November 8^th, 2013

As I left my West Village rental on Friday morning a shirtless man wearing a green mask with a beak, ass-liberating chaps and furry green boots confronted me.  “I’m Michael Alig,” he said, “And I am here to party.  Come on, I’ll take you to the Limelight.”

“It’s 8 a.m.,” I said.  “The Limelight isn’t open.”

“The Limelight is always open,” he said.  “It’s the hottest club in the city.”

Then I remembered the name Michael Alig.  This was the famous “party monster,” portrayed in a movie of the same name by McCauley Culkin.  It was an excellent film in that it featured frequent and gratuitous Chloe Sevigny nude shots.  I made a mental note to spend the afternoon Googling “Chloe Sevigny Nude” though, to be fair, she is naked so often that these pictures often pop up as random search results to queries about vacations, car purchases and where to have dinner (and that’s with safe mode set to “on”).

“Aren’t you in jail for murdering your drug dealer?” I asked.

“I was, but it’s all good now.  Bill de Blasio pardoned me.”

Could the mayor-elect of New York City really nullify the sentence of a convicted murderer and dismemberer serving his sentence in a maximum-security state prison far outside of the city?  For answers to questions like that, read Slate or something.  The new soft on crime policies of Bill de Blasio cannot be checked by mere reason.  All had been forgiven for Alig.

“I am so glad that the stuffy, conservative New York City of Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg and Michael Musto is over,” he sighed.  Then he took me by the hand and led me uptown to the Limelight.

When we arrived at the deconsecrated Gothic cathedral where, in happier times, Alig once held court as Queen Bee of the club scene, the former “club kid” was shocked to find that it was indeed closed and had been converted into an upscale shopping mall with its own Grimaldi’s Brick Oven Pizza restaurant.

“At least the founder of Grimaldi’s is getting paid,” Alig sighed.

No, I told him.  The founder of Grimaldi’s had been pushed out of his own business years ago after falling for a scam to expand his business to Las Vega and Los Angeles.

“I am going to have a tough time affording life in this city,” Alig realized.  “Let’s go rent me a crack den on 43^rd street near the river.  Bad memories, but it’s all I can afford.”

“There are no crack dens in Hell’s Kitchen,” I told him.  “Just multimillion dollar brownstones and luxury condos.”

“Then where do all the crack addicts live?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “Missouri?”

“I know that Michael Musto is behind this,” he growled.  “I’m going to go watch a porno in Time’s Square and then, when I’m in the right frame of mind, I’m going o remake this city the way de Blasio intends!”

Before I could warn him, Alig stormed away in the direction of midtown.