Self-proclaimed inventor of graffiti, ‘Tracy 168,’ dead at 65.

It was a warm September night in Kingsbridge when renowned graffiti artist Michael Christopher Tracy was grabbing a late-night bite at the Wendy’s on 238th Street and Broadway and suffered a massive heart attack. He was dead at the age of 65.

“I didn’t find out until last week,” his estranged son, Shawn Tracy, told the Bronx Times on Oct. 27. Tracy died Sept. 3.

His body sat in a morgue for a month before he was claimed by a relative and memorial services have yet to be held, which epitomizes the complicated life he led.

Born on Valentine’s Day in 1958, Tracy was a Bronx latch-key kid, raised by his grandparents and a single-mom in University Heights where he was known as a vagabond until the day he died, depending on the kindness of others for food and crashing at friends’ homes.

“I took him in like a stray,” said Lewis “Devote” Martell, Tracy’s best friend. The two met one night in the mid ’70s while Tracy was writing on a wall and asked Martell, who was walking by, if he had a pen (a pilot marker.)

But not even his close friends knew much about Tracy’s personal life.

“I met his grandmother once,” said Martell.

Tracy was known as one of the pioneers of the graffiti scene, signing his works with his tag, Tracy 168 – the number of the street he hung out on.

“He saw the graffiti I had on my gate and told me, ‘If I paint a mural here, no one will spray over it,’” said Gennady O., owner of Cohen’s Optical on the corner of 231st Street and Broadway. Tracy painted the mural in 1994 and Gennady confirmed that he never had problems with vandalism again.

“I started this f—ing movement,” said Tracy of writing – how graffiti is referred to by artists — in a YouTube video titled, “A Tracy 168 Tribute.” “I wanted to draw pictures all my life and I found an outlet. I just started spraying.”

What started as the artistic expression of one kid in the late ‘70s, transformed from walls and the side of…