Michael Alig: The Life and Death of the Party

After months of toying with clubland and the media, the attention had gotten to be too much for Alig to bear. The joke was no longer funny. He decided to skip town for a while.

First, he sold all the furniture he had bought with Angel's money. Then, he collected on a loan of $1,600 from Peter Gatien; and then he bought a stash of heroin he thought would last the duration of a cross-country trip he intended to take with his club friend Gitsie.

He made it to Colorado before running out of drugs and turned back to go back to Indiana, where he spent some time with his mother. Three months after the murder, unable to resist the limelight, he returned to New York, and attempted a feeble comeback hosting a party night called "The Honey Trap" at a club in Midtown — named after a New York Post headline about a drug raid on Gatien's clubs. It flopped. With the Club Kid era in eclipse under the law-and-order initiatives of Mayor Giuliani, and the rumors about the Melendez murder still swirling, Alig was now persona non grata in clubland.