Visiting Ours

New York magazine picks up the slack on information about Michael Alig, 10-year prison resident for the murder of club kid Angel Melendez. To keep Alig alive, so to speak, while Melendez remains dead, the magazine catches up with the real-life party monster at Elmira Correctional Facility in New York, and it's not pretty.

He is 40 years old, for one thing, and he skulks into the room looking as though he hasn’t showered or shaved in days. His longish brown hair is dull and dirty. He is hunched over, paunchy, tentative. The $500 Prada glasses that his friends, two former club kids named Jenny and Karliin, bought for him last year are precariously perched on his nose, held together with fishing line, one lens missing. He has on a maroon T-shirt splattered with paint and standard-issue green drawstring pants. We are sitting in a tiny jerry-rigged enclosure of plywood and Plexiglas deep in the bowels of the maximum-security prison. The institutional quiet of the place is shattered at regular intervals with bursts of harsh, frightening noise: buzzers going off, iron doors slamming shut, guards shouting orders.

And if you read the piece (it's long) and make it to the "Phone Call from a Felon" section, here's the link to the popular James St. James series that ran on the WOW Report. (t/y Kate)

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