Free The End of a Primitive by Chester Himes Page B

glittering marquees of plush modern play-houses. Now it was descending into a mudhole again, but of a different kind. The once famous playhouses, lumped together on both sides of the street, were now crummy second-and-third run movie theatres, contesting with the cheap appeal of a penny arcade with its shooting galleries, mechanical games, flea circus, thimble arena where Jack Johnson had done a daily stint of boxing in his waning years. And in between there were the numerous jewelry stores with fake auctions every night, beer joints, cafeterias, sporting goods stores, shoe stores, shoe repair and valet shops, book stores that dealt principally in pornography, second-class hotels and filthy rooming houses.
    “Poor man’s Broadway,” Jesse thought sourly, as his searching gaze flitted from the lighted movie signs to the passing faces: then his mind began improving on the commonplace phrase, “Melting pot…already melted—rusting now…last chance…I can get it for you hot—hotter than you think, bud…this side of paradise—way this side…” His eyes rested on a black couple, the man tall and strutting in a cream coloured suit, a yam-coloured woman with a hundred pounds of hams…“Nigger Haven too…”
    Ahead of him a short swarthy man in a striped blue suit backed angrily from a narrow-fronted hash joint, shouting belligerently, “You come out here, you bastard, I’ll show you!” A big blond buck, Swedish looking, dressed in a white apron, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, obviously the counterman, charged onto the sidewalk. His face was red with rage. “Don’t you call me no bastard, you son of a bitch!” The short swarthy man stood his ground defiantly. “Don’t you call me no son of a bitch, you bastard! You’re out here on the street now and I’ll knock you on your ass!” Whereupon the big blond counterman knocked him down with one wild swing. The short swarthy man staggered to his feet and lurched about dizzily in a fighting stance. “You ain’t got no counter now to protect you,” he said. Whereupon the big blond buck swung wildly and knocked him down again. Jesse recalled his dream where the short squat man had brained the big wild man with a heavy oak chair, and said, half-laughing, “Law of averages.”
    A cop ambled up lazily and broke it up. “Go on, go on, get on back tuh work ‘fore I lock you up!” he said to the counterman, giving him a push, then he turned to the short swarthy man, “Whyoncha pick on somebody yo’ own size?” A snigger ran through the crowd. “He slipped up on me,” the short man defended his prowess. “Go on, go on,” the cop said. “I can tell you never wuz a boy scout.”
    “Never was a boy, son,” Jesse thought. “Where’d you study psychiatry?”
    Further on, a book store claimed his vagrant attention. He stopped for a moment, searching among the titles for those of his own two books. There were several books by black writers, but not his. “If you ever find someone who’s read your books you’ll drop dead,” he told himself. His gaze picked out the title. Lost Horizon . “Good and lost right here,” he thought.
    Then he recalled an editor who’d rejected his second book, complaining, “Why do you fellows always write this kind of thing? Some of you have real talent. Why don’t you try writing about people, just people.” He had countered, “White people, you mean?” The editor had reddened. “No, I don’t mean white people. I mean people! Like Maugham and Hilton write about, for instance.” He laughed at the recollection and his bitterness left. “I should have told him I don’t want no Eskimos, and that’s all the people they left. Don’t even know no ape-men, I should have told him, and no apes either, for that matter—although he probably wouldn’t have believed that, close as he thinks I am to Africa.” The thought kept tickling him as he ambled along, unmindful of the gay who trailed him on the leeside. “My