Drug Usage: Case in Personal Destruction
By
andophiroxia
on May 6, 2009 at 06:05 am
When Club Kid Michael Alig joined his friends on Joan Rivers’ talk show in 1990, he wasn’t the most conspicuous of the group. That would have been Leigh Bowery, the London-based drag performance artist after whom the New York club kids were modeling themselves. Bowery, a gargantuan and imposing figure, was wearing an orange Afro-style wig that totally covered his face, giving him the look of a giant with a bushy circle for a head. As he made his way onto the stage, he waved to the crowd, who watched open-mouthed as the willfully freakish crew made their way onto the stage.Link here.
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As the years wore on, Alig’s antics became more and more absurd. It started innocently, if somewhat childishly, enough: he had kicked off his career with a “Filthy Mouth” contest in which the contestants would shout obscenities; later, he had a Disco Truck—an eighteen-wheeler and trailer complete with a disco ball and heavy speakers that weren’t properly secured (thus toppling over onto the clubbers inside when in motion)— that literally made the 200-odd revelers he recruited for the cruise around Manhattan breathless, as the trailer was completely lacking ventilation for its human cargo. He held underground renegade spontaneous parties in subway cars and at Burger King, long before the Internet made such instantaneous “flash” happenings easy. When confronted, he gleefully outran the police and treated such brushes with the cops as part of the anarchic fun.
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What started as an Ecstasy dream became cocktail drug nightmare.
Alig and the Club Kids’ descent in the darker, harder drugs perfectly mirrored what was happening in rave scene throughout the rest of America. Ecstasy use gave way to multiple drug use. Soon, Alig and his clubbers were combining Ecstasy with methamphetamine or ketamine—Special K, and even heroin and crack. By the mid-90s, Alig’s drug use had gone from abstinence, to occasional recreation, to full-blown addiction. With addiction comes an obsession for an endless supply of drugs, and there’s no better way to procure drugs than to be “friends” with a drug dealer.
