ductboy
by Kevin Maloney
I was an unlikely candidate to save my city from the forces of evil, but my insomnia, once a minor annoyance consisting of trips to the bathroom that spilled over into two-hour Netflix binges, had broken wide open. Sleep eluded me completely. I tossed and turned, checking my iPhone every ten seconds to see if an hour had passed. At some point I gave up and watched TV from dusk ‘til dawn. First quality stuff, then bottom-of-the-barrel pablum—reality shows you’ve never heard of and dramas with confusing plots starring actors who should’ve retired years ago.
One night I couldn’t take it anymore. I decided to be my own TV show. I passed a background check and started driving for Lyft, ferrying drunk people from downtown bars to Eastside apartments in the dead of night.
There are two types of riders at 3 a.m.: blackouts and talkers. Blackouts pass out the moment they get in your car or remain just conscious enough to whisper Thank You Thank You Thank You as you deliver them, barely upright, to some address only their iPhone can remember. As long as they don’t puke, it’s like being alone, only with the added satisfaction of knowing you are an expensive chaperone to a dysfunctional adult baby.
Talkers are less pleasant. Put five drinks in just about anybody, and you find out what kind of sewage flows through the heart of humanity. People bitch about their jobs, coworkers, spouses, bosses, money… the most boring drivel you could imagine. But every once in a while, you get a wordsmith in the right state of drunkenness, they tell the most incredible stories. I heard of alleyway sex acts involving holes in fences, where you could suck dick for Bitcoin. Businessmen doing coke with prostitutes only to discover the coke was actually PCP and the prostitute was actually a ferret. Apps where you scheduled anonymous hookups wearing ski masks and fucked a stranger behind an azalea bush, having no idea if you were exchanging bodily fluids with an underwear model or your own sister.
One night, my rider confessed to a serious crime. He said one time he was driving home from a bar and clipped a homeless person. He was too scared to stop. He didn’t think he killed her, but his guilt had turned his life upside down. He’d developed an oxycodone addiction. All his hair fell out. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a bald man, high and crying. I felt bad for him. This is what a sinner looks like: even more wretched than you.
There were other confessions: burglary, assault, embezzlement. Some people committed crimes right there in the backseat. A guy snorting coke sold heroin to the girl sitting next to him who I was almost certain was a minor. A woman unbuckled her seatbelt so she could suck a guy off only to demand $50, a surprise to the John who thought the call girl was his new girlfriend.
I was the opposite of Travis Bickle. I didn’t want to murder the guilty and save the innocent. They were all victims as far as I was concerned. The worst monsters were beautiful but twisted. They needed a time machine and their mother’s love, not prison.
The only crimes that bothered me were the ones committed by capitalism. I picked up millionaires from nightclubs and drove them past homeless camps on the way to West Hills mansions. They bragged about some loophole they’d found, a gray area of the law where they could funnel retirement funds into dodgy real estate deals on behalf of developers who gave them kickbacks. Because the money got routed via offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands, this activity was legal.
I dropped them off and made a note in a small ledger I carried for the purpose. Not with any thought of retribution, but to add to some ineffable equation I was calculating in my head. These people were victims too. Their fathers never loved them, so these soulless money fiends bought bigger and bigger castles hoping to impress the ghosts of Baby Boomers who’d long since died of heart disease.
Lack of sleep was wearing on me. When the sun rose, my eyelids trembled, and the trees started talking, telling me that I was part of the capitalist system that drove over the good people of the world and made the unscrupulous ones rich. I got scared. Ferrying drug dealers for a living, I’d made a few purchases along the way. I popped blue pills that were supposed to make you sleep, but instead turned the sky pink no matter what time it was. I took green pills that made my teeth feel like they were covered in hair, and yellow pills that instilled in me the unflinching idea that I was the creator of the universe.
Night came, and I picked up my first ride. It was a young woman on her way to a party. She was dressed as a witch, drinking from a flask, babbling on and on about how good Billie Eilish’s new album was. I took a pill and she stopped talking. I took another pill and all her clothes disappeared and she was naked in the backseat, speaking in tongues, trying to describe life in the Garden of Good & Evil.
It was Halloween. I didn’t pay much attention to calendars, but this day meant something to rideshare drivers. It meant I’d be ferrying goblins and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers from one house to the next, so these childish app developers could pretend to be people they weren’t, hoping it would lead to popularity, sex, and quality Instagram posts.
It was 10 p.m. on October 31, but I decided I needed a costume. I pulled over at a mom-and-pop convenience store. They didn’t have masks for sale, so I bought some paper plates and a roll of duct tape. I fashioned a rudimentary silver mask, and when I picked up my next rider, I told him I was a superhero named Ductboy.
“What are your superpowers?” he asked.
“Driving your drunk ass around all night,” I said.
Let me explain how drugs work. TV and movies depict down-and-out people covered in scabs cowering in abandoned tenements, but in my experience, pills just add or subtract something important from your brain, and the only drawback is a serotonin deficiency the next day, meaning you’ll take stock of your life and find it to be a hollow, meaningless spectacle with no joy or direction. Which means you have to take another pill to feel human again, or you grit your teeth under the sheets of your bed, throwing up and watching Seinfeld reruns, trying to power through.
I took a pill which had almost no effect, except that I lost track of time in a fundamental way. People kept getting in and out of my car wearing horrible costumes, and I kept introducing myself as Ductboy, but according to my iPhone calendar, it was November 6th, and the riders seemed unnerved by my homemade mask. My Lyft ratings fell, and an email appeared in my inbox informing me that one of my riders filed a complaint against me and that my driving privileges were being temporarily revoked.
This was good timing, because I’d started taking new pills that were half white, half pink that gave everything a sliding sensation, like I was on a conveyor belt even when I was standing completely still, which made driving a car feel like I was summoning the force inside dead dinosaurs to compel a 2,000-pound Japanese station wagon to stop moving for a few hours, while people flew through the air, jumped into my car for the pleasure of not moving for a while, then jumped out and rejoined the flying circus.
Friday night came, and for the first time in many years, I left the house on foot. I walked to 7-Eleven, bought a can of beer, and sat on the concrete curb, trying to figure out how to fight crime and save my city when there were no criminals to apprehend, and the Criminal Justice System was a racist institution stemming from the South’s desire to continue slavery beyond the Civil War.
I took a purple pill, and it came to me. The only way to save people was to live by example, demonstrating by means of good behavior how to lead our species away from wrongdoing and towards a life of selflessness. I went back into the 7-Eleven, bought five cases of Milwaukee’s Best Ice, and set out to save Portland from the crippling forces of evil.
The first person I came upon was a woman outside a restaurant. I told her my name was Ductboy and that I was leading an initiative to clean up Portland’s streets by giving away free beer to pedestrians.
Instead of receiving her gift and thanking me for my heroism, she backed away like I was a scary ex-Lyft driver in a homemade mask handing out cheap corner store beer.
“Leave me alone or I’ll call the cops,” she said.
“The cops?” I laughed. “Do you have Netflix? Have you seen 13th? Why don’t you just drape a confederate flag over the trunk of your car and call it a day?”
The woman sprayed me with mace and ran into the restaurant.
I was blind and my eyes were on fire, and I kept dropping cans of Milwaukee’s Best everywhere that exploded, spilling their beautiful yellow ambrosia into the sewer.
I took a red pill, and my left arm became cold and full of metal. I took a white pill, and a crow flew down out of the sky and taught me the Pythagorean theorem. I took an orange pill, and my eyes felt a little better, so I continued on my mission.
After walking for half a mile, I came upon a grocery store with a shopping cart parked next to the sidewalk. Stealing was wrong, but I was a higher order of citizen like Robin Hood or Batman. I commandeered the shopping cart, filled it with beer, and pushed it down Lombard Street, telling anyone who would listen that I was a strung-out superhero trading inebriation for justice.
A guy on a bike heard me and pulled over. “What kind of beer is that?”
“Milwaukee’s Best,” I said.
“Are there any IPAs in there?”
“I went for value.”
He flipped me the bird and got back on his bike.
Eventually I came upon a house with a bunch of children on the balcony. They were 19 and 20 years old, and they were talking to each other in sad, conciliatory voices. I asked what was wrong.
They said they pooled all their money and sent their buddy Max, who was 21, to buy beer, but they were pretty sure he bought weed instead and wasn’t coming back.
I said, “My name’s Ductboy, and I’m saving Portland from the forces of evil by delivering beer in a non-judgmental way to whoever needs it since I don’t believe in the police.”
Suddenly all my Milwaukee’s Best disappeared. Nobody asked if I had IPA. The party became joyful. Music got louder. People clapped me on the back and told me I’d saved the party from the forces of Max, who wasn’t exactly evil, but that when it came down to it, I was a pretty good superhero.
I started crying and sat down on the dirty porch sofa. The partygoers offered me beer, but I said, “No thanks, I’m a pill guy.”
I took a gold one, and the stars fell out of the sky. I tried to catch them, but they were falling too fast. I lay back on the couch, and the stars pushed me deeper and deeper into the cushions until everything turned dark, and for the first time in almost a year I slept.
Kevin Maloney is the author of Cult of Loretta (Lazy Fascist Press). His writing has appeared in Hobart, Barrelhouse, Green Mountains Review, and a number of other journals and anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Aubrey.