Bushwackers and Karaoke

Don’t tell her I said this, but Desdemona spends way too much time on dating apps.  She’s pretty bad at them, too, swiping left on real charmers, right on complete duds.  To prove my point, the other day she matched with a fella of real tautonymic proportions: Isaac Isaacs.  She sent me a screenshot of their text exchange where he’d asked if she wanted to “meat up” that Wednesday night at Margaritaville, asking me my thoughts on the matter.  Well, Des, he’s either a major tool who wants to have sex with you, or he’s a moron who’s got a brain with a Zamboni-finish.  Probably a combination of the two, if I’m being honest.  But I didn’t say any of that.  What I did say was that it looked like her man Ike couldn’t spell, to which she responded that “maybe he’s a butcher.”  Good heavens, what would she do without me?  Anyway, you guessed it, she practically begged me to tag along as her incognito guardian angel, the parrot on her shoulder, said she wanted to make sure this guy wasn’t a fucking freak, which, so far, didn’t look promising for the ole Ikester.  I didn’t have anything better going on that night, so I agreed.  Plus, I had not yet paid my respects to Mr. Buffett—R.I.P.—and I also remembered that Wednesday was Karaoke Night at Margaritaville.  

So, we got there first.  Des said we should sit back-to-back and instructed to me take the booth behind hers.  She was facing the front door, I was facing the restrooms, and, like real amateurs, we hadn’t come up with a code word or anything like that for when she spotted Ike.  I mean, how was I supposed to know what the guy looked like?  Other than the screenshot she’d sent me, she hadn’t given me any details other than that, in his profile picture on the dating app, he was wearing waders.  Oh, yeah, that’s real helpful, I guess I’ll just keep a lookout for the guy who strolls in wearing waders with his flyrod collapsed and tucked under his arm.  It’s like she didn’t even want my help.  But I didn’t have to stress for too long, because, as I was drafting up a text to send her about what our code word would be—it was gonna be “gazebo”—I heard Des’ voice.

“Ike?”

“Yo!  Sorry I’m late.  Got held up at work.”

So, look, I must admit: it was at that moment that I feared I’d completely misjudged Ike.  After all, you can’t fault a guy for his name.  And maybe it was just a typo, that he sincerely meant “meet” instead of “meat,” and perhaps he wasn’t a tool, and his brain wasn’t shiny and smooth like a recently buffed hardwood floor but was actually, in fact, lumpy, because I thought that was masterful play by Ike.  Simply by his salutation, he’d exuded an easy and outgoing nature while simultaneously suggesting that he was gainfully employed.  Not to mention, he left the ball in Des’ court for an easy-enough follow-up, one that even I’d picked up on.  Of course, Des, being the lovely and capable woman that she is, discerned it too.

“No worries,” she said.  “So, what do you do for work?”

As she asked this, the waitress appeared at their booth and asked for drink orders.  Des ordered a gin and tonic.  Simple.  Classy.  Ike ordered—well, I guess it’s more appropriate to say that Ike customized—a bushwacker.  He wanted it three-quarters full with a floater of peanut butter whiskey, three maraschino cherries, two muddled, one normal, and a jumbo straw.  I was expecting some blowback from the waitress, but, surprisingly, she only said that they didn’t have jumbo straws, only the bendy kind, to which Ike replied that he “fucking hated bendy straws” and that, screw it, he’d just raw-dog it, which I guess meant he was going to go straw-less?  An interesting development, but I didn’t really think anything of it.  Sure, everyone has his or her drink of choice, and I wasn’t going to begrudge Ike his, despite its containing 300% of his daily value of added sugars.  Not to mention, I was still feeling a bit guilty for having possibly so misread this man.  I needed to give him the benefit of the doubt.  I was wrestling with these competing thoughts when I realized the waitress had forgotten to ask me for my drink order, which was kind of annoying, but I didn’t have time to think about that because I heard Ike answering Des’ previous question.

“My dad’s an attorney,” he said.  Then he quickly added, realizing Des had asked what he, not his father, did: “But I’m a content creator.”

“A content creator.”

“Yeah, I’m on all of the platforms, but I mainly livestream.”

“Interesting,” Des said, sounding the least bit interested.

“Yeah, I just reached a thousand followers the other day,” Ike said.  “To celebrate the occasion, I streamed myself eating a gallon of water with a fork.”

“Wow.”

“Took me a little under an hour.”

“Mhmm.”

“But I know I can do it faster.  Got the technique down pat now, you know?”

Alright, so I did another 180 and was fully back on my original take.  The dude seemed like a total nut.  And poor Des, this went on for more than half an hour—multiple rounds of Ike bragging about his internet livestreams, Des mumbling a response, Ike not registering her complete disinterest and then proceeding to order another bushwacker.  He was really slurping them down—raw-dogging them, in his words—apparently impervious to brain freeze.  By my count, he was on his fifth.  Five bushwackers in under an hour!  Couldn’t imagine what his labs looked like, assuming he even went to the doctor, because he was surely toeing the line of pre-diabetes, if not already full-blown, and, speaking of toes, Ike, that’s where it starts, and then it’s the foot, sometimes even the whole fucking leg, and then, before you know it, you’re getting your gangrenous limbs lopped off, and you’re bedridden looking like a half-eaten rotisserie chicken, spending all of your money on a live-in nurse to take care of your apodal ass, not to mention the incessant stream of supplies needed to satisfy your addiction—the handles of rum, the bottles of coffee liqueur and crème de cacao, the jugs of milk.  Shit can get expensive.  I began to wonder whether should Des tell him this, or, Christ, should I?  Did we have a moral obligation to warn this man about the dangers of high blood sugar?

These thoughts were cut short, though, when a voice came over the speakers and announced that karaoke was starting, welcoming a Julian to the front stage.  I overheard Des say that she needed to hit the restroom, which, despite Ike’s festering presence, was a bit hasty on her part because it was right then that the unmistakably groovy intro of Steve Miller Band’s “Fly Like an Eagle” filled the Margaritaville.  Oh, she was going to regret missing this.  Anyway, after I’d seen her walk away, I did a little sneaky swivel in order to get a better look at our guy, Ike, who, remember, I hadn’t yet witnessed in the flesh.  And I sort of wished I hadn’t.  I could only see him from the torso up, but believe me when I tell you that he looked like an amalgamation of your stereotypical frat boy and an unformed mound of butter, or one of those blobfish things.  In other words: exactly—and sadly—what I’d expected.  See below for the picture I snagged:

Jesus Christ, he was so disgustingly pasty that I truly did consider asking him if everything was alright, if there was some profound sadness in him that, with each successive frozen cocktail, he was attempting to bury further and further beneath the frozen tundra of himself.  Subsisting solely off of bushwackers would do that to a man, I guessed.  But my brief moment of altruism was interrupted by Julian up front who, as it turned out, was showcasing a wicked speech disorder.

“TIME KEEPS ON SWIPPIN’ SWIPPIN’ SWIPPIN’, INTO DUH FOO-CHUHHH.”

I didn’t have time to process what was going on because Ike screamed that “this was his fucking jam” and jumped out of the booth and began to slowly gyrate his hips like a sumo wrestler with a hula hoop.  Now that I’d gotten the full view of him, I was actually quite impressed with his stamina, because he kept this up for the duration of the song, even joining in with Julian on the chorus, “I WANNA FWY WIKE AN EAGLE, TO DUH SEAAA…” and, afterwards, rushed up to the stage with his bushwacker to evidently sign up for the next song.  My God, where was Des?  I texted her that she needed to finish up whatever the fuck she was doing because things were moving fast as her date was about to karaoke his ass off.  There clearly wasn’t a strong hankering for karaoke at the Margaritaville that day, because Ike was up next and immediately took the stage.  Now, I know I’m losing credibility here, but at this point I almost did another 180 on our pal Ike, which was based solely off his song choice—“Eminence Front” by The Who.  But this, too, was short-lived because, for whatever reason, he refused to sing the words and was content with simply bobbing his fat head to the instrumental track and slowly rotating his hips like Jupiter on its planetary axis until the first chorus arrived, which is when he finally decided to sing, replacing the lyrics “it’s an eminence front” with “just put it in my butt.”  If you’ve ever heard the song, then you’ll know that this artful refrain could’ve been repeated nine times, but, thankfully, the Margaritaville manager stepped in by the sixth, grabbing the microphone from Ike and ushering him off the stage, which did not prove to be an easy task, as Ike had decided to start causing a scene, all 250-plus pounds of him, yelling that his dad was an attorney, that he had over a thousand followers on Twitch, that he wasn’t even drunk because he was only on his fifth bushwacker.  Baffled, I looked at my phone.  Still nothing from Des.

Long story short, the staff eventually had to get the police involved, and the last I saw of Ike was his being led away in handcuffs to the cheer of the Margaritaville patrons, which really ticked him off.  He was still yelling something as they packed him into the back of the squad car, which was like stuffing a mound of dough back into an already-popped Pillsbury roll.  Realizing the waitress had never taken my order, I got up from the booth and walked over to the bathroom hallway with the plan to ask someone to check on my friend in the ladies’ room.  Par for the course here, I imagined.  Well, I waited a few minutes for a woman to show up, and, when none did, I decided—against my better judgment—to poke my head in myself.  From where I stood, I couldn’t see anything, or anyone, so I bent down—again, against my better judgment—to look for Des’ shoes under the stalls, which was when I was startled by the manager who’d crept up behind me.  He demanded to know what I was doing, and as I fumbled around for an appropriate response, he cut me off and declared that he’d already been forced to remove one freak from the premises so what was one more?  I happily allowed him to escort me out of the back exit, conveniently located in the bathroom hallway, as I wondered what could’ve happened to Des.