery of shitting yourself before a skirmish, about having your legs amputated by nineteenth-century quacks, about your blood soaking into the soil of a country atoning for other blood. I wanted to calculate the exact cost of a human life in 1861, down to the dollar.
I couldn’t make it work. The research killed me. World War II was nothing compared to the Civil War. The books people’ve written.
—So you’re working on short stories? asked Parker.
—Yeah, I said.
—We can always sell a book of stories as a holdover between novels. Certain people are suckers for short fiction. Personally, I can’t give two fucks. What are you working on now?
I’d finished “White Walls,” and was putting together a new story called “Decimal Notation.” It’s about a printer named Solomon Prower who for years has produced single-run forgeries of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Prower’s editions are perfect replicas of the preexisting editions, with only slight modifications to the original text.
Using Wittgenstein’s method of decimal propositions, Prower locates a particularly boring part of the book and inserts nonsense phrases that undercut its central premises. For instance:
4.4662 The tautology of all things suggests that which is not the case is made of atomic facts unapprehended through the internal sense of a proposition. Thus anti-fact becomes fact.
In each volume, Prower includes an Ex Libris bookplate with his own address. This has gone on for ten years. He’s never been contacted. In some instances, his forged propositions have snuck into low-level scholarly literature.
On August 8th, 1974, a Thursday, our protagonist receives a letter. It reads, “I know what you are doing. I am coming to see you tomorrow.” Prower sits around on Friday, awaiting the arrival of his mysterious correspondent. He’s so overtaken with nerves that he misses Richard Nixon’s resignation. In the early evening, there comes a knock on his door.
I hadn’t gotten any further. I was sure it was a love story.
—It sounds suspiciously literary, said Parker.
We played another few games, as I kept an eye on the street through the windows. Grotesque human travesties stumbled out of the A& P in the Zeckendorf Towers and passed into the Palladium. It was like watching an undertaker put a body down. Everything changes. Everything dies.
Parker won every game. Pool required a level of engagement that I had never possessed.
When our two hours were up, Mr. Brickley went to the bathroom. I waited by the windows. If I craned my neck, I thought I could see the copper-ringed roof of 31 Union Square West. I wondered if Thomas M. Disch still lived there, wondered if he’d read Trapped, wondered if my whole life was the product of his indirect influence. If I could talk to him again, I’d have endless questions. That fey little boy from a Podunk little town was long gone, effaced by a full decade in New York City, replaced by a brand-new creature. It happened to me, I had been in it, but I still didn’t understand how I’d gone so far from home.
A sound from the far end of the room. Parker was in an argument with two guys about my own age who looked like genuine-grade Italians from Staten Island, dressed up in Wu Wear, bomber jackets and the hottest stocking caps. Parker hollered in the face of one, going red, distributing spittle. I ran toward them. The second guy hit Parker across the back with a pool cue.
The thing about hunting Leviathan. That harpoon had better pierce the hide. Otherwise it’s liable to wrap a line about your neck.
Parker turned to face the one who’d hit him, exposing his back. The original adversary was in the process of picking up a pool cue.
—I wouldn’t, I said.
I threw myself on the original adversary, knocking us both to the ground. I pinned his arms with my knees, and hit his face with a billiards ball that I’d grabbed on my way over. I’d been in too many fights to hit with my hands. I couldn’t deal with the swelling and pain.
It took a few strikes before I drew blood. Parker’s attacker swooned into the sweet blackness of the unconscious. I stood up, ready to beat out the stuffing of the other guy, but he and Parker were watching in mutual horror. Everyone had stopped playing pool. Everyone stared at me. I dropped the bloody ball.
—Come on, I said to Parker.
One of the old timers said to another: —I been here twenty-four years and I ain’t never seen nobody make nobody else eat a seven ball.
Worried about cops, I rushed Parker along the east side of Union Square. He labored beside me, the heaviest of breath.
We hit 18th Street and got drinks at the Old Town Bar. I couldn’t imagine that many Staten Island thrill seekers were interested in the low-key atmosphere of New York’s ninth-oldest bar.
—Is it always like this with you? asked Parker.
—He hit you with a pool cue. Something had to be done. What started it, anyway?
—I bumped into them as I was coming out of the bathroom. One of them missed his shot.
JUNE 1996
Baby Looks for Michael
Gatien posted bail, but the clubs were crippled. We all lived in Rudy’s world. I wasn’t the only person obsessed with getting the latest Voice. People wanted peripheral resonances of catastrophe. It was the last cool summer that I can remember, the last summer before global warming thrust us into endless sweltering. We never broke 90 degrees.
On June 4th, Musto wrote about Michael Alig’s escapades across America. Alig was spotted in Chicago then ended up in Denver, where he was planning Disco 2000 parties. Innuendo oozed from each consonant and vowel, seeping into the reader’s pores through the transferences of print osmosis.
On June 11th, Musto claimed that Michael was masterminding a re-make of “If I Had a Hammer.” The latest rumors had Angel surfacing in one piece. Could it all be a hoax?
On June 18th, there wasn’t any mention.
On June 25th, it exploded. A front-page photograph of Angel wearing his white wings.
The accompanying headline: A MURDER IN CLUB-LAND? Some say promoter Michael Alig killed Angel Melendez. Some say it’s a hoax. FRANK OWEN investigates.
Frank Owen knew James St. James. I’d never met him, but he’d written a few clubland pieces for the Voice. Someone said that he had an English accent. I turned to page 29.
Looking for Angel: Did King of Club Kids Michael Alig Really Kill Angel Melendez? Or Is It All a Hoax?
Owen’s opening was human interest. He followed Angel’s brother, Johnny Melendez, while Johnny journeyed around New York, seeking information about his missing sibling. He posted flyers. Johnny’d last seen Angel outside of the Riverbank West. He and Angel had kept in contact through their beepers. When it became clear that Angel was not returning his pages, Johnny’d gone through clubland, asking people if they knew anything about his brother’s whereabouts. No one knew anything. Johnny received the distinct impression that everyone knew everything.
The article reproduced the flyer:
MISSING
$4,000 REWARD
POSTED BY FAMILY FOR THE
WHEREABOUTS OF ANGEL
IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION PLEASE
CALL (917) 290-9012 OR (908) 629-9110
Multiple unnamed sources told Owen that Michael Alig had killed Angel. Only Screamin’ Rachel went on the record. Alig had visited her in Chicago. He’d broken down and confessed.
Owen had the entire story. The hammer, the body in the tub for a week, the dismemberment, the elevator, the taxicab. And he had the orgies. He had Angel on Gatien’s payroll. He even had Freeze on the record, denying that he’d murdered Angel. Owen had everything except for Michael.
My answering machine was blinking. I had two messages from reporters. Only at this moment did I realize that the story would never go away. I would be answering questions about Michael for the rest of my life.
My phone rang. Another reporter.