On the Road Sex Quotes

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

Quote #43

Suddenly Dean leaned to me earnestly and said, "Sal, I have something to ask of you - very important to me - I wonder how you’ll take it - we’re buddies, aren’t we?"

"Sure are, Dean." He almost blushed. Finally he came out with it: he wanted me to work Marylou. I didn’t ask him why because I knew he wanted to see what Marylou was like with another man. (II.5.5, II.5.6)

While Sal sees sleeping with a friend’s girl as betrayal, Dean sees it as a sexual adventure.

Quote #44

Marylou lay there, with Dean and myself on each side of her, poised on the upjutting mattress-ends, not knowing what to say. I said, "Ah hell, I can’t do this."

"Go on, man, you promised!" said Dean.

"What about Marylou?" I said. "Come on, Marylou, what do you think?"

"Go ahead," she said.

She embraced me and I tried to forget old Dean was there. Every time I realized he was there in the dark, listening for every sound, I couldn’t do anything but laugh. It was horrible.

"We must all relax," said Dean.

"I’m afraid I can’t make it. Why don’t you go in the kitchen a minute?"

Dean did so. Marylou was so lovely, but I whispered, "Wait until we be lovers in San Francisco; my heart isn’t in it." (II.5.7-II.5.14).

Sal is unable to sleep with Marylou because he isn’t as open and free about sex as Dean is.

Quote #45

I could hear Dean, blissful and blabbering and frantically rocking. Only a guy who’s spent five years in jail can go to such maniacal helpless extremes; beseeching at the portals of the soft source, mad with a completely physical realization of the origins of life-bliss; blindly seeking to return the way he came. This is the result of years looking at sexy pictures behind bars; looking at the legs and breasts of women in popular magazines; evaluating the hardness of the steel halls and the softness of the woman who is not there. Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live. Dean had never seen his mother’s face. Every new girl, every new wife, every new child was an addition to his bleak impoverishment. (II.5.14)

Just as he seeks to understand Dean’s madness through his criminal past, Sal also explains Dean’s sexual nature through his time in jail.