How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #22
"That’s where I’m going too!" I cried. "I’m very glad you let me sit with you, I was very lonely and I’ve been traveling a hell of a lot." And we settled down to telling our stories. Her story was this: She had a husband and child. The husband beat her, so she left him, back at Sabinal, south of Fresno, and was going to LA to live with her sister awhile. She left her little son with her family, who were grape-pickers and lived in a shack in the vineyards. She had nothing to do but brood and get mad. I felt like putting my arms around her right away. We talked and talked. She said she loved to talk with me. Pretty soon she was saying she wished she could go to New York too. "Maybe we could!" I laughed. The bus groaned up Grapevine Pass and then we were coming down into the great sprawls of light. Without coming to any particular agreement we began holding hands, and in the same way it was mutely and beautifully and purely decided that when I got my hotel room in LA she would be beside me. I ached all over for her; I leaned my head in her beautiful hair. Her little shoulders drove me mad; I hugged her and hugged her. And she loved it. "I love love," she said, closing her eyes. I promised her beautiful love. I gloated over her. Our stories were told; we subsided into silence and sweet anticipatory thoughts. It was as simple as that. You could have all your Peaches and Bettys and Marylous and Ritas and Camilles and Inezes in this world; this was my girl and my kind of girlsoul, and I told her that. She confessed she saw me watching her in the bus station. "I thought you was a nice college boy." (1.12.12, I.12.13)
While Sal meets many women, it is only those who "love to talk" that really capture his interest.
Quote #23
And here my mind went haywire, I don’t know why. I began getting the foolish paranoiac visions that Teresa, or Terry - her name - was a common little hustler who worked the buses for a guy’s bucks by making appointments like ours in LA where she brought the sucker first to a breakfast place, where her pimp waited, and then to a certain hotel to which he had access with his gun or his whatever. I never confessed this to her. We ate breakfast and a pimp kept watching us; I fancied Terry was making secret eyes at him. I was tired and felt strange and lost in a faraway, disgusting place. The goof of terror took over my thoughts and made me act petty and cheap. "Do you know that guy?" I said. (I.12.15)
Sal is unable to recognize sexual happiness even when he finds it.
Quote #24
"Six-foot redhead, hey? And I thought you was a nice college boy, I saw you in your lovely sweater and I said to myself, Hmm, ain’t he nice? No! And no! And no! You have to be a goddam pimp like all of them!"
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"Don’t stand there and tell me that six-foot redhead ain’t a madame, ‘cause I know a madame when I hear about one, and you, you’re just a pimp like all the rest I meet, everybody’s a pimp."
"Listen, Terry, I am not a pimp. I swear to you on the Bible I am not a pimp. Why should I be a pimp? My only interest is you."
"All the time I thought I met a nice boy. I was so glad, I hugged myself and said, Hmm, a real nice boy instead of a pimp." (I.12.20-I.12.24)
Terry is only interested in Sal as the best-alternative, not as a genuine person. She "loves love," not Sal.