Part Three of “The Agreement,” a special Valentine’s Week series

When you write an essay about Road House every day for a month and a half and counting, you learn some wonderful things. As mentioned earlier, Sharing Husband is played by one Christopher Collins (no relation). What I did not know until a reader kindly brought it to my attention is that Mr. Collins was also a voice actor under the name Chris Latta. Not just any voice actor, either. The same guffawing bumpkin who asks “Ever seen a better pair a’ attitudes?” is the voice (screech? wail?) of Starscream from Transformers and Cobra Commander from G.I. Joe, two of the most distinctively abrasive villains in the entire pantheon of early-to-mid-Eighties boy-oriented action-figure commercials in children’s-entertainment form.

Cobra Commander in particular was for me the sound of an entire school of childhood villainy, and a very popular school at that: the chickenshit heel who looked much cooler than he actually was. (Skeletor is the other go-to here.) Any time I had access to a Cobra Commander action figure I felt behooved to swing in the opposite direction and make him competent and fearsome—the lack of respect shown him by his own goons, much less the Joe Team, bothered me that much. Anyone with a mask collection that rad, I reasoned, deserved better. Yet such was Latta’s skill in voicing the character that I maintained the same timbre to the best of my ability even as I substantially changed his skill set. This was not a voice you could shake so easily.

To be sure, the voice Latta/Collins provides for Sharing Husband is less distinctive and more easily imitated than Starscream or Cobra Commander (or the even more eardrum-annihilating D’Compose from Inhumanoids, the …And Justice for All to the other villains’ Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets). Latta also voiced some of the Simpsons characters during the cartoon’s first season; his Mr. Burns, an instantly recognizable voice that Harry Shearer was nonetheless able to recreate perfectly and play for the rest of the show’s 78-year run, is a creation closer to Sharing Husband’s mark. But learning that Collins was a voice actor by trade, rather than a stuntman as I’d assumed, made his marvelously cartoonish delivery of this scene’s central offer easier to contextualize.

“Tell you what,” he says to the Gawker as the man ogles Well-Endowed Wife and her pair a’ attitudes. “For twenty bucks…you can kiss ’em!”

The offer itself is a wonderfully dumb surprise, of course. It’s “Take my wife—please” with a pricetag. His subsequent repeated elaboration that this amounts to “ten a kiss” implies that either there’s a cheaper option on the table, like going to Subway and getting the six-inch instead of the foot-long, or perhaps that you save if you buy in bulk off the individual price of $15 per breast. The whole thing somehow manages to be both salacious and childish, like if the graffiti on the wall provided a number for neither a fuck nor a Buick, but the opportunity to “check out my weiner.”

But as you might expect from an actor with Collins’s bonafides, it’s all in the delivery. His eyes shine with twinkle straight out of Looney Tunes. A wolfish grin borrowed from Tex Avery spreads across his broad sweaty face. His eyebrows move with exaggerated Groucho Marx mischief. After being relatively deliberate with tell you what and for twenty bucks, he whips through you can kiss ’em in a pair of rapid up-and-down inflections, like if he says it fast and forcefully enough it can be fired directly into the brain of his mark, so he’ll think it was his own idea.

I make a lot of hay out of a lot of minor Road House moments, because they often communicate much more than intended. That isn’t the case here. This is a minor Road House moment that does exactly what the expert performer behind it set out to do, no more and no less. He wanted to seem funny, horny, eager, slightly stupid, and wholesomely sleazy. Unlike he perpetually failing Cobra Commander, he got what he wanted.