Nurse the Hate: The Josephine Baker Story

Electric Dave did a lot of drugs.  That can’t really be disputed.  He didn’t do “bad” drugs, or what was defined as “bad” drugs in this particular cultural moment.  In the mid 1980s he took a lot of heat for things that would make him the Mayor of Denver today.  He went “natural” at some point in the 1990s, which translated to him smoking garbage bags full of weed and eating heroic quantities of mushrooms weekly.  I don’t know if that was a good idea, but at least he stopped eating all the pills in his Mom’s medicine cabinet and creating random combinations of cold medicines and LSD.  All things considered; Electric Dave was doing OK.  He had maintained a job doing IT shit remotely from some logistics company that probably had no idea that their IT guy was shipping himself boutique weed strains from all over the Pacific Northwest under the heading of “pizza toppings” for the Red Baron Pizza Company.  I guess if everyone’s computer worked, no one really cared what Electric Dave was doing.

 

I hadn’t seen him since the start of the pandemic, but that wasn’t strange since the only place I normally saw him was at live shows.  Electric Dave went to any show that had a “far-out guitar player”, the strict definition of which I couldn’t fathom as some of the guitars players he felt were “far-out” I definitely didn’t think were “far-out”.  Then again, I wasn’t smoking garbage bags full of weed or doing heroic quantities of mushrooms like Electric Dave.  I saw him a couple weeks ago at Home Depot, which is the great equalizer in 2021.  You never know who you might see wandering around hopelessly looking for an obscure piece of hardware in Aisle 37 at a Home Depot. 

 

Dave had a shopping cart filled with all kinds of crazy shit.  There were metal drain pipes, spools of wire, 9 volt batteries, a leaf blower, and about six boxes of screws.  It was a bunch of random crap you can buy at Home Depot.  Hey Dave!  What’s up?  That’s a lot of stuff you got there…. That’s when Electric Dave gets into it.  He starts telling me about this project he’s been working on, and he’s been real busy, and this pandemic has been a real bummer, and he’s mostly just been home, and he hasn’t really seen anybody, and….

 

I think we can agree that the pandemic wasn’t good for certain people.  Too much isolation and time spent in your own head can lead one down some strange pathways.  Electric Dave, pretty loosely tethered to reality anyway, was not handed a favor spending a year all by himself working through all that weed and heroic quantities of mushrooms.  A restless mind is going to find something to do with all that time and lack of stimulation.  There in that Home Depot, in Aisle 37, Electric Dave laid it all out for me.  He was going to build a time machine to go back to 1925 and start up a sexual relationship with Josephine Baker in Paris.

 

Now you are probably in the same place that I am on this little project.  Let’s say that Electric Dave somehow solves the riddle of the time space continuum, a very large leap of faith considering his time machine is built from ordinary products at Home Depot and scrap lumber.  Even if he does somehow get to 1925, how the hell is he going to get to Paris and get in there with what was the biggest sex symbol of 1925?  Between you and me, Electric Dave is no looker.  So, for whatever reason, I focused in on this logistical hurdle and allowed for the willing suspension of disbelief on the time machine itself.  I think I got caught up in the excitement of possibility.

 

I asked Dave, “Hey man, so when you go back to 1925, how are you going to get to Paris?  It’s not like you can book a flight on United.  You’re going to have to take a train to New York and then get on a ship to cross the Atlantic.  Plus, you’re not going to have any money.  You can’t take a $20 bill from 2019 and pay for shit.  No one is going to take money from the future.  And you can’t wire yourself money from 2021 to 1925.”  We both sort of scrunched up our faces as we worked on that issue in our heads when Dave blurted out “Yeah well I can just buy old money at one of those stamp and coin shows at the Holiday Inn and stuff my pockets with that.”  Yeah…. That might work.  I had caught the fever by that point.  “Make sure and take a pocket French dictionary, because you can’t use Google translator.”   We both nodded our heads at this.

 

So now I’m thinking, if you build a time machine, why go to 1925?  You’re chipping yourself right in front of The Great Depression and World War II.  1925 sure wouldn’t be my first destination.  Electric Dave was focused though.  “Yeah man, I watched that Hemingway documentary and then I fell into a YouTube rabbit hole on Paris in the 1920s.  You know who Josephine Baker is?  You ever see Josephine Baker do The Banana Dance?  She’s hot as shit.  I really got obsessed man.  She’s awesome.  I start really checking her out and it turns out she’s bisexual too, so I figure I can have threesomes with hot burlesque dancer friends of hers.  It’s going to be killer man.”  He beamed a smile at me, a man more assured than any I had seen in a couple years.

 

Who am I to rain on someone’s dreams?  Electric Dave and I exchanged some more pleasantries, and I think I said “Hey, that’s great man… just great… really happy for you” or something like that.  We did that elbow bump thing you do now, and I went towards the yard care area looking for some ant killer.  Dave wheeled his cart towards hardware.  That was a couple weeks ago.  I haven’t seen him since, but I keep going on the internet looking at Josephine Baker from the 1920s.  I can’t wait until I see Electric Dave on one of those jittery 1920s film clips.