On the Road Sex Quotes

How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #55

"I dig you, man!" yelled Dean. They dashed off. For a moment I was worried; but Dean only wanted to dig the streets of El Paso with the kid and get his kicks. Marylou and I waited in the car. She put her arms around me.

I said, "Dammit, Lou, wait till we get to Frisco."

"I don’t care. Dean’s going to leave me anyway."

"When are you going back to Denver?"

"I don’t know. I don’t care what I’m doing. Can I go back east with you?" (II.8.22-II.8.26)

Unlike Sal, Marylou seems to have no loyalty whatsoever to Dean.

Quote #56

Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back, out of the corner of her eye - with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy- wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self- containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad. Dean was convinced Marylou was a whore; he confided in me that she was a pathological liar. But when she watched him like this it was love too; and when Dean noticed he always turned with his big false flirtatious smile, with the eyelashes fluttering and the teeth pearly white, while a moment ago he was only dreaming in his eternity. Then Marylou and I both laughed - and Dean gave no sign of discomfiture, just a goofy glad grin that said to us, Ain’t we gettin our kicks anyway? And that was it. (II.8.31)

Dean and Marylou’s love for each other is somehow based on mutual hatred and distrust.

Quote #57

One night Marylou disappeared with a nightclub owner. I was waiting for her by appointment in a doorway across the street, at Larkin and Geary, hungry, when she suddenly stepped out of the foyer of the fancy apartment house with her girl friend, the nightclub owner, and a greasy old man with a roll. Originally she’d just gone in to see her girl friend. I saw what a whore she was. She was afraid to give me the sign, though she saw me in that doorway. She walked on little feet and got in the Cadillac and off they went. Now I had nobody, nothing. (II.10.4)

Sal’s interest in Marylou may not have been about sex as much as it was about companionship.