Michael Alig Goes to the Eternal Party

Two-and-a-half years ago I did a short interview with former party promoter/convicted murderer Michael Alig. In the 1980s and early 1990s he was the king of downtown nightlife in NYC, promoting parties and clubs, thinking up and hosting all sorts of outrageous events, and basically just going everyhwere, doing everything (and everyone) and living a wild, crazy life.

Then tragedy.

Alig and a friend murdered someone, a man named Angel Hernandez, in a particularly brutal way. Alig then spent the next almost-20 years in prison. After he was released he tried to reinvent himself back into the mileau of a very different NYC (he called it "more normalized"). This was the subject of our interview and he was very forthcoming about the challenges of it. 

Michael Alig has died, aged 54, of a heroin overdose -- alone, on Christmas Day. 

What's clear about Alig's life, both before and after prison, is that he was a deeply broken, troubled soul and his demons cost someone his life -- and now his own. I felt at the time that I perhaps shouldn't have interviewed him, that I was giving a murdered a voice he didn't deserve, but I realized that he had a story and it deserved to be told (even if such stories shouldn't necessarily generate sympathy for the storyteller).

And now as Alig's life is over, and this hard year comes to an end. You can't remember the life and death of someone who has killed someone else without also remembering the life and death of the victim. I just hope that Alig's family, the family of Angel Hernandez, and everyone who was impacted by their lives, both for better or worse, finds a new peace next year.