Michael Howell, Part II

After we stopped playing chess I still met Michael most every night. He never stopped begging for a rematch but we managed to stay cordial and he even began to introduce me to his other friends as a "brilliant mathematician with a DOCTORATE, even" who FINALLY managed to beat him in chess ONCE. This became a theme of our friendship, such as it was. My academic past was proof that he had smart friends.

In 1987 I quit cab driving, so our encounters at Ralph's came to an end. There were a couple of years that I didn't see him. I got on welfare & was living in the U District when I became homeless again. Then I lived north of the city limits for a year.

Finally I returned to the U District, renting a room at 16th NE & NE 50th, two blocks from the U. One Sunday I stopped at the NE 50th Burger King for a snack and I found Michael there with other friends of his. I found out that they were waiting there for the time to head over to Blessed Sacrament for its Sunday free meal.

Michael, it turns out, never paid for food. In fact, if he could help it, he never paid for anything. Over time I came to really admire this aspect of Michael Howell. For example, he got a cheap voicemail account. This was back when voicemail services were just becoming available. His cost less than ten dollars a month. A phone would have cost him 8 more, but instead he checked his voicemail every day on Nordstrom's complimentary customer phone.

For a few months I met with Michael and his friends every Sunday. It was a social hour for me that was a relief from the dismal apartment house I lived in.

But gradually Michael's attitudes wore me down. It was the repeated diatribes against Asians that were too much.

To Michael, all Asians were "gooks". Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Filipinos, it didn't matter. You'd think, to hear him talk about it, that he'd been horribly traumatized by the Vietnam War and he had generalized from the Viet Cong to all Asians. That would be wrong. He'd in fact been in Vietnam, but it was just briefly and he admitted he was a shop clerk at a secure post the whole time and the war didn't affect him. When I asked him why he hated the Vietnamese he always turned it around to events which happened to his brother.

It simply made no sense. OK, so his brother was shot at by some Vietnamese. How do you get from, "A Vietnamese man who was waging war with our country shot my brother" to "[Insert random Asian ethnicity here] are evil and should all be dead?"

I don't know how anyone could even get across a room with logic like that, much less from the Viet Cong to the Korean Peninsula.

It gets worse. It gets comically worse. Michael was a confirmed atheist. He didn't call himself that, he called himself "completely nonreligious." He pushed Ayn Rand's Objectivism on me, saying "it's all the philosophy you need." He scoffed at people who were religious.

But then he heard that Rev. Moon's Unification Church was offering a deal whereby new converts could sign up for special training in Korea. They would get a free suit, Michael said, and meals and expenses. He said it sounded great to him. He would pretend that he was a convert, go to Korea, take their money and their free suit and then laugh at them and return to America with extra money and a suit.

[Left: "Nice suit," thinks Michael. "I'd like a suit like that."]

When he first proposed this idea, I was sure he was joking. But sadly, he wasn't. He really believed it was a clever way to take advantage of stupid "religionists". He could profit from their stupidity. Not only that, he would be taking advantage of Asians.

I told him that his Ayn Rand-inspired "irreligionism" was itself a religion. He had a fit almost as bad as the one he had when I beat him at chess.

That was around the end of 1989. I avoided him for the next two years.

My First Rapes

It will probably be hours before I can get all the Tahitian dance and drum videos loaded. So meanwhile, back to the story of my horrid childhood.

Good place for a warning. I am going to try to avoid salacious language, but there is no way to talk about child sexual abuse without some sick creep thinking you're trying to turn him or her on. So if you start to think I'm trying to help you get off, stop reading here and go browse real porn. Or scroll down to things I've posted that were deliberately erotic, like Sex, Art, Sex.

It was probably November, 1950, when I was brought home from the hospital. I was 1 year and four months, or I was a week old, depending on what you or I mean by "I". At first the daily routine was alternately boring and stressful. There was almost no joy. When both my parents were home and sober, there was silence or argument. Often the argument was about me.

My Mother repeatedly called me the Freak. She said I'd never speak or understand English, even though I was already understanding it. She couldn't tell. My Father sometimes seemed to agree with her by not challenging her about it. Other times they would get into heated arguments about it, which neither one could win. Only I could ever win.

They'd usually be drunk within two hours of my Father arriving home from work. After that the arguments would be about whose fault it was that it all happened. On weekends my Father would hold off getting drunk until the evenings. Otherwise the ritual was pretty much the same.

They rarely spoke directly to me for an entire year. I just learned words by listening to them talk to each other. My Mother tried to teach me simple commands, like "come" and "go", as if I were a dog.

Maybe once a week, or every other week, my parents would put me in the care of one of usually two other families. There was a family on one side that had a couple of little girls that would take me while my parents went out together. There was another one down the street in the other direction, who happened to be black. I remember that my Mother had no problems leaving me with the black family, or even visiting with them to socialize, but she wouldn't let my Father have them to our house as guests.

When my Father was out and I was home with my Mother, I was mostly neglected. She wouldn't feed me for the entire time my Father was away at work. If the weather kept me in the house she would keep me in diapers but rarely change them.

It was when she changed my diapers that the sexual abuse started. She would set me on the changing table and remove the dirty diaper. As she did I'd invariably get an erection. She'd clean me and then start playing with it. That was fine. I had no sense that it was inappropriate. But then she would get mean. She always had a lit cigarette, she was a chain smoker. She would wait until I was giggling, then lean forward and blow smoke in my face from an inch away, and laugh at my coughing. Then she'd drop glowing ashes onto my genitals.

In the 40s and early 50s there were pediatricians writing books advising the use of soap suppositories as a way to get your baby regular and on a schedule convenient for you. The people who came up with that were flakes in the tradition of John Harvey Kellogg, who deserves a whole post of his own. He's very relevant.

It may be because my Mother had read about the soap suppositories that she started cleaning my rectum with soap and then raping me with pieces of it. The progression from cleaning and nurturing to following quack advice to rape needs to be noted. One of the reasons Mothers don't get caught often enough raping their children is because they can arrange the scene so even if you walk in and catch them in the act, they can pass it off as care-taking. At the worst they get accused of using bad judgment. Malicious intent is almost always impossible to prove.

But I remember the way my Mother leered at me when she raped me, and I remember how she laughed when I cried and screamed. The malicious intent was obvious to me.

Great-Grandparents Get Down

A film made in 1955 featuring dance greats George Christopherson and Freda Angela Wyckoff:



Until just the last few decades, whenever prudes complained about how oversexed, vulgar, or promiscuous kids these days are, they always blamed the Crude African Tribalism the Negroes maliciously smuggled with themselves aboard the slave ships. You can still see the idea crawling out of the woodwork when emotions get heated. For example, "GO BACK TO AFRICA AND DO YOUR GAY VOODOO LIMBO TANGO AND WANGO DANCE AND JUMP AROUND AND PRANCE AND RUN ALL OVER THE PLACE HALF NAKED THERE," as was recently emailed by U.S. Army recruiter Sgt. Marcia Ramode, in response to a black openly gay man's correspondence, pretty much incorporates the theme.

In the video you've just had the opportunity to see, a couple of pre-boomers, old enough to be my parents, dance in a style they might indeed have learned in their youth after they snuck out of their houses and across the railroad tracks to the local African-American Blues joint. My real parents, who were older still, would have said their morals were corrupted, by the Coloreds.

Nice White girls don't dance like that, they would have said, and good White boys are respectful to ladies, and don't stare so inappropriately, no matter what the provocation. This young man should have fetched a blanket, they would have said, to throw over this horribly vulgar woman. If not for her sake, then for the sake of the innocent on-lookers.

Nowadays, the prudes can blame all the oversexedness, vulgarity, and promiscuity on Baby Boomers, who are alleged to have invented sex ca 1967. This way they can avoid charges of racism. Some of the most cynical among them know this, that they are replacing one scapegoat with another. They know it benefits them politically because, against all reason, the apolitical hippy movement has been identified with the New Left movement, which in turn has been blamed on liberals, even though it was only occasionally liberal (as when Eugene McCarthy drew on some of its energy).

The truth is, Blacks didn't invent sex either. Neither did Adam and Eve. And Mary wasn't a virgin, and you all know it, so cut the crap.

I would never charge prudes with racism. I would charge them with prudery, or more precisely, having their heads up their asses, and rubbing too hard.