But he couldn’t answer. He was swaying back and forth, happily singing his little nigger-la-da-doo song.
Onward ho.
“Stop!” he screamed at a particularly seedy intersection.
“James, get out. You’re coming with me.”
“Oh no, I’m not. You’re on your own. I am not getting beat up or arrested in a strange town just to shut you up.”
I got out anyway. Oh, the tyranny of drug addicts!
Michael scampered off. I watched his little green head bob up and down as he chatted amiably with the native riffraff. I prayed for deliverance.
Of course, leave it to Michael to end up with the lowest common denominator in any situation. It never fails. And so it came to pass that I spent the whole of that lovely, sunny day traipsing through the gutters of downtown Denver with a spooky old panhandler named Smelly Mel. Oh, he was just awful. Michael didn’t seem to notice the flies crawling out of the man’s nose, or the pungent fecal matter clinging to his pants. No, Michael had found a kindred spirit.
Before long the two of them had linked arms and were whispering like coconspirators. “Hurry up, James. Mel here is going to help us.”
One hour, and two aromatic cab rides later: the two of them ducked into an abandoned building. A deal went down. He scored.
Thank God.
He came dashing down the street, happily brandishing his good fortune, waving it high above his head for all the officers on the beat to see.
“Oh James, Mel here has graciously offered to share his needles with me. Isn’t that sweet of him?” He turned to Mel, “I’d love to! You’re a lamb to offer!” and he batted his lashes appealingly.
“Oh for pity’s sake, Michael! Come on.”
I dragged him back to the hotel.
Now, this was tar, of course, not the pretty powder New Yorkers prefer. It needs to be cooked and injected. Without Mel’s needle, he became frantic.
“How are you at stitching up a gushing artery, James?”
“A little out of practice. Why?”
“I’m going to slash open my wrist and push it directly into my vein. Do you think it will absorb into the bloodstream?”
Thank God I talked him out of that. Instead he managed to locate a local faghag who came to his rescue and supplied him with a set of works. Funny, that no matter where you are in the world, there’s always someone eager to help you destroy yourself.
It was almost time for me to leave for the airport. Michael had decided to stay another few days, but I had had enough. I packed my things and headed for the door. I turned to say goodbye.
The last time I ever saw Michael, he was blissfully inserting a needle into his arm.
“Bye, Skrink …”
“Yea … see ya, Skrod …”
It was September and the lease was up on my apartment. I was finally free to move, I packed up all of my lovely things—my skrinkles, my skroddles … three full buckets of hoo-has … and fourteen pairs of flambiggy wignuts! Twelve years of memories, stuffed into 172 cardboard boxes and tossed into the U-Haul … then, I was off!
I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t angry. I just wanted out of the ugliness.
I clutched my throat and whispered: “Take me away from all this death.”
(Actually, I didn’t say that. Winona Ryder said it in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But it’s a good line, and I do a marvelous imitation. In fact people often mistake me for her … No really. We have the same soulful eyes …)
But yea, that’s what I was thinking: “Take me away. Get me the fuck out.”
New York was on its last leg anyway. After Peter Gatien’s clubs were seized by the DEA, and Peter himself was arrested, there was another one of those yawning chasms in nightlife. Another “Death of Downtown.” This time, though, there was no new Michael Alig to roar in and shake everything upside down and bring it all back to life. There was no crazy new scene to take the place of the old one. Just a mind-numbing succession of paint-by-number nightclubs, and a few rickrack club kids going through the motions. The fun people just stopped going out. And the ones who kept at it, did so with a drowning man’s ferocity, and a hara-kiri, Blood & Guts approach to nightclubbing. Of course, since then, most of them have died.
Hey ho.
The world goes on.
So I left New York, I drove to my mother’s house and deposited the 172 boxes of crap that I was determined to reclaim someday. God bless Mom, huh? Aren’t mothers just wonderful? Mine was a perfect goddess, the entire vacation. She never once pried into my reasons for leaving. She never pressured me to explain about the nights when I still woke up screaming, and the days when I would do nothing but sit in the backyard and laugh at the grass. She knows that something hurt me, and when I’m ready, maybe I’ll try to explain it all to her. But in the meantime, she did what she could. She made her signature heart-shaped meatloaf, frosted with red mashed potatoes. That always cheers me up. And she found lots of excuses to give me hugs.
I was still there when I heard the news that a homeless woman who had been fishing for her dinner in the Harlem River had snagged a rotting, limbless torso instead.
The papers all reported that it was Angel’s body—recovered at long last!
It took an enormous amount of energy and effort to call Michael and ask what was really going on, but I did. He was doing fine. He was still living at the Chelsea with Brooke. Yes, he’d heard about it. In fact, he was taken in for questioning again. But he seemed completely nonplussed by it all.
“So she hooked herself an Angel-fish, huh?” he said and then laughed himself silly. The rest of the conversation was a bizarre new riff on the Logger Blagger variations. I didn’t care enough to decode it.
The body they found turned out not to be the body formerly belonging to Angel Melendez. Michael knew that all along. The police’s body was armless as well as legless. Michael hadn’t been quite so barbaric as to chop off ALL of Angel’s appendages. He has his limits … So, this poor, nameless quad was two arms shy to play the lead “amputee-murder victim” in OUR little melodrama.
Sorry, Bob. But, back you go!
(I’m sorry, too. I couldn’t resist that. I mean, what else do you call an armless and legless body found in the water?) (I have waited my whole life to have an excuse to tell that joke, and really, honestly mean it. Oh, that felt good.)
So, they tossed their body back into the river. I guess. Or gave it back to the homeless lady for lunch. “Here you go, ma’am. Sorry about the mix-up.”
Just another case of mistaken torso.
Common error.
Could have happened to anyone, and quite frequently does.
About two months after that, the Staten Island police decided to, oh, maybe look around the station house a bit … see what they might see … maybe do a little light dusting, who knows what might turn up …
And …
Lo and behold!
Would you look at that?
Was that what I think it was?
Hm.
Huh.
Goddamn! If it wasn’t an unidentified corpse! Right there! Under their very noses, all this time!
Well, I’ll be jiggered.
Gee … great … I mean, whew! … but … well … hmmm …
I mean … isn’t it, well, kind of odd … that they never noticed it there before? … I mean, of course … well of course there’s an explanation!
Let’s see … It was probably just so busy the day they fished it out. See, look here, they never even had time to take him out of the box and look him over! Did they even remember finding him that day? “Why sure! I remember it well, sir. There must have been hundreds of bodies washing up, you know how Mondays are, right after the weekend and all!” … Yea. That’s what must have happened. So, in that case, wouldn’t it be rather selfish of each corpse to expect personal attention?
Then, of course there was, let’s see, Memorial Day … then summer … and who really wants to spend the day with an old rotting piece of meat
when it’s ninety-five in the shade! I’m serious! It was a perfectly … normal … oversight…. Apparently, they had only had Angel’s remains there, on ice, since when? April?
This was December.
Work with me here, people!
The Staten Island police tried to explain how it was that they had the body all along and never knew it:
“Er … uh … Mr. Melendez’s body washed up here on Staten Island. It was the Manhattan D.A.’s case. We don’t handle Manhattan cases. That’s out of our jurisdiction …”
Hello! It’s just ANOTHER BOROUGH OF THE SAME CITY, Boneheads, not fuckin’ Timbuktu! Just how difficult is it to coordinate bodies in this town?
“And … uh … we thought the corpse was an Asian person judging from his skin tone.”
OK … let me see if I got this right—judging from his skin tone— which probably would have been somewhere between “seafoam” and “azure” by that point—they deduced he was Asian …
So … what? … they don’t ID dead Asians in Staten Island?
I don’t understand.
“Here Sarge! I found two more dead gooks, floating in the drink!”
“Toss ’em in Lost and Found!”
Oh.
Poor Mother Melendez.
The truth of the matter is: the police just didn’t care about Angel. Not one lick. Because he was a drug dealer. Because he was Hispanic. And from the Bronx. Because he was gay. Because he was a night-crawling freak. Because he may or may not have been an illegal alien, depending which gossip column you read.
The NYPD didn’t care enough about Angel to pursue something as time-consuming and bothersome as the truth. Just like everybody else.
I used to joke with Michael that the D.A.’s office probably had a whole file of gay drug dealers that they were just DYING to give to him. “Have at it, kid. Here’s your hammer, what’s your hurry? Don’t worry about us. Ve know nossing! NOSSING!”
Of course the police knew all along that there were two wacky faggots out there, named Michael and Freeze, who had killed someone named Angel, who used to dress up like a bird, and sell drugs at nightclubs. How could they not know? Michael Alig was THE MOST INEPT CRIMINAL OF ALL TIME! Talk about your “fear of success”! He was on autodestruct from the get-go. He confessed to anybody that would listen. He told the press where his hideout was when he was leaving town. He bungled detail after mind-blowing detail during the actual crime. And then held a press conference afterward to confirm all of his fuck-ups…. Apparently, one time (now I can’t verify this, but it certainly sounds possible to me) he had people over, and the box, with the body in it, was out in the living room, and people used it to set their drinks on all night long! … Oh, Lord help him! … He spoke openly and explicitly about the murder on a phone line that he already suspected to be tapped (by the DEA, trying to get the goods on Peter)…. Then he left a paper trail of money a mile long…. He even saved all the receipts from his purchases made with the stolen loot!
Another joke I used to say to him was: “Darling, for your next murder, be sure to videotape it for Hard Copy. I mean, you might as well make some money off of it, as long as you’ve gotten away with it. Cindy Adams is marvelous, as far as she goes, darling, but she doesn’t pay the legal fees.”
Hmmm. These aren’t very funny jokes when I tell them to you. Why is that, do you suppose?
It’s certainly clear to me: Michael went out of his way to get caught. He wanted the truth to come out. HE WENT TO LIMELIGHT ONE NIGHT, WITH “GUILT” ACTUALLY WRITTEN ALL OVER HIS FACE!!! But for nine months, it looked as if he couldn’t even get a traffic ticket in Manhattan. I don’t think his silly little murder mattered much until it began to impinge upon THE REALLY IMPORTANT BUSINESS of closing down Peter Gatien’s nightclubs! Remember, until then, every reporter who did a story on Michael would call the D.A. and ask for updates on how they were handling the case.
“Case? What case? We got no case. We got better things to do, buddy!”
Yea. More important things. Like spying on people over the bathroom stall doors, while they try, in vain, to urinate!
And picking on poor little drag queens, who, through no fault of their own, just happen to be lying face down on the sidewalk, K’ed out of their freakin’ skull.
Sheese!
But I digress.
So they found Angel’s body, right there in the police station. Freeze was picked up first for questioning, and immediately JUST BROKE DOWN AND GAVE A COMPLETE WRITTEN STATEMENT. Right there and then.
“Complete” being a relative term.
Like, after reading it, I don’t believe it’s the “complete” truth. I don’t think he’s being “completely” honest.
But then, I no longer believe Michael’s account either.
I’m convinced they’re both lying.
And the truth lies somewhere between the two stories. But we’ll probably never know.
Here: Judge Freezes version for yourself. Don’t let me influence you in any way, shape, or form.
You decide.
It’s all up to you.
Not me. I’ll stay out of it.
Here goes:
CONFESSION
It starts off on a pert note:
On a Sunday in March of 1996 I was at home in my bedroom with a friend.
[This is Freeze’s only mention of Daniel.]
In the other bedroom Michael Alig and Angel Melendez were loudly arguing. I, at one point, heard a little crash like glass breaking. Then, I heard the argument progressing and getting louder. I opened the door to the room and started towards the other bedroom. I stopped just outside the bedroom door at which point Michael was yelling “Help me! Get him off of me!” Angel briefly turned and said “Stay out.” Then, he grabbed Michael either by the shoulder or around the neck and started shaking him violently and banging him against the wall. He was yelling “You better get my money or I’ll break your neck”—or something to that effect I remember Michael looked right at me with a sort of pleading look in his eyes.
[This part I love. Michael has that pleading look in his eyes, so what do you do?]
I grabbed the hammer which was in the closet directly to my left.
[Of course you did. Who wouldn’t do exactly the same thing? Then what did you do, dear?]
I stepped forward and hit Angel over the head, trying to get him off of Michael and maybe knock him unconscious.
[And you did an admirable job of it, at that. You were obviously worried about your dear friend, Michael. We should all be so lucky to have a Freeze in our life, for just these types of moments …]
I was in a panic and very concerned at the level of anger Angel was displaying.
[Sure, sure … makes perfect sense to me … and nicely put, too.]
After the first blow, he turned and grabbed for the hammer. He might have gotten his hands on it. I’m not sure, but I snatched it back and hit him in the head again.
[Get ready for some side-splitting antics here.]
He started to go down, but he was still pissed off
[Well, who wouldn’t be? Can’t fault the guy for that one …]
and he started going for Michael again. So, I hit him a third time and he went down. At this point, Michael got onto his chest and was strangling him with his hands. I yelled “What are you doing?” Michael seemed to be very angry at this point and was cursing at Angel. He then took a pillow and put it over Angel’s face. I made him stop by either telling him to stop or pushing him off of Angel.
[Let me pause and wipe the tears of laughter from my eyes. But wait, it gets better.]
I then walked into the livingroom, and possibly to the bedroom.
[?]
When I returned, Michael was beside the body again. I noticed a broken syringe on the floor by the body, and Michael was pouring something from the bathroom, some cleaner or chemical, into Angel’s mouth. I, again screamed, “What are you doing? What is your problem? He’s out!”
[Freeze, the i
nnocent bystander, voice dripping with concern: “What are you doing? You might hurt Angel!”]
He then started wrapping tape around his mouth. He asked for the duct tape from the closet and said “You have to help me!”
[So what did you do, Freeze?]
So, I helped him finish wrapping the tape around Angel’s mouth.
[I wouldn’t have expected anything less.]
Then I left the room. When I came back Angel was undressed down to his underwear, a pair of white “Fruit of the Loom” type underwear.
[Such pleasant imagery: a mangled, taped-up corpse in his underwear. Make that a mangled, taped-up corpse in his white “Fruit of the Loom”-type underwear—it makes all the difference when you think about it.]
Michael said “Help me put him into the tub.” So we carried him to the tub, and closed the bathroom door.
[Here comes an all-time classic line:]
About 5-7 days later, Michael and I decided we had to do something about this terrible mess.
[Can we all take a moment and howl over this one? “Five … to … seven days later …” Don’t you just hate it when time just slips away from you? So much to do, the days pass by in a drugged-out haze, and you forget there’s a stinking blue body in the bathtub …]
It was decided that I would go to get knives or something to help dispose of the body. I went to Macy’s and bought 3 large knives; 2 chef knives and I cleaver. When I got back Michael told me that if I gave him 10 bags of heroin he would take care of this part. So I did and he went into the bathroom alone, and cut off both of Angel’s legs. Then, we put each leg into plastic bags, and then a duffel bag and seperately earned them, one at a time, to the river and threw them in. Probably about the next day 1 went downstairs to the storage area and got a large box. I cut the UPC code off the box. I brought it up to the apt. Michael put the remainder of the body into a large plastic garbage bag. I got another bag and put it over the first one. I think before Michael put it in the first bag, he wrapped it in a sheet. After the second bag I think I taped it closed. We then put the whole bundle into the large box.
[Angel shall henceforth be known as “The Bundle.” I like that.]
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