What do you do?

B. You and your buddies are enjoying a few beers at the local pub. After a time, you decide to order some bar snacks. You ask for the bill and pay cash, telling the bartender you need change. But instead of returning you bills that would allow you to leave a reasonable tip, the bartender leaves you only a twenty, which, if you left it, would be a tip of nearly 35 percent.

How do you respond?

C. While visiting Phoenix on business, you stop in at your hotel bar. Monday Night Football is playing on the television, and your favorite team, the Houston Texans, is losing to the Arizona Cardinals. The bar’s clientele overwhelmingly favors the Cardinals, not surprisingly. A man seated beside you, assuming you too are a Cardinals fan, begins to speak to you. “It looks good for us,” he says. “With Al Simmons out with a hamstring injury, the Texans simply don’t have the backfield.”

What is the appropriate response?

D. Howie’s, your favorite bar, is always crowded on Thursday nights, and tonight is no exception. Entering, you notice there is only one available seat at the bar, and it happens to be beside a gorgeous brunette. As you make your way through the crowd, she looks up from her gin and tonic and flashes you a smile. But just as you are about to sit down, another man slides onto the stool. His greasy hair is slicked back and he wears a tight t-shirt bearing the logo of the band Styx; peeking out below the sleeve, you think you notice the bottom half of a swastika tattooed on his left bicep. He has an earring, coughs without covering his mouth, and is carrying a copy of Das Kapital, which he places on the bar, though he clearly has not read it and is just carrying it for show. The brunette is visibly disappointed by his arrival; she eyes you and shrugs, seductively, as if to say, “your move.”

What now?

E. It’s been a rough day. You lost your job, and then when you arrive home, seeking nothing more than consolation from your loving wife, she announces she is leaving you. It does not help that she is leaving you for Al Simmons, the Houston Texans’ star running back, who has fully recovered from that hamstring injury and is doing great. It also does not help that you have been describing him to your wife lately as “impressively lithe.” So now you’re at Howie’s, mad at the world, and you’re getting pretty drunk. Doug, the bartender, listens to the whole story. Not just nodding his head but really, truly listening. It’s nearing 2 a.m. and the place is beginning to empty out, and Doug goes down to the basement to change the kegs. There’s really nothing to lose, you think. there’s got to be at least two hundred dollars in the register, and probably more in the back. Howie’s always overcharged for drinks anyway. you sit tight. When Doug returns, he gives you that old Doug smile and asks, “Friend, what’ll it be?”

What do you do?

ANSWERS: A. Shoot him! B. Shoot him! C. Shoot him! D. Let him have the seat. In the grand scheme of things, it’s nothing. Another seat will open up, and you’ll avoid confrontation and feel good about yourself tomorrow. E. shoot him!

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This piece appears in Issue #4.5 of Whim. Order your copy here!

Reprimand
This most common of punishments, which carries no actual consequences, calls for House Ethics Committee members to take “a few days” to read aloud the representative’s infractions and “really lay into him.” It was implemented in 1842 to combat widespread perceptions of Congress as a bastion of inefficiency and grandstanding.

Comeuppance
The purpose of this punishment is to deprive the offending representative of some of the most wonderful perks of being an elected official, especially those that are considered extremely impressive and even attractive by those who don’t work on Capitol Hill. For example, the representative loses the right to refer to his or her workplace as “my chambers.” Also lost: the right to refer to his or her private parts as “my chambers.”

Banishment
Relieved of lawmaking duties over a long weekend, the representative is instructed to check into the Alexandria Radisson. If the representative asks for a king-size bed, the front desk clerk, who has been briefed in advance, offers his apologies that none are available, even though there are quite a few available.

Sweetbread Surprise
In this particularly devious punishment, the offending representative is invited to a party with all his friends. However, the representative is told that his best friend cannot make it. Champagne and sweetbreads are served. After a time, the party guests to begin to gossip and spread terrible rumors about the absent friend, at which point the representative joins in, at first reluctantly and then with considerable jollity. Just then the guests explain, to the representative’s horror, that the best friend has been there all along, and wheel out the corpse as a big band plays “I Got Rhythm.”

Telephone
In this humiliating exercise, the representative stands alone on the House floor as his colleagues are seated around him in the chamber. The House speaker whispers a sentence into the ear of the person sitting next to him, who in turn whispers it into the ear of the person sitting next to him, and so on, until it reaches the last person in the room, who then walks down to the House floor and “pantses” the representative.

Disappointment
Here, the representative is made to stand before an assemblage of moms. Opinions differ on how many moms should be present; when the House formally expressed Disappointment with Representative Stymie Hash in 1876, there were more than four hundred. The moms must repeatedly use the word “potential” and unfavorably compare the representative to other better-behaved representatives or, ideally, his or her older sibling in the Senate. This goes on for six hours, after which the representative does the dishes.

Talking-To
Often confused with Disappointment, this punishment dictates that the representative must be referred to as “Mister,” or, in the case of a female representative, “Young Lady.” Alternatively, the Ethics Committee members may elect to refer to the representative by his or her full name for the duration of the proceedings. If a representative lacks a middle name, or cannot afford one, one will be provided at government expense, though naturally it will not be a distinguished, euphonious middle name like Winston but something like Gippman or, in extreme cases, Ralph.

Expulsion
Frequently and erroneously considered the most severe punishment meted out by the House, this action requires a two-thirds vote. Permanently relieved of lawmaking duties, the representative is taken out onto the Capitol steps, blindfolded and given a satchel containing nothing but a copy of the Financial Times and a wrapped loaf of ciabatta. He is told to walk six thousand paces before removing the blindfold. When he removes it, he sees that he is not in downtown Washington, D.C., but deep in a densely wooded area, and that the bread is not ciabatta, but in fact olive loaf.

A Spanking
This humiliating, though rarely employed, punishment must take place in a public park during the lunch hour. The House speaker brings the paddle. It does not matter who brings the haddock.

September 12, 1957

Dear Diary,

I love my dog, Sandy. He licks my face. We play fetch.

This morning when I threw the bone into the street, Sandy ran to get it. Just then Mrs. Jenkins came around the corner in her Toyota and ran over Sandy. I called out but it was too late, and now Sandy is dead. I rushed to Mrs. Jenkins, who asked me to hold her Corona while she inspected the car. We cried out in shared agony when we saw that the fender had a slight dent. I can still see the passenger side mirror, which was a little askew. Tonight I will not sleep. Is there a heaven for car parts?

Tragically,
Joe

* * * * *

March 1, 1989

Dear Diary,

Every morning when I go out to get the paper I see my next door neighbor, Hal. I’ve always liked him. We chat about politics, lawn care and baseball. He likes the White Sox, but what can you do?

Well, tonight when I came home from work his driveway was crowded with police cars. People stood outside, craning their necks and muttering rumors, and when I finally waded up to the front door a cop told me the news: for years Hal had been hiding six young children in his basement, keeping them as costumed servants and never once letting them see the light of day. My heart sank and a lump rose in my throat: when Lily and I first moved to Austin we looked at that house and deemed it just out of our price range. And it is with an especial pang of remorse that I note that it was the basement we loved most of all. In its reasonably high ceilings, laundry facilities and half-bathroom we saw such potential! I remember thinking, “this is a place where we could be happy,” and I somehow doubt those kids made the most of it.

Is there no God?
Joe

* * * * *

June 18, 2009

Dear Diary,

Last night at 3 am the phone rang. It was my brother Robert. Before he spoke a deep sob came through the line, and immediately I knew: Mother was sick. The doctor said it was only a matter of days.

I hung up the phone and dialed the cable company. I had to call ten times before someone picked up. Mother has always had a phenomenal bundled cable package with Cable City, known as the Triple Crown: cable TV, phone, and high-speed Internet for only $19.99 a month. It’s unreal. She got the deal because she signed up with Cable City in its early days, and they never raised her rates. When I finally got an actual human being on the phone and explained the situation he said no, they couldn’t transfer the deal to me at the moment of Mother’s death. Those rates, he said, are simply no longer available. Her own flesh and blood! I offered to drive to the company’s offices right then to show photo documents proving my lineage, to no avail. Policy is policy, the man said, and I felt a coldness come over my body as I realized that the deal would die with her. It’s so unfair: she didn’t even know how to use the Internet!

Still paying $49.99,
Joe

It was a long train ride, and eventually, in one of the square states, he grew sleepy. As he drifted off, Pelbridge, a lifelong East coaster, recalled the prairie scene from Altini’s early roman à clef, American Frolic. That closing monologue! Today’s audiences, Pelbridge thought with some scorn, wouldn’t even register the echoes of Tennyson. As his eyelids grew heavy and he gazed out at the fields of rolling wheat, he envisioned buxom, modest Adelaide Marsh, the farmer’s daughter, naked beneath a distant windmill. Green eyes. If you knew Altini’s films – and Pelbridge knew them by heart – you knew his female characters were hardly mindless flesh objects, but ambitious women juggling professional and personal concerns, suffering but never complaining of double standards. “To strive, to seek, to find, and for God’s sake don’t stop.” He slept.

Pelbridge met Altini under a streetlight just outside Union Station. Altini looked bad: unshaven, tie crooked, underfed and unrested. Though he was only 56, these features seemed to confirm, to Pelbridge’s considerable regret, what the trade magazines said. He was washed up.

Once, Altini had been a great actor. At parties, he liked to boast of the time he stalled a ravenous blonde for three hours and forty-five minutes by reading aloud from Herman Melville’s Redburn. Only then did he “give her a yearly tune-up, rotate her tires and throw in a complimentary oil check,” as they say in the business. Altini was a romantic.

He was also a genius, his talents perfectly suited to the demands and fashions of his time, a time when a strong libido didn’t mean a short attention span, when couples would settle down for the evening with one of his plot-heavy films. It was San Fernando Valley legend that he had completed the outline for what would become Play-Doh Masochism at age fourteen. And the mid- to late-’70s saw a string of masterpieces that set the standard for adult filmmaking, culminating in the Lastrodoro’s Woman Wagon trilogy and, to a lesser degree, Forty-Eight Hours in Eileen Jacobson.

Pelbridge extended his hand, but Altini only stared off into the distance. “Just tell me one thing,” he said, as he led Pelbridge to a beat-up black sedan in the parking lot. “Why did you come here?”

“I want to make movies,” Pelbridge said.

In Altini’s laugh Pelbridge could hear both nostalgia and anger. “I used to make movies.”

* * *

Altini’s office was on the second story of a drab garage in a part of town that, even to Pelbridge the outsider, seemed very far away from the action. The sight of a single blanket flung on the room’s lone couch told Pelbridge that it was Altini’s home, too. One entire wall was covered with framed posters of his finest films. “It’s simply the law of supply and demand,” Altini said. “Once people wanted what I could give them. Now they don’t.”

“How’s LuAnne?” Pelbridge asked. Altini’s success and onetime stature in the adult film business meant the details of his personal life were widely known.

“She left me.”

Unsure how to respond, Pelbridge wandered around the room, stopping at a stack of typed papers, at least six inches tall, atop Altini’s desk. Altini explained that he was writing a movie for LuAnne, in spite of it all.

“There must be hundreds of scripts here,” Pelbridge said with awe.

“Just one,” Altini said.

* * *

What devastated Altini the most was that LuAnne, who was his third wife and had starred in almost all of his later films, had not only left him but continued to work. As the industry turned on him, she ran off with one of the pizza delivery outfits that had taken over the Valley.

“I want you to see something,” Altini said, popping in a DVD. A scraggly, long-haired man holding a pizza box knocked on the front door of a large suburban house. LuAnne answered, wearing overalls with no shirt underneath, the straps hooked around her bare shoulders. A glint of sunlight flickered on the gold wedding band on her left hand as she flipped her long blonde hair seductively. She told the man she hadn’t ordered a pizza, but when he shrugged and turned to go, she called out and asked, “What kind of pizza is it?”

“Sausage,” he said, turning. “Extra large.” When LuAnne licked her lips and beckoned the delivery man into the house with a slow wag of her index finger, Altini cringed.

Inside the house, LuAnne lifted the lid of the pizza box to find that it contained a plain cheese pizza with a hole cut out of the center.

“I thought you said this was a sausage pizza,” she said, raising an eyebrow. The delivery boy smirked.

“Enough!” cried Altini, switching off the TV. He paced the room. “So many unanswered questions!” Pelbridge kept quiet, his eyes fixed in awe and fear on the great man.

“What are the particulars of the marriage?” Altini thundered. “Is this happening on a lazy Sunday morning, or Tuesday at rush hour? The husband — is he having his appendix out? Is he stuck in traffic? Don’t you see, the answers matter.”

“Maybe he was on a business trip,” Pelbridge said timidly.

Altini, his face contorted in rage, slammed down a fist on his desk, knocking over his stack of pages, some of which floated to the floor.

“Nothing is explained!”

Altini poured them both a drink, but Pelbridge didn’t dare speak. After a time, Altini wandered out on to a small balcony that looked out on an empty lot and, in the distance, the lighted windows of buildings. Something, he felt, had gone out of the world. Inside, Pelbridge pushed in another DVD. In two minutes it was over, and above the faint hum of the blank screen he could hear the sound of Altini softly singing to himself, “Bom chicka wow wow, bom chicka wow wow.”

Below: The work of the Great Altini through the years.