On the Road Sex Quotes

A few moments later Camille was throwing Dean’s things on the living-room floor and telling him to pack. To my amazement I saw a full-length oil painting of Galatea Dunkel over the sofa. I suddenly realized that all these women were spending months of loneliness and womanliness together, chatting about the madness of the men. (III.2.12)

Dean claimed he no longer needed Marylou though he still loved her. We both agreed he would make out in New York. (III.3.2)

I took one last look at Mill City and knew there was no sense trying to dig up the involved past; instead we decided to go see Galatea Dunkel about sleeping accommodations. Ed had left her again, was in Denver, and damned if she still didn’t plot to get him back. We found her sitting crosslegged on the Oriental-type rug of her four-room tenement flat on upper Mission with a deck of fortune cards. Good girl. I saw sad signs that Ed Dunkel had lived here awhile and then left out of stupors and disinclinations only.

"He’ll come back," said Galatea. "That guy can’t take care of himself without me." She gave a furious look at Dean and Roy Johnson. "It was Tommy Snark who did it this time. All the time before he came Ed was perfectly happy and worked and we went out and had wonderful times. Dean, you know that. Then they’d sit in the bathroom for hours, Ed in the bathtub and Snarky on the seat, and talk and talk and talk - such silly things." (III.3.4, III.3.5)

Galatea looked like the daughter of the Greeks with the sunny camera as she sat there on the rug, her long hair streaming to the floor, plying the fortune-telling cards. I got to like her. (III.3.8)

He invited us to his home for a bottle of beer. He lived in the tenements in back of Howard. His wife was asleep when we came in. The only light in the apartment was the bulb over her bed. We had to get up on a chair and unscrew the bulb as she lay smiling there; Dean did it, fluttering his lashes. She was about fifteen years older than Walter and the sweetest woman in the world. Then we had to plug in the extension over her bed, and she smiled and smiled. She never asked Walter where he’d been, what time it was, nothing. Finally we were set in the kitchen with the extension and sat down around the humble table to drink the beer and tell the stories. Dawn. It was time to leave and move the extension back to the bedroom and screw back the bulb. Walter’s wife smiled and smiled as we repeated the insane thing all over again. She never said a word.

Out on the dawn street Dean said, "Now you see, man, there’s real woman for you. Never a harsh word, never a complaint, or modified; her old man can come in any hour of the night with anybody and have talks in the kitchen and drink the beer and leave any old time. This is a man, and that’s his castle." (III.3.43, III.3.44)

"When Ed gets back I’m going to take him to Jamson’s Nook every night and let him get his fill of madness. Do you think that’ll work, Sal? I don’t know what to do." (III.3.47)

Dean went there and of course he was all sweats and joy at the sight of them, especially Janet, but I warned him not to touch her, and probably didn’t have to. The woman was a great man’s woman and took to Dean right away but she was bashful and he was bashful. She said Dean reminded her of the husband gone. "Just like him - oh, he was a crazy one, I tell ya!" (III.6.19)

Dean immediately took over the responsibility of selecting and naming the price of the car, because of course he wanted to use it himself so as of yore he could pick up girls coming out of high school in the afternoons and drive them up to the mountains. (III.6.21)

There were a lot of Mexican girls too, and one amazing little girl about three feet high, a midget, with the most beautiful and tender face in the world, who turned to her companion and said, "Man, let’s call up Gomez and cut out." Dean stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of her. A great knife stabbed him from the darkness of the night. "Man, I love her, oh, love her . . ." We had to follow her around for a long time. She finally went across the highway to make a phone call in a motel booth and Dean pretended to be looking through the pages of the directory but was really all wound tight watching her. I tried to open up a conversation with the lovey-doll’s friends but they paid no attention to us. Gomez arrived in a rattly truck and took the girls off. Dean stood in the road, clutching his breast. "Oh, man, I almost died. . . ."

"Why the hell didn’t you talk to her?"

"I can’t, I couldn’t . . ." (III.6.32-III.6.34)

We decided to buy some beer and go up to Okie Frankie’s and play records. We hitched on the road with a bag of beer cans. Little Janet, Frankie’s thirteen- year-old daughter, was the prettiest girl in the world and was about to grow up into a gone woman. Best of all were her long, tapering, sensitive fingers that she used to talk with like a Cleopatra Nile dance. Dean sat in the farthest corner of the room, watching her with slitted eyes and saying, "Ye yes, yes." Janet was already aware of him; she turned to for protection. Previous months of that summer I had a lot of time with her, talking about books and little thing she was interested in. (III.6.34)

"He just went for gas. He’ll be right back." I cut down to the corner and watched Dean as he kept the motor running for the waitress, who had been changing in her hotel room; in fact I could see her from where I stood, in front of her mirror, primping and fixing her silk stockings, and I wished I could go along with them. She came running out and jumped in the Cadillac. I wandered back to reassure the travel-bureau boss and the passengers. From where I stood in the door I saw a faint flash of the Cadillac crossing Cleveland Place with Dean, T-shirted and joyous, fluttering his hands and talking to the girl and hunching over the wheel to go as she sat sadly and proudly beside him. They went to a parking lot in broad daylight, parked near the brick wall at the back (a lot Dean had worked in once), and there, he claims, he made it with her, in nothing flat; not only that but persuaded her to follow us east as soon as she had her pay on Friday, come by bus, and meet us at Ian MacArthur’s pad on Lexington Avenue in New York. She agreed to come; her name was Beverly. Thirty minutes and Dean roared back, deposited the girl at her hotel, with kisses, farewells, promises, and zoomed right up to the travel bureau to pick up the crew. (III.8.8)

"Oh, that Beverly is a sweet gone little gal – she’s going to join me in New York - we’re going to get married as soon as I can get divorce papers from Camille – everything’s jumping, Sal, and we’re off. Yes!" (III.8.11)

They hooked chains on and the farmer hauled us out of the ditch. The car was muddy brown, a whole fender was crushed. The farmer charged us five dollars. His daughters watched in the rain. The prettiest, shyest one hid far back in the field to watch and she had good reason because she was absolutely and finally the most beautiful girl Dean and I ever saw in all our lives.

She was about sixteen, and had Plains complexion like wild roses, and the bluest eyes, the most lovely hair, and the modesty and quickness of a wild antelope. At every look from us she flinched. She stood there with the immense winds that blew clear down from Saskatchewan knocking her hair about her lovely head like shrouds, living curls of them. She blushed and blushed.

We finished our business with the farmer, took one last look at the prairie angel, and drove off, slower now, till dark came and Dean said Ed Wall’s ranch was dead ahead. "Oh, a girl like that scares me," I said. "I’d give up everything and throw myself on her mercy and if she didn’t want me I’d just as simply go and throw myself off the edge of the world." (III.8.16-III.8.18)

"What are you thinking, Pops?"

"Ah-ha, ah-ha, same old thing, y’know - gurls gurls gurls." (III.9.10-11)

I took up a conversation with a gorgeous country girl wearing a low-cut cotton blouse that displayed the beautiful sun-tan on her breast tops. She was dull. She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do. "And what else do you do for fun?" I tried to bring up boy friends and sex. Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done - whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was. "What do you want out of life?" I wanted to take her and wring it out of her. She didn’t have the slightest idea what she wanted. She mumbled of jobs, movies, going to her grandmother’s for the summer, wishing she could go to New York and visit the Roxy, what kind of outfit she would wear - something like the one she wore last Easter, white bonnet, roses, rose pumps, and lavender gabardine coat. "What do you do on Sunday afternoons?" I asked. She sat on her porch. The boys went by on bicycles and stopped to chat. She read the funny papers, she reclined on the hammock. "What do you do on a warm summer’s night?" She sat on the porch, she watched the cars in the road. She and her mother made popcorn. "What does your father do on a summer’s night?" He works, he has an all-night shift at the boiler factory, he’s spent his whole life supporting a woman and her outpoppings and no credit or adoration. "What does your brother do on a summer’s night?" He rides around on his bicycle, he hangs out in front of the soda fountain. "What is he aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want" She didn’t know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost. (III.11.1)

Not five nights later we went to a party in New York and I saw a girl called Inez and told her I had a friend with me that she ought to meet sometime. I was drunk and told her he was a cowboy. "Oh, I’ve always wanted to meet a cowboy."

"Dean?" I yelled across the party - which included Angel Luz Garcia, the poet; Walter Evans; Victor Villanueva, the Venezuelan poet; Jinny Jones, a former love of mine; Carlo Marx; Gene Dexter; and innumerable others - "Come over here, man." Dean came bashfully over. An hour later, in the drunkenness and chichiness of the party ("It’s in honor of the end of the summer, of course"), he was kneeling on the floor with his chin on her belly and telling her and promising her everything and sweating. She was a big, sexy brunette - as Garcia said, "Something straight out of Degas," and generally like a beautiful Parisian coquette. In a matter of days they were dickering with Camille in San Francisco by long distance telephone for the necessary divorce papers so they could get married. Not only that, but a few months later Camille gave birth to Dean’s second baby, the result of a few nights’ rapport early in the year. And another matter of months and Inez had a baby. With one illegitimate child in the West somewhere, Dean then had four little ones and not a cent, and was all troubles and ecstasy and speed as ever. So we didn’t go to Italy.(III.11.7, III.11.8)

Inez cooked in the kitchen and looked in with a wry smile. Everything was all right with her. "Dig her? Dig her, man? That’s Inez. See, that’s all she does, she pokes her head in the door and smiles. Oh, I’ve talked with her and we’ve got everything straightened out most beautifully. We’re going to go and live on a farm in Pennsylvania this summer - station wagon for me to cut back to New York for kicks, nice big house, and have a lot of kids in the next few years. Ahem! Harrumph! Egad!" (IV.1.2)

"Me, I was singing. I sat down next to you ‘cause I was afraid to set down next to any gals for fear I go crazy and reach under their dress. I gotta wait awhile." (IV.2.4)

A group of girls walked directly in front of us. As we bounced by, one of them said, "Where you going, man?"

I turned to Dean, amazed. "Did you hear what she said?" Dean was so astounded he kept on driving slowly and saying, "Yes, I heard what she said, I certainly damn well did, oh me, oh my, I don’t know what to do I’m so excited and sweetened in this morning world. We’ve finally got to heaven. It-couldn’t be cooler, it couldn’t be grander, it couldn’t be anything."

"Well, let’s go back and pick em up!" I said.

"Yes," said Dean and drove right on at five miles an hour. He was knocked out, he didn’t have to do the usual things he-would have done in America. (IV.5.8-IV.5.11)

Strange young girls, dark as the moon, stared from mysterious verdant doorways. "Oh, man, I want to stop and twiddle thumbs with the little darlings," cried Dean, "but notice the old lady or the old man is always somewhere around - in the back usually. (IV.5.13)