At Black Sheets, I prepped the outbound mail, and then swept and mopped and scrubbed everything that needed sweeping, mopping, or scrubbing.

After work, I tacked up a few of my “I’ll do anything” flyers in four different laundromats, came home to pack a few peanut butter and vanilla frosting sandwiches, and walked to the Roxie for a double feature:

In Downstairs (1932), a wealthy family hires a new chauffeur, and he’s a cocksure charlatan who soon boffs the cook, seduces the butler’s bride, and blackmails the master’s wife.

John Gilbert, who also wrote the story, is all too believable as the cad. The script is gritty, grown-up, and offers wickedly keen observations on class, along with a few deliciously modern surprises. The only thing dated about Downstairs is a brief but moving monologue from the head butler about taking pride in one’s work.

When Ladies Meet (1933) starts off as a screwball comedy about high infidelity. Myrna Loy stars as an author whose next novel is about a woman having an affair with a married man, and coincidentally the author is having an affair with a married man. It’s a ribald, funny sex farce, until Myrna meets her lover’s wife.

At that point, the movie turns suddenly serious, a shift of mood and pace and point that can’t work, but does. Everything becomes so different, When Ladies Meet feel like a double feature all by itself. The conversation between wife and mistress is stirring, and it’s one of those rare old movies that’s such a masterpiece, I wonder why I’d never heard of it.

If you’re lucky enough to have a theater in your town that books this pre-Code series, Downstairs and When Ladies Meet are two movies not to be missed.

♦ ♦ ♦  

I don’t do much cooking, and at my old place in Berkeley, Judith kept the kitchen stocked with incidentals. That’s why I’ve had no salt & pepper in my room at the hotel.

Today, though, eggs were on special at Jose’s Produce, so I bought two dozen. And you can’t do eggs without salt & pepper, so I also bought one of those super-cheap disposable sets of cardboard shakers, manufactured by Morton.

Then I came home and microwaved an 8-egg cheese omelet, or at least I call it an omelet, but it’s just microwaved eggs. They get tall and fluffy.

I was ready for my delicious eggy dinner, but disaster struck. I unwrapped the salt & pepper to season my marvelous meal, but it was salt & salt — two shakers of salt.

The omelet was good, but not as good as it would’ve been with pepper. And I was annoyed, so after eating, I walked back to the store to trade Morton’s mistake for salt & pepper.

Calmly and politely I explained what had happened, but the clerk wouldn’t let me exchange it, because I hadn’t kept the receipt.

A receipt? I had opened the egg carton in the store, so I knew none were busted, and surely nothing could go wrong with a factory-filled salt & pepper set wrapped in plastic. I don’t keep the receipt for anything unless it’s a big-bucks purchase.

Why does the store need a receipt anyway? Is Morton gonna quibble over 79¢ when the store wants their money back? Most of this I said, first to the clerk, then to the manager, and also to some jerk working behind the meat counter who kept nosing into the conversation. The angrier I got, the softer I spoke, but the answer remained no.

Fuck you, you fuckers, but I didn’t say that on my way out. Already a plan was percolating, but I didn’t want to make myself too memorable.

There are four small and three big bodegas within very easy walking distance, and for 79¢ Jose’s has lost me as a customer. I will be back, though.

Instead of killing the roaches in my room, I’m now trapping them. It’s fairly easy, and I’ve done it before. You take an old, empty but not washed jar of peanut butter, and wrap strong tape around the mouth of the jar, making a short sticky walkway that leads to the PB residue. The scent of the peanut butter attracts the roaches, but the tape snags their tiny feet on the way to their supper.

My little homemade roach motel now sits next to the toaster, where the bread crumbs already attract roaches. In a few days, several will be stuck on the tape.

In the past, I’ve then microwaved the roaches, but this time they get to live. I’ll shake the captured cockroaches into a baggie, and discreetly deliver them to Jose’s Produce, somewhere near the meat counter.

As I was pushing the cart on the side streets toward Telegraph, there came a rustling in the bushes beside me. On reflex I turned to see what was the noise, and saw a middle-aged woman, crouching in the shrubs. Her pants were at her knees as she squatted and squirted, and my eyes were instinctively drawn toward the fountain.

These were the first woman’s pubic hairs I’d seen without having even the slightest sexual thoughts. Embarrassment was my only response — blame my mother and a guilty Christian upbringing.

There was nothing for me to be embarrassed about, though, and philosophically, nothing for that woman to be embarrassed about either. The scene I’d seen was as natural as birth and death and everything in between.

I said nothing, she said nothing, and onward I rolled the cart.

Maybe she didn’t know, maybe she didn’t care, but there is a public restroom at People’s Park, two blocks up the street.

♦ ♦ ♦  

In the afternoon, came a few minutes of easy conversation with a personable stranger, who seemed smiley and outgoing.

Personable, smiley, outgoing — I was pretty sure of the answer before asking, “Say, are you a salesman?” and he gave me a happy yes. He sells vacuum cleaners, he said, but he used to sell ‘hand-crafted’ jewelry at a table right here along Telegraph Avenue.

He said ‘hand-crafted’ with the tiniest smirk, so I asked, and he said, “I don’t even know, but it sure wasn’t hand-crafted by me.” A long-time suspicion, confirmed.

Our conversation was interrupted by a couple of potential customers looking at the fish, so I gave them my usual, very brief spiel, “All the fish come as both stickers and magnets.” I said it with my best fake smile, but after that I shut up and let them look. As usually happens, they walked away without buying anything.

The salesman-guy asked if that was really my pitch, and I gave him the truth. “I got this job because I know the fish-designer, not because I know sales.” I didn’t give voice to my next thought, that I could never be a salesman, and wouldn’t want to.

He nodded, because of course he’d already known I didn’t know what I was doing, and then a youngish couple approached the table, lookie-looing at the fish. “Do you mind?” the salesman/stranger asked me softly. I shrugged, sat back and watched.

“Howdy, folks,” he said, sounding sincerely nice, like someone not at all interested in selling anything. “My name’s Bob,” and within two minutes he’d sold ’em two Dali stickers and a Darwin magnet.

For which he earned no commission.

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The fish business was rained out today, sort of. It was drizzling when I woke up, the skies were completely clouded over, and the forecast was rain, so I called in dry.

Instead of BARTing to Berkeley, I walked through the rain to the Roxie, where they’re doing another series of movies from before the Hays code. Don’t tell Jay, but I’d actually been rooting for rain, because I wanted to see today’s triple feature.

The Hays Code? Yeah, that’s something maybe most folks don’t know about, so I’ll briefly ‘splain: When movies were still a relatively new thing, a group of prudes and politicians were demanding more purity and morality on the screen, and under threat of regulation by Congress, the film industry promised it would be prim and proper. Toward that stupid goal, they created the Hays Code, named for Will Hays, then-President of the MPAA (the job an equal schmuck, Jack Valenti, holds today).

The Code was enacted in 1933, promising that movie bad guys would always be caught, that depictions of any woman who enjoys sex would always include her comeuppance by the story’s end, etc. As a result, American films until the late 1960s were effectively sanitized, Disneyfied, reflecting a wholesome, idealized view of the world.

When movies are billed as “pre-Code,” they might have something darker, sexier, and less chaste going on than films from a few years later. I was hoping for less chaste.

Waterloo Bridge (1931) is about a chorus girl who’s out of work once the show she’s in closes, so she becomes a prostitute. She’s haunted by a melodramatic script, in which she meets a soldier boy who’s way, way too quick to say “I love you.”

It’s all cornball, and though it accumulates power and pull toward the end, it’s only OK. Best I can say about it is that it’s better than the Code-era remake with Vivian Leigh.

Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (1931) is scary and thoughtful, easily the best version of this oft-told tale of yet another mad scientist tinkering with things best left alone. Fredric March plays both halves of the title role, and he’s excellent, and his transformations from Jekyll to Hyde are genuinely frightful (you do know the story, right?).

From pretending to have read the novel in high school, I thought his transformations were really about alcoholism. That’s what I wrote in my book report, and the teacher didn’t tell me I was wrong. This film, though, has a different subtext. Doc’s fiancée won’t sleep with him, and her father won’t let them marry for another ten months, so he’s driven mad by sexual repression. So it’s a pre-Code movie where the plot is powered by a woman’s refusal to put out. If there’s a moral to the story, it’s lose your morals, ladies. And I like that.

That was my takeaway, at least, but perhaps my interpretation was influenced by being two rows away from a couple of pretty lesbians who were handsy with each other during the show.

The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) is in sharp two-strip Technicolor, and features fearless Fay Wray as a fast-talking gum-chewing wisecracking reporter. She’s quaintly amusing, but the movie is a workable diversion, nothing more. Or maybe my heart wasn’t in it. After Jekyll & Hyde and the lesbians (who left after the second show), almost anything would be a disappointment.

Was it a mistake to have stayed away from a day’s wages? Yeah, probably, but it wouldn’t have been such a big mistake if the movies would’ve been better.

I still recommend just about anything pre-Code, but I’ve seen a hundred of them, and apparently there isn’t an endless supply of truly terrific pre-Code movies.

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