Michael Howell, Part VII

The End

Michael lost the gallery by gallery by the end of 1994, but refused to admit it and adjust to it. As a result he was driven from the gallery.

If there was any single mistake he made that got him driven out it had to be the habit he had of letting himself in to the gallery after hours and claiming more wall space for himself. At the start of gallery self-governance Michael had one-third of the wall space. For the December '94 reopening there was a more equitable reapportionment of space, although Michael's was still larger than others. But after that event, Michael came in nights and worked at restoring his dominance of the display space. He took down art he didn't like, moved other art in its place and increased his own display.

Another factor in Michael's ouster was the arrival of Boyd McLaughlin. Boyd was a talented artist who specialized in detailed representational drawings dawn with ballpoint etched in wood. His art sold. He was also a recovering drug addict who needed to throw himself into his work to fight his addiction. So he had a vested interest in seeing the gallery open for as many hours as possible. By the summer of 1995 the gallery was open more than half the week and Boyd was clamoring for 7-day coverage, telling Barbara Brownstein he would do it himself.

The rest of us, aside from Michael, were happy to let Boyd do it. Not only would it mean more hours that artists could use the space and sell, but we knew that Boyd was a fair monitor.

Monitoring was a constant problem for the gallery. The monitor greets visitors and gives them a tour of the space, answering any questions the visitors have and arranging sales for artists who don't happen to be present. When Michael performed the function everyone could see that he tried to keep the visitor's attention moving from display to display until they landed on his art. He deliberately put his art at the back of the room so the visitors would get to it last. That way there would be no place next to go after they got there, and Michael could keep them at his display for an indefinite period of time. If anyone complained that he wasn't showing the other artist's work equally he'd say he'd already done that. The tour was over, he was just carrying on a conversation now. The deceit was transparent to the artists but the cover just barely plausible enough that the staff felt they could do nothing.

With Boyd there were no dirty tricks like that. He showed all the art equally. If the visitors were still there asking questions when the tour was technically over he wouldn't hog their attention, but invite other artists to share in the conversation.

Real Change featured Boyd McLaughlin in the August 1995 issue, the same issue that my column started. Soon after, Boyd started opening the gallery 7 days a week.

Barbara Brownstein and Noel House staff began to put pressure on Boyd to cut back. They were afraid he was overworking himself. Boyd cheerfully dismissed their concerns, saying, "I know what's best for me."

What happened next was one of the best examples I can give of what is wrong with social workers' training. Instead of acknowledging that Boyd really MIGHT know better than they about his personal life and needs, they made the decision for him to cut his hours back. He subsequently died, of a drug overdose, on one of the days he otherwise would have been working the gallery.

Apparently the schools that turn out social workers need to require Humility 101.

Boyd's death brought the other artists together as a community and his work while alive told us we didn't need Michael Howell.

The final push came after Michael was called to a meeting downstairs with Barbara, Noel House staff, and representatives of the cooperative that had formed over Michael's objections. I was picked as one of the representatives. The main issue was Michael's meddling with the displays after hours. He was asked to stop his "obstructionism" and join with the other artists as an equal member of the coop. He sulked through most of the meeting, then told us all it was his gallery and we had no right to take it away from him. I pointed out that he had told us all along that it would be a coop, now it is one, so what was the problem? He said, "So you're on their side." He must have imagined himself the Julius Caesar of the gallery.

It took us months to get Michael Howell's art out of the gallery. After six months, we came very close to just throwing it in the trash, on the theory that six months was more than reasonable time to expect an evictee to clear out.

About half a year later, on March 9, 1997, Michael died of heart failure. Unlike Boyd's death, it wasn't clear whether you could blame Michael's on his eviction from the gallery. Too much time had passed. But maybe we did kill him. I don't know.

But I do know I'm far from a Brutus. I didn't stab him. He walked into it.

Michael Howell, Part VI

The first issue of Real Change appeared in August 1994. The second issue came out October 1, 1994, and featured a two page article on the art of Michael Howell. It crammed a full 25 of Michael's drawings in together with a half page article describing Michael Howell's art and Michael Howell -- by Michael Howell. He didn't want anybody else interpreting him.

Meanwhile, the other gallery members were meeting regularly with Barbara Brownstein to prepare for a rededication of the gallery under a new name, StreetLife Art gallery, as a genuine cooperative art studio/gallery. Michael Howell was invited to all the meetings, but refused to attend, because his position was that he was in charge of the gallery, therefore decisions made without him had no force. Our meetings were just an opportunity, he thought, for us to exchange so much hot air. The gallery was what he made it. What we said it was meant nothing. If we wanted to change it, WE had to meet with HIM, not HIM with US.

The Archdiocesan Housing Authority, the Dominican Sisters, and A Territory Resource saw it differently. They were funding a cooperative gallery, not a Michael Howell gallery.

Without input from Michael, the other members voted to change the name, reorganize the gallery, put out a book featuring art and biographies of all the artists, and hold a public reopening. The date was set for December 8. Michael didn't make it.

[Above: The StreetLife opening, as pictured in the next month's Real Change.]

About the same time, though, Michael found a reason to get back on speaking terms with me. He wanted to apply for a bus shelter project. He didn't think he could get one on his own. So his idea was to repeat the success of the gallery idea: make a joint application with 2 other artists. The idea was the 3 of us would represent homelessness better than one could. We would offer 3 different kinds of art combined on the same bus shelter.

For the 3rd artist, Michael wanted our poet friend, Stan Burriss. It was the sort of sly choice I'd come to expect from Michael. He knew Stan would only get a small plaque for a poem or two, leaving the rest of the shelter to Michael and I. He got me to agree to do only the bottom third of the shelter, around the bench, while he did the upper two thirds. My incentive was that my share of the money Metro paid us would not be reduced by more than a third of a dollar. Stan and I would each get $333, Michael would get $334.

Getting a design approved was a nightmare. The man in charge of the shelter art program was Dale Cummings, who always seem to me to be on the verge of pulling his hair out in response to talking to us. I didn't blame him.

Michael wanted to use his wall projector to duplicate twelve of his small paintings on the fronts and backs of the six panels he would have. Stan, who, ever since his homeless days has always written his poems on napkins and paper cups he picks up at cafés and meetings, wanted Metro to create plexiglass cases to house cups and napkins so people could see them as they were written. I wanted to create a semi-abstract linear piece that would illustrate the words of one of the poems that Stan submitted.

Mr. Cummings objected, first of all, to the lack of cohesion these plans had. We had very tense meetings in which he basically said, "You guys get together and integrate your design plans, or we'll cancel this project." He objected to Stan's proposal on grounds of cost and practicality. The cases would be one-of-kind, so if they were damaged the cost of replacement would be too high. Stan was told he'd get the same kind of case that holds bus schedules, for copies of his peoms. Those would be easily replaced and cheap.

The biggest objection came when Michael presented the 12 paintings he wanted to use. Dale Cummings wanted women, minorities, and youth. Michael painted older White males, almost exclusively.

Cummings finally gave up on the cohesion issue, but never gave an inch on the demand for diversity of images. He kept reminding Michael that he understood that Michael has to have his own personal vision as an artist, but Metro is paying for this shelter, so Metro has a right to demand that the content be something that reflects well on it.

Michael became defensive. he felt he was being charged with racism. He made the point that he painted old White men because their wrinkles stood out. That was really what his art was about.

He was a landscape artist in effect, not a portrait artist. But he couldn't say it that way because he had spent years promoting his art as portraiture art. His whole rap was that he was depicting the "real" homeless. So Dale Cummings said, by only showing old White men and saying that you're depicting the real homeless you're implying that only old White men are real homeless. That homeless women and homeless Blacks and homeless youths and homeless Native Americans, for examples, aren't real homeless.

I thought it was great. For the first time someone speaking to Michael Howell about Michael's art was really taking it seriously. He was talking to Michael about what his art really was about.

Michael hated it. But after one long tense meeting after another he finally realized that Cummings wasn't going to budge. Michael caved and we went ahead.

[Below: The shelter was originally placed at 7th & Olive. From a photo accompanying a June '95 article about the shelter project taken by Karla Manus.]

Michael Howell, Part V

Michael Howell's Homeless Art Gallery was a great success for him. By May 1992 there were displays up for about 7 artists, counting Michael. Michael had half the display space, the rest of us shared the other half. Many more people came in to get free lessons from Michael and ask for space. Michael always said he would "think about it," or he would critique their art, being mostly positive and encouraging, and then end with, "Pretty soon you'll be doing something we can put up." He was a genius at stringing people along with flattery and promises.

He expected flattery in return. Every time I saw him he fished for compliments. When I finished a painting he would always say how interesting it was, or how he liked the use of color, or the composition, sounding quite sincere until the next words out of his mouth were, "So what do you think about the color [or composition, etc.] of this one?" showing me one of his. If my compliment for him wasn't at least as good as his for me, he'd make a sour face, acting offended.

At least he was conscious about it. He freely admitted he liked having me around because I came off as an intellectual and it made him look intellectual to be associated with me.

His desire to be regarded as intellectual clashed with his bigotry at times. An example involved some uncomfortable moments at the Burke Museum in 1993. I was with Michael and Stan Burriss at the U District Burger King. It was after the free meal and Michael had a few hours to kill before an appointment. I told them I was leaving to go to an exhibit of contemporary Maori art at the Burke Museum on campus. Michael decided he had to go to learn what all this Maori art is about. He talked Stan into coming with us.

On the walk over (just 4 blocks) Michael talked about how anything a native can do a non-native can do. It's just a matter of wanting to. I couldn't see any way to argue against that sort of reasoning, but I also couldn't see what the point of reasoning it was.

The exhibit was awesome to me. Two of the artists especially stood out, Cliff Whiting and Manos Nathan. Manos Nathan did beautiful carved clay pots which he allowed to be exhibited for a year and then destroyed to respect the sacred clay they were made from.

Predictably, Michael had no more interest in that bit of cultural trivia than in the art itself. I spent the next hour and a half constantly moving away from Michael to avoid hearing him carp about how he could do better than this or that in half the time, "if he wanted to."

In general Michael was interested in whatever he could trivialize or master. If he could master it, it was genius. If he couldn't, it was beneath him.

By the end of '93 the fact that women at Noel House with clear talent weren't getting display space and growing frustration with Michael's dismissal of crafts (what he called women's art when they weren't listening) led to meetings with Michael and Archdiocesan Housing Authority officials to try to work some arrangement out that would better accommodate the women at Noel House. Michael expressed sharp bitterness about these meetings to me. He told me he planned to stonewall them. He would keep going to their meetings but he would find objections to all their proposals and wear them down.

It didn't work. When he was uncooperative, the AHA simply sent a social worker. Her name was Barbara Brownstein. She was short, thin, darkhaired, energetic, female, and of a suspect orientation. Michael Howell's noncooperation extended to Barbara. He avoided speaking to her as much as possible.

I don't remember how long it took but the next thing I recall is that Barbara and Michael were opening the gallery on different days. I think it was in the Spring or early Summer of 1994. It was maybe a month after Tim Harris came in and told me of his plans to begin a street paper similar to a Boston paper he'd started up a few years earlier.

Barbara took no answer for a yes whenever she consulted Michael about adding members, or rearranging displays, so Michael's sulking noncooperation backfired. By the end of Summer we had a total of twelve artists working in the gallery and displaying, in addition to artists who were old friends of Michael who never had to check in order to get their work displayed.

The new artists included, as I remember, at least 3 women. One of them, Jonna Taylor, had a piece that was an assembly of items on a level board on a table, webbed with string with bits of paper with writing on them. Michael's reaction to it was at first just that it was junk. Then he noticed that one of the items forming the piece was a black dildo. I was watching him when he saw it. His face turned lobster red and he said that it was disgusting, and we had to get it out of the gallery.

[Above Right: Not a good enough picture of it to see the dildo, but at least it conveys how busy it was. Anitra wrote about Jonna when she passed away a few years ago.]

I said I thought it should stay, it's art and it makes a statement. Michael scoffed at that. Then he said, "Well, it has to go. It's offensive to women. Women don't want to see disgusting things like that. The dykes downstairs won't allow it."

He hadn't read the signature. I said, "How can you say it's offensive to women if it was done by one? It was put together by one of the Noel House women. The staff already know about it."

It was true. The staff was fine with it. It was controversial with the residents but the majority liked it. Only two of the residents ever objected. All of the claims that the piece was offensive to women in general came from Michael and from male friends of his he could line up on his side. Michael couldn't get Barbara Brownstein or the Noel House staff to support him in barring the piece.

He could have come in alone after hours and hauled the piece out and trashed it. But he knew he would be the only suspect, so he wanted someone else to take credit with him when the accusations were made. So the next time I was at the gallery he followed me out and tried to persuade me in joining him in a trashing party. I said no.

He became so angry he drew me around the corner at what is now the the Qwest Building at 2nd and Lenora and crowded me up against the wall. A foot from my face he demanded to know why I was supporting that "lesbian garbage." I said I was supporting it because it was art. He said it wasn't art it was offensive. I burst out laughing, as I do sometimes, I can't always help it, and I said, "You know, actually, I like the piece, but even if I didn't I wouldn't trash it." He then told me that I was a disgusting pervert and he would never speak to me again. He was mistaken about that last part.

In the next few days Michael complained to Noel House staff that another of the items in Jonna's piece, a ball peen hammer painted silver (representing Maxwell's) was his hammer. He was missing a hammer, Jonna's hammer looked just like his hammer, therefore she had stolen his hammer.

When those charges were disregarded, a few more days passed, and the hammer disappeared. Michael denied taking it. He convinced staff that just anyone could have walked up and snatched it.

Michael Howell, Part IV

For a long time Michael Howell was the only one who could open the Homeless Art Gallery, and he kept limited public hours. Visitors, including the artists who used it as their only studio and whose art was housed at the gallery, were able to drop in only two days a week at first. Michael had other commitments and couldn't operate the gallery more than that.

After I began coming in regularly Michael trusted the space to me for a few additional hours. I would show up Tuesdays and give Michael the opportunity to leave for a while, before returning to lock up. So, soon, the gallery was open three days a week. That continued to be the case until sometime in 1994.

A little about the physical space. The building is at the corner of 2nd and Bell. 2nd is almost level but Bell drops as you walk from the corner to the back of the building, so there's a direct entrance to the basement from the alley. The basement held the women's shelter, Noel House, still there. There was (and is) also a women's transitional housing program on the west side (back) of the first floor and above, called Rose of Lima. Rose of Lima was addressed on Bell Street, but both the gallery and Noel House shared the 2nd Avenue address. Rose of Lima, meanwhile, shared an internal door with the gallery and had internal windows that looked out into the gallery from their office space, so you could feel like they were spying whenever the blinds were open.

All this and the fact that AHA's primary concern at the building was keeping Noel House and Rose of Lima running, naturally created frictions. Those frictions were ultimately exacerbated by the fact that, in addition to being profoundly racist, Michael Howell was also deeply sexist and homophobic.

I've mentioned the racism, directed mainly at Asians. A freakish example of it occurred one day when we were leaving the gallery together, walking south. We were engrossed in a conversation as we approached Wally's, a little Mom and Pop store in Belltown run by a wonderful Korean couple. I wanted to get something in the store and suggested to Michael that we could carry on the conversation inside.

It wouldn't have been so freakish if he had just said, "No." Even "No, I don't like the people that run the store, I'll wait out here," wouldn't have been so bad. I didn't have to know what he didn't like about them. What he did that was so off the wall racist was get furious at me that I would do business with Koreans. It wasn't enough that he hated them, I had to hate them, too. He got angry to the point of sputtering. I went in anyway. When I came out he punished me by walking off in a babyish pouting sulk. He was as angry that he couldn't control me as he was racist. Control was important.

An apparent contradiction to that sort of behavior lay in the fact that he welcomed a Korean artist into the gallery. The contradiction is resolved by the nature of the relationship. Michael was in control of the gallery. Michael was not in control of Wally's. Michael could let one extremely talented Korean artist make his gallery look good, knowing that he could exclude any others. Michael also knew that he could potentially be accused of racism and was smart enough to know that the accusations could be headed off as long as he allowed token representatives in. He explicitly told me in private that he considered all that in allowing our Korean artist membership.

He also spoke to me at length about his theory that women can't be good artists no matter how hard they try, but that it was important to satisfy the wishes of AHA and the "Noel House dykes" by appearing to not exclude women.

Rather than grant space to any women artists, Michael Howell tried to make feminist points by offering art lessons to women. He made a point of reaching out to Noel House in particular, inviting them to send women up for help in learning art.

I think it worked for a while. Michael avoided using his disparaging homophobic language around Noel House residents and staff. The free art lessons were appreciated and gave the intended impression that Michael thought the women had promise as artists. Privately he told me it was a farce, the women weren't capable of learning, they were only good for crafts, and he had no intention of allowing "women's art" be hung on the walls of his gallery.

Arguing with Michael about any of his bigoted views would get you an angry tirade at first, followed by a flat refusal to continue the discussion further, followed by pouting and departure for the day. The next time you'd see him he'd pretend nothing had been said, and get irritated if you brought it up again.

I wondered how long I could continue to associate with the man. Being put in the role of an unofficial assistant made me feel I was endorsing his management. At some point the manifestations of his bigotry on that management would be too embarrassing, I thought. It turned out though that by the time it became unbearable to be associated with him there were other allies available and I didn't have to leave the gallery. I'll be getting to that.

Michael Howell, Part III

Late 1991 was a huge turning point in my life. I used to use email signatures that said things like, "Harnessing Stupidity, Since 1991" and "One Personality To Serve You, Since 1991." Between September and November of that year I resolved the old split personality and broke out of a lot of the problems that PTSD put me through. I quit smoking cold turkey. I felt like a new person. One of the consequences was that I decided I could deal with hanging out with Michael Howell again.

I decided that on the spur of the moment. I was walking by the Burger King on NE 50th on a Sunday and went in, impulsively. Sure enough Michael was there with poet Stan Burriss, who often dropped in to meet Michael without going on to the Blessed Sacrament feed.

After getting through with the "long time no see" business and after I dished up a diplomatic answer to "why haven't you been around?" Michel broke the news that he was about to move his traveling "Homeless Art Gallery" into a physical space downtown.

Michael Howell's Homeless Art Gallery had been a collection of art work done by homeless and formerly homeless artists who trusted Michael to store their art in his apartment so he could haul it out and display it in public places.

The idea for this traveling art show preceded the Seattle Goodwill Games of 1990. But the city's homeless sweeps in advance of the games spurred a revolt. There was a Tent City and associated protest. The protest gave rise to SHARE and WHEEL, Seattle's most active grassroots organizations powered by homeless people themselves. The rallies incident to the protests surrounding the Goodwill Games and to other actions by SHARE brought new life to Michael's art show. Homeless protesters wanted to show the public that homeless people are talented and sensitive human beings. So activists were happy to help haul the art around and set it up wherever public actions were planned.

Meanwhile, the severe winter of 1990 prompted the Archdiocesan Housing Authority to open a severe weather shelter in Belltown which evolved into a permanent women's shelter (Noel House) in a building at 2nd and Bell. Yielding to neighborhood pressures, the AHA agreed that the corner storefront of the building would not be used by the permanent shelter. Instead some other use would be found for it, one which would benefit the entire community, not only the homeless community.

Enter Michael Howell. He offered to run his Homeless Art gallery out of the storefront as a working studio and gallery. It would benefit the wider community by being a place where anyone could come and see the artwork. The studio space would be open to all walk-ins. Even non-homeless could create art in the space.

Michael figured he couldn't sell the idea as "Michael Howell's Private Gallery" open by invitation to other artists. He had to tell AHA that he wouldn't really be the owner of the new gallery. He told them it would be a democratically run cooperative.

Already in the Burger King, December 1991, without having seen me for two nearly two years, Michael Howell couldn't resist bragging to me how he was pulling the wool over the eyes of a "religionist" bureaucracy. The gallery would be open to homeless and formerly homeless artists, but he intended to retain iron control. There wasn't going to be any cooperative.

When he said it would be open to formerly homeless artists I perked up. "Hey, I'm a formerly homeless artist," I said. Even before I first met him I had been doing pen and ink drawings. I had since taken up acrylics. he asked to see some, so the next week I brought a handful of paintings to the Burger King. He admitted they weren't to his taste, but he said they would fill a niche in the gallery. He had been looking for a non-native who did "native" art, because, he said, the natives were too demanding.

I pointed out that my art wasn't really Native American inspired, except insofar that Native Hawaiians are now Native Americans thanks to Hawaiian statehood, and a fraction of my art is Native Hawaiian inspired, although mostly I've been influenced by art from other realms of Oceania, such as New Zealand and New Guinea and Indonesian -- and he said, "Yeah, whatever."

So that's how he accepted my art for display in the Homeless Art Gallery.

[Below: Me in front of my display in the gallery a few years later. Michael was already on the way out when this picture was taken but you can see two of his pieces in this scene. One is the bowed man in blue over my left shoulder. The other is a painting of a woman at my far right, below a couple of landscapes by a third artist. My stuff is around the windows. Michael wasn't able to paint directly on large canvases and boards such as these. One of the reasons he wanted the gallery space was to have a place to set up a projector. He came in nights when the gallery was closed and projected his small drawings onto large boards and traced them.]

There was still a little agoraphobia problem that made it difficult for me to ride crowded buses from the U District to Downtown Seattle. In March 1992 I saw the place for the first time thanks to Michael's gracious agreement to ride with me to keep me distracted and get me past the panic attacks.

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.

Michael Howell, Part I

It suddenly occurred to me that a major anniversary of Michael Howell's passing had itself passed without my noticing, and there is unfinished business.

The Michael Howell of whom I speak is the formerly homeless one who made a career in Seattle of sitting in public doing pen and pencil drawings of wizened old homeless white men, tinting them with watercolors, and selling them not to the subjects but to mostly female concerned idealists. He also, in late 1991, began what he called the Seattle Homeless Art Gallery, which later called itself the StreetLife Art Gallery.

When Michael died over ten years ago I was still very active in StreetLife, had been writing for Real Change, and everyone assumed that I would be the one to write the obituary. I'd known him since the mid-80s, and at one point I was for all practical purposes his principal assistant in running the gallery. But I said then that if by obituary they meant eulogy, forget it. I would not write a eulogy. It turned out it was a eulogy the editorial committee wanted, so fellow editor Michele Marchand wrote it.

I think ten years is long enough to wait. This now is the obituary the editorial committee would have gotten if they'd kept insisting. It's a little long, so they would have cut it. I'm going to run it here in installments -- because I can!

I first met Michael at Ralph's Deli at 4th & Lenora, around 1985, give or take a year. Dates in the 80s are a little hazy because of the divorce, the extreme grief (which resulted when I couldn't see my daughter anymore because she was taken thousands of miles away from me), the two bouts of homelessness, one long, one short, and the intense delayed stress syndrome associated with PTSD that was so bad that between 1984 and 1987 I couldn't look at the front page of a newspaper.

Ralph's Deli was a decent all-night grocery store and deli then. They didn't discriminate against the homeless like they do now. They let Michael and his buddies hang there all night long, only asking what all stores ask, that they occasionally pay for a fresh cup of coffee to justify their occupancy. Michael was there with a chessboard every night and wanted to play anyone who looked at all interested.

I was a cab driver. I came in every night to buy coffee and a sandwich. The sandwich would usually be my only meal in a twelve hour shift. I'd use the purchase to justify the use of the men's room. Sometimes I'd sit down and take a break, sometimes not.

One night I stopped to gaze at a chess game Michael was playing with a friend. The brief attention I gave induced Michael to introduce himself and spend the next several days twisting my arm to play a game with him.

While he was prevailing on me to play chess, I got to know him as an artist. Whenever he had no one to play the sketch book would open and he try to sketch the most wrinkled white man in the room.

The choice of white men as art subjects was not racist. Michael was racist -- I'll be getting to that -- but his choice of art subjects was NOT a manifestation of his racism. Michael was fascinated with wrinkles and the shadows they cast on faces. With white people the shadows are more pronounced because of the contrast to the white skin. Early on he would draw wrinkled old women, too, but there aren't as many wrinkled old white women around as white men because the women use makeup to hide the wrinkles. Eventually when he caught on to the fact that women were more likely to buy his art he convinced himself that it was old men they wanted to see. He thought old women would disturb them because they might identify. But they could just feel sorry for the old men.

Finally I caved in and played a game of chess with Michael. I lost. I played another and lost. And another. Over the next few weeks I lost 30 games in a row to Michael, winning none, tying none.

Michael was an insufferable gloating prick when he won. He was also hypocritical about the game. He bragged that he would never be a "book" player, but he never played any opening as White but P-K4, and he whined if you didn't follow with P-K4, saying you were "ruining" the game. On top of that he whined whenever he had to play Black so much that just to shut him up I agreed to play Black all the time. [Pictured: The start of a "good" game, as seen by Michael.]

So heading into the 31st game I was getting pissed at his petty whining and gloating and general unsportsmanlike behavior. I did something nasty: I went to the Seattle Public Library and found a big thick opening book that analyzed lines of his favorite opening to 20 and 30 moves. I found an obscure trap in the 12th move that was described as "unsound, but very difficult for an unprepared player to counter over the board." I memorized it and sprang it on him the next time we played.

As soon as he realized he was about to lose a rook to a knight (as the trap promised) he panicked. He started whining that I'd spoiled the game by playing a "weird" move. He tried to get me to take it back. When I wouldn't he started to get that it was a deliberate trap, and began to get hostile about it.

He had a friend who usually hung with him who was a tournament player. Michael got his friend to help him solve the problem posed by the trap. So I was playing two people now.

Michael might have pulled off a tie in spite of the trap by just exploiting his superior experience in the endgame, but he couldn't stand the thought of giving up his unbroken streak of wins against me to a tie so he took a rash risk that cost him the game, and I finally won one.

When losing a game it's customary for a chess player to tip his King over, acknowledging defeat. Michael Howell acknowledge his one and only loss to me by yelling, "SHIT, GOD DAMN IT, FUCK!" and hurling his King half-way across the grocery.

So I never played him another game. It pissed him off that I would stop playing after a win and not let him "settle the score." That the score was 30 games to 1 in his favor meant nothing to him. I guess he had to win the last game or he was a loser in his mind. I didn't care. I didn't want to be bothered playing such a sore loser again.