How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #79
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)
Just as Dean’s madness changes once they get to Mexico, so does his attitude toward girls.
Quote #80
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)
Dean’s interest in very young girls is ambiguous: it may be sexual in nature, or it may not.
Quote #81
On the fast "Mambo Jambo" we danced frantically with the girls. Through our deliriums we began to discern their varying personalities. They were great girls. Strangely the wildest one was half Indian, half white, and came from Venezuela, and only eighteen. She looked as if she came from a good family. What she was doing whoring in Mexico at that age and with that tender cheek and fair aspect, God knows. Some awful grief had driven her to it. She drank beyond all bounds. She threw down drinks when it seemed she was about to chuck up the last. She overturned glasses continually, the idea also being to make us spend’ as much money as possible. Wearing her flimsy housecoat in broad afternoon, she frantically danced with Dean and clung about his neck and begged and begged for everything. Dean was so stoned he didn’t know what to start with, girls or mambo. They ran off to the lockers. I was set upon by a fat and uninteresting girl with a puppy dog, who got sore at me when I took a dislike to the dog because it kept trying to bite me. She compromised by putting it away in the back, but by the time she returned I had been hooked by another girl, better looking but not the best, who clung to my neck like a leech. I was trying to break loose to get at a sixteen-year-old colored girl who sat gloomily inspecting her navel through an opening in her short shirty dress across the hall. I couldn’t do it. Stan had a fifteen-year-old girl with an almond-colored skin and a dress that was buttoned halfway down and halfway up. It was mad. A good twenty men leaned in that window, watching. (IV.5.46)
Interestingly, Sal begins to mirror Dean in their trip to Mexico, in that he, too, desires a very young girl.