The End of a Primitive Read Online Free PDF

seventeen years old and he was wrestling playfully on a bed with the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, trying to kiss her. She had a coffee-cream complexion and short black curls and her eyes flashed laughingly as she struggled to get loose from him. She had a strong slender body, hard and round, and she wore a middy blouse and skirt. She gave a quick turn and was free, her body extended away from him, tensed for flight. But instead of escaping she lay passively on her back, her hair spread out on the white counterpane, and he bent forward tenderly, looking into her dark laughing eyes, and kissed her from an upside down position. He knew it was the first time she had been kissed, and it was also the first time he had kissed a girl. He felt a sweet, nameless sensation spread all over him.
    He opened his eyes wide. The sweet sensation was still with him and he lay unmoving, scarcely breathing, trying to hold it a little longer. But immediately his mind began analyzing it, dissecting it, breaking it up, pulling it down, twisting it this way and then the other. It was sweet because it was so pure. Never in all of his life had he felt a pure sex feeling—not even with his wife. But pure wasn’t just the word. His thoughts began leafing through the dictionary of his mind: good , look under good ; pleasant, virtuous, admirable. How about clean? nice? good? —there’s that goddamned good again. There must be some goddamned word!
    Sex in his mind had always been something a little soiled, a little weird, perhaps somewhat sordid too. Not in a bad sense always, but always a little tainted by his protestant upbringing, his grotesque memory, his strange imagination. But this sex feeling in his dream had been completely undefiled. Perhaps the way two virgins felt. He’d never had a virgin; perhaps he’d never been a virgin, either.
    Leroy’s laugh came through his closed door and he heard the nasty little dogs racing over the hall floor…“Now Napoleon, behave yourself. You come back here and get into your collar, you bad little thing.” It was a man’s falsetto voice affecting a womanish air. “Goddamned homos,” he thought. “The dogs too.”
    All the sweetness went and the loneliness closed in. He was lying diagonally across the wide, old-fashioned, dilapidated, mahogany bed, and had to roll over to reach the night table where his cigarettes lay. “There’s nothing lonelier than a double bed,” he thought, putting a paper match to his cigarette, and with the first inhalation the dizziness came. He was still too drunk for a hangover but his head felt unset and his body unjointed and everything had a double-edged, distorted look like a four colour advertisement with each colour slightly out of line.
    However, his brain was sharp. For the past five years it had never let him down. It was always packed with some definite emotion, defined in intellectual terms; futile rages, tearing frustrations, moods of black despair, fits of suicidal depressions—all in terms of cause and effect, of racial impact and “sociological import”—intellectual horseshit—but nagging as an unsolved problem, slugging it out in his mind, like desperate warriors. No matter how much he drank, whatever he did to deaden his thoughts, there was this part of his mind that never became numb, never relaxed. It was always tense, hypersensitive, uncertain, probing— there must be some goddamned reason for this, for that . It had started with the publication of his second book, five years before… Some goddamned reason for all the hate, the animosity, the gratuitous ill will —for all the processed American idiocy, ripened artificially like canned cheese.
    The night before he’d wandered from bar to bar, trying to find a safe-looking pickup. At the Ebony up the street, on Amsterdam, he’d tried to make the hostess, a show-girl type, what the guys used to call a “Brown-skin Model.” The joint had been practically empty and she had come and sat with