Fag Hag (Robert Rodi Essentials) by Robert Rodi

Author:Robert Rodi [Rodi, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-06-03T04:00:00+00:00

THE DRIVE WAS uncomfortable at first. It was impossible to heat the interior because of the broken window, and Lawanda’s lips were turning blue; she hugged herself and shivered. Quentin kept eyeing the receiver and tape deck in the back as if he were considering stealing them.

But the closer they came to the city, the more animated the group became. “Fuckin’ Trey gon’ try’n’ make me pay for his piece-o’-shit wheels when it’re him that’ve drive it down to nothin’,” he said. “I cain’t pay shit. I ain’t got no paper, man. What I s’posed to do? Roll somebody?”

“Oh, Quen, no,” said Lawanda; she was almost hyperventilating.

“You don’t have a job, right?” asked Natalie as they drove under the Pulaski exit sign. The city skyline was before them now, lit up against the setting sun, majestic and faintly terrifying.

“Ah, shit, who gon’ give a ex-Rama Z a job?” he said, naming a particularly virulent north side gang. “Who are gon’ give a paycheck to a niggah wif a record?”

Natalie was struck by an idea that almost made her drive off the road. “You know guns, Quentin, right?”

“Shit if I don’t know gun.”

“You own any?”

He shook his head. “Handled plenty.”

“You want to work in a gun shop?”

He laughed. “Last place anybody ever hire me. I were Rama Z, man! I marked for life, knowhumsayin’?”

She cocked an eyebrow. “You read much, Quentin?”

“I can read,” he said defensively.

“But do you?”

“Who got time?” He looked ahead of him, as if closing off this avenue of inquiry.

Natalie took the ramp from the Eisenhower onto the Dan Ryan Expressway; it was a metaphor for her thinking—she was steering them all onto a whole new plane. “Do you know who Ayn Rand is?”

“No.”

“Quentin, if I told you that reading a book by Ayn Rand might get you a job, would you read it?”

He shrugged. “I guess.”

“It’s a long book. Couple hundred pages.”

He seemed undaunted. “I just gots to read it? Thassall? Then I get a job in a gun shop? A gun shop?”

She shrugged. “Well, you can’t just read it. You have to believe in it. And you have to convince the owner of the shop you believe in it. You have to make him think that book changed your life.”

He smirked. “Kinda chump gon’ b’lieve that?”

“This chump will. Trust me.”

“Where I get this book?”

She swung off at the first exit. “We’ll pick up a copy now. Start reading it tonight and don’t stop till your finished. And by next week, you’ll have a job.”

Quentin looked at Lawanda, then back at Natalie, then back at the road. “Shit if that happen,” he said.

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