excerpt from “Lonesome Ballroom”
Madeline McDonnell | Lonesome Ballroom | Rescue Press | March 2025 | 222 Pages
I’d driven that stretch countless times. How had I never noticed the woman who switched on in the sky, dress stitched out of cold cathodes? How had I never seen the blue letters she sang—L-O-N-E-S-O-M-E B-A-L-L-R-O-O-M—the eighth notes that tumbled from her lips toward the door?
Anyway, I followed them.
Inside, the bar was black-and-white. The music was low and strange, an orchestra tuning up. Dust motes drifted, and the soundtrack shifted, an overture shimmering out of the static as a tall dark figure zoomed into view behind the bar.
Peekaboo hair. A frown fixed in place by femme fatale lipstick. I might have taken her for a vision out of Hollywood’s Golden Age had it not been for the t-shirt with its savagely scissored collar, some band name stretched illegible across the breast. Her dangly earrings had demanded the decapitation of two Barbie dolls. She looked at me, I opened my mouth—
“I got her, Lizzie.” A new tall, dark someone was beside me, smiling as if he’d been waiting. “She’ll have the usual,” this one said. I’d never seen him before.
But the barmaid was already shaking out an icy rhythm on a silver cylinder, shaking her head at me because the man— Goodman—was taking off the little screens of his glasses, looking me up and down, putting them back on and taking my hand, leading me in a tumbling two-step to his table. I was sitting on theater velour then, and he was introducing me to Jim, a ghosty Classics all-but-PhD defined by little but his lack of definition, he might have been twenty or forty, everyone called him Sunshine. And then Goodman was doing as a good Goodman should, taking his own seat, talking at me like he knew me. He was telling the one about his grandfather’s golden retriever—how Fluffernutter had saved little Goodman from drowning, swinging into the swimming hole on a vine she managed to clench between her teeth!—and the next thing I knew it was bar time. Then it was seven or three, it was five o’clock somewhere, it was the next night and the next. The past was crashing into the present because it was the next month already—it was September then November then March—it was Sunday, Monday—and Goodman was on a roll, talking Fluffernutter’s grandpup, Fluffermutter, talking Moby Dick or Maddux’s mastery of the outside corner—
The magnificence of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, and, to think, they were all white guys!—
The Marantz Model 2 tube amps built into his great-uncle’s great room, fucking sweet!—
Which meant the months had flipped to June, and it was Tuesday. Goodman was moving from great-uncle, to grandfather, to father again, and then he was telling another dog story.
Picture it: X in 1976. Picture a stately saltbox colonial—erected in 1776, painted avocado green two hundred years hence—where the Mrs.—oh the poor Mrs.!—still lives. Picture a picnic table, a pile of ransacked presents, smashed-in boxes and smushed cake.
Goodman turns nine today. You can just make him out at the far end of the lawn, standing, lifting something long.
It’s a rifle. And this is a story central to the Goodmanian canon, so soon that rifle will go off.
The suspense builds as the perspective moves closer, Goodman the younger growing taller… Picture his grass-stained sneakers, his mussed hair, his tiny hands trembling on the gun. He’s always wanted a rifle, so why are tears blurring his face even as it comes into focus? And what is that doomed form beside the fence? A buck? A doe? No, a dog.
Goodman raises the rifle, tears and snot streaming. A man’s voice screaming, “Do it, boy!”
Steady, steady… He aims, because he’s asked for this, hasn’t he? His fingers are numb and his hands are too small, his skin sticky, but somehow he—
I had come to the Lonesome Ballroom for this—this singular ideal discourse, this friendliness that didn’t require friendship, this conversation that was perfect precisely because it did not require me to speak. So why were Goodman and Sunshine swiveling, looking at me as if I had?
“Exactly,” Goodman answered. “My ninth birthday.”
Picture it. The dark forest that fringes the property, the blue triangles the trees draw upon the sky, the undergrowth that seems fashioned of shadow. Goodman follows his father, trains his eyes on the floating ghost of his old man’s t-shirt, tries to keep from his mind the other specters that lurk here, the specter they are bringing in now, the dog’s body bloody in his father’s arms, the tail hanging limp, or askew somehow, what’s different about it—? No! Don’t look, little Goodman… That climax has passed. Time to put the event away—slam the door, shut the drawer, etc.—the way all good Goodmen do.
But then Goodman trips and sees it: the tiny cross, two twined twigs. Then he sees another—and another—
“But don’t you get it?” Sunshine was talking as if I’d asked for clarification. “They’re graves, Betty.”
Goodman shook his head. “I can’t even tell you how many… Dad had killed Fluff’s parents, and Gramps had killed her grandparents—”
“Not Fluffernutter?” Sunshine said.
“Fucking Fluffernutter.” Goodman shook his head. “Please tell me some died of natural causes.”
“You know I’d love to, Sun. But I’m afraid—”
And I loved this, didn’t I, this friendliness that didn’t require friendship, this conversation that didn’t—
Again, Goodman and Sunshine swiveled their somber heads. They were right to, because I loved this, I swear, I totally, totally loved it, and, yes, I needed just this sort of distracting, ridiculous
story on the Tuesday in question, so why was I crying, “Come on!”?
More importantly, had Lizzie Barmaid heard?
8.
She was close enough, certainly. She was eyeing our empties, mouth ajar, tray balanced on one arm. I didn’t remember ever actually introducing myself to Lizzie, didn’t remember telling the barmaid about my tenuous tenure in what passed in X for an art world, though I must have, at some point, because there she always was, hovering stern and sudden above, everything she wasn’t asking me aloud blaring through her glare.
Could she get me another? And could I give her a break? Were these assholes actually making me cry? And what was I—Betty B. of the pseudo-venerable Snodgrass Gallery—doing here in the first place?
The truth was—
But no, I couldn’t say it to Lizzie’s face.
I could say this, though: “Come on, dude, seriously!”
I could say something Lizzie would appreciate: “That story is, like, right out of a Guy Greco movie.”
The heads swiveled once more.
“‘Cupper, you indigent fuck!’” Goodman said.
“‘You can take your ball, Dad. I don’t want your fucking ball,’” Sunshine answered.
Goodman now: “‘The briefcase was fireproof.’” Sunshine, gruffly: “‘That’s good.’”
“‘My ass wasn’t.’”
“‘That’s bad.’”
They laughed. Looked at me, looked at each other, laughed louder.
“I take it you’re not a Brutal/Sensitive fan, Betty?”
“Is it even out?”
“You’ve seen his other stuff, though? I mean, you have to have seen Sweatpoison?”
“Fatherfucker?”
I knew the titles. Indeed, I knew Guy Greco’s IMDB page as well as I knew which dress Sarah Smalls had worn to her most recent premiere, a frothy whip of tulle dyed the color of mint chocolate chip, its bodice embellished with paillettes, pearls, sequins, and seed beads, its semi-sweetheart neckline finished in—
Anyway, I knew it well.
I may even know it still.
9.
According to the Internet Movie Database, Guy Greco has no fewer than seven films in development. In his headshot, he wears his usual flannel, and—even within the wee-est telephonic screen—his sideburns seem inches long. His eyes manage to bug out as they narrow, so strenuous is his appraisal. It’s a relief to scroll through to the other images, to let Guy Greco turn his restive and captious gaze away. He is busy, after all. He is standing on the set of Men in Pain, extending a long stiff lens. Or he is obscuring his flannel with a scarf of camel cashmere, he is staring, disgusted, at the glassine hunk in his hand—the audience award he’s just picked up in Zurich or Utah or Dubai for Matt Eats a Sandwich. In the next frame, he is tuxedoed but still untamed, those sideburns sculpted into magnificent wildness, one arm struggling to drape itself about the massive shoulders of Jake Rock, the actor who has been with our own GG since well before The Woodsman, the short that started it all.
The Woodsman was shot not so many years before the Tuesday in question. Guy Greco had made the film for a first-semester MFA seminar, then submitted it to festivals on what he called an “anti-lark.” He knew it would win, and it did: it won Best Independent Mini-Feature at a festival or fifty; it won special praise (“Ballsy!”) for the seventeen straight minutes Jake Rock spends standing before a cracked mirror, shaving moss (“That’s right: moss!”) from his face; it won the notice of Popper Ashburnham, the powerful art-horror producer; and it won the artist formerly known as Greck his first job helming a feature.
Of course, by the Tuesday in question, Greck had disavowed that feature—Get Along Home, Betsy, Betsy—as “dickless schlock.” What was not to renounce? Guy Greco had not conceived its conceit (When a group of high-school football players invite the titular—not to mention virginal!—new girl to a weekend rager at a grizzly preserve, terror ensues… But who is responsible for the dead revelers: the bears, the boys, or Betsy!?). He had not scripted its script (“What big arms you have,” Betsy, Betsy coos to the presumed wide receiver in an early scene, “and they’re furry!”). But he had been “ballsier!” enough to close said schlock with an eight-minute single-take tracking shot—no edits! no cuts!—following a mystery character out of the depths of a windy cave; into the infrared woods; through a shootout between the alcoholic sheriff and a renegade tight end (Jake Rock, in a rare minor role); in and out of the burned-out shell of the team’s travel bus; over two barbed-wire fences; and, finally, to the lighted window of Betsy, Betsy’s cabin. Inside, Betsy, Betsy—played by who else but our own Sarah Smalls?—sits on a ratty couch, her large eyes closed, her neck erect, her hand moving languorously beneath her skirt. The camera thrusts in, out, in, as, through the crescendo of Betsy, Betsy’s moans, we discern another sound, a soft thlunk-thlunk-thlunking. The glass clouds. The cloud dissolves. Betsy, Betsy dissolves, ecstatic. Thlunk. Thlunk. The camera pans swiftly back, and we see an enormous grizzly bear—we’ve occupied his perspective all along!—thrusting his wet nose against the pane.
It was Guy Greco’s willingness “not just to enter the mind and body of a predator, but to reveal the soft longing within” that led Ashburnham to finance the former’s first big-budget foray as auteur, Brutal/Sensitive. On the Tuesday in question, B/S had been in theaters for two weeks. No, Goodman, no, Sunshine—please believe me, Lizzie!—I had not seen it. But I had seen Guy on my screen, shilling his soul—his words. “It’s weird to be here,” his beard said to a bendy, pompadoured late-night host. “I mean, this project is, like, me, you know? It’s not a product.”
As he spoke, he looked angrily at the camera. Which had me cutting to not so many years before, to a not so distant classroom at the U, to Guy Greco casting just that angry look at the series of shoeboxes I’d boldly titled Death and turned in for my Image and Communication critique, at the dolls’ clothes I’d painstakingly disarranged within. His sneer was so pure—you’d have thought his disgust would be canceled out by the pleasure he took in it, but instead it was elevated, enhanced.
“Is this, like, a comment on capitalism?” Guy Greco asked, as he examined my scrupulously reconstructed dressing rooms, which were not comments but memories, memorials, maybe. My grandmother, who’d died not so many days before, had taken me to such spaces throughout my stupid childhood. “I know. And that’s cool,” Guy said, “but, like, I don’t think it’s working? I mean, maybe if you privilege commenting over narrative content. But what’s the point? We’ve all read Judith Butler—gender performance, commodification, blah blah. But what’s the point if no one wants to look? If no one wants to keep looking, I mean… I’m sorry, but it’s a dressing room. Like, in a mall. Sure, I get it, we’re all empty, commerce is empty, we’re all complicit, but what’s your story?”
10.
Cut back to Tuesday. By which I mean cut ahead. To the Lonesome Ballroom, where, fine, fine, I was at very least crying out. Raising my voice at Goodman, in hopes that the hovering Lizzie Barmaid would hear. “So I haven’t seen Brutal/Sensitive!” I cried. “So what? I’ve seen enough of his ‘flicks’ to know that you just narrated the Guy Greco ur-scene. You know, the hero’s face goes hazy and he’s a kid again and his dad’s yelling at him to go ahead and bludgeon their pet parrot, or whatever. I swear there’s always some climactic dead animal…”
Goodman’s voice was mild. “I can’t think of one.”
“Well, there is the Komodo dragon in Bloodletting,” Sunshine said. “That’s kind of an esoteric example, though.”
“Shit. I stand corrected. Plus, I guess the pets do die at the beginning of Brutal/Sensitive. The dalmatian, the gecko… But that scene isn’t the climax.”
“Yeah, but she does kind of have a point if you’re counting Betsy, Betsy…”
“You gotta count Betsy!”
“And, I don’t know, the rabbit in Sweatpoison?”
“Oh yeah… And isn’t there a dog in Fatherfucker?”
“Two. Corgis, I think? Actually, doesn’t Rye Wrecko smother them on his eighteenth birthday?”
“Dude! That scene’s incredible!”
“But, like you said, it’s not the climax. I don’t know, though, do you think it presages the final sequence? With the ice cream truck? And the twelve-point buck?”
“Either way, it’s absurd!” The heads swiveled again. “I mean, what is that trope even about?”
Sunshine, whose all-but-dissertation considered “epic paratext” in Homer and Hesiod, was delighted I’d deferred to his expertise. “Oh,” he said, mouth rounded in faux-surprise, “it can be traced to the Odyssey, at least! The death of Argos? This is the dog who died when his master traveled out into the world…”
Actually, Sunshine, the Goodmanian rhetorical and Grecan cinematic weren’t the only canons with which I was familiar, so— had I come to the Lonesome Ballroom to speak—I might have reeled off the words that were reeling up from Classics 930, which I’d taken several some not so many years ago: If you could only see the dog as he was when Odysseus abandoned him… so strong and swift you’d be amazed…
Sunshine raised his translucent eyebrows at Goodman, who barked a laugh. As a voice—a wild, riled voice—a voice that was sliding toward stridence—went on, “But he himself nears death now that his master has perished…and the women are too careless to take care of him!”
Fine, fine: it was my voice. So shut up, Betty! You came here to listen, and you know what not to say, so why are you shouting out the answer before Sunshine can, blurting those old words up at Lizzie as if your fluency in the paaaaaaghst might do anything but condemn you? “Servants are always like that—”
Cue Ms. Barmaid! Who was taking matters, or at least empties, into her own hands, thlunk-thlunk-thlunking them onto her tray, eloquent eyes persisting:
Seriously, Betty, what are you doing here?
Don’t you have any other story to tell, or listen to, or live out?
“All right,” Goodman said, “okay, impressive, Bets, especially after, let’s see, four, five, six drinks! But you won’t show this guy up. Sunshine’s told you what his dad used to make him do, right?”
But Sunshine didn’t have to, because, ah, at last, Goodman was doing as a good Goodman should, he was telling me himself, and I loved this, I swear I loved this, loved hearing about sadistic Sunshine, Sr., the quizzes he’d give on Sunshine’s birthday—the first eleven lines from each of the major Western epics when he turned eleven, the first sixteen when he turned, etc.! Just as I loved the swift shift back from the arms and the man, from dogs and birds feasting on the bodies of heroes, to Goodman’s birthday party. He’s turning six this time and Goodman, Sr., has thrown the younger’s presents down the stairs and now he’s punching in the hall wall because, what, Lizzie? Don’t you love it? How can you not love it!? Come on, Lizzie! We don’t even have to listen, because we already know what he’s saying, know what story he sings, know that this latest Goodman’s wrath can be traced all the way to Goodman the First. And what could be more restful? We don’t have to listen to know that we’ve plunged back into the paaaaaaghst, that Goodman the First or Third or Fifty-third is searching a shantytown for a deranged war buddy or dilettante ward. That Goodman the Second, or Fourth, or Forty-second is kicking heroin with the help of a purehearted waitress.
Or committing suicide on the anniversary of his father’s death!
Or hitting for the cycle whilst contemplating social cycle theory!
Or wrapping a wounded blackbird in a bandana and gazing upon it with a tenderness he’s never shown his son!
We know that Goodman the Seventh is weeping over the fate of Goodman the Eighth—oh poor doomed Goodman the Eighth, that dead little brother! We know him—the talented one, the handsome one, the one who is, alas, drinking grain alcohol at seven a.m., and setting fire to the tenement, and coming this close to killing their poor mother, oh poor Mrs. Goodman, who has every excuse to get back in bed and never get up, except she’ll never do that because there are mouths to feed and sheets to wash and, well, she is just too tough.
And we know that Goodman the Ninth is scraping a flattened ear from the bottom of his field boot, or letting slip the secret of his second family, or ordering a lobotomy for his feeble-minded daughter, or flying his seventy-seventh sortie. We know that Goodman the Seventy-seventh has just made a staggering dagger shot, before fucking the lustful neighbor girl until she begs for more, before reading six different biographies of Castro, before climbing back over the sixteen-foot fence because he doesn’t want to leave the asylum!
We know the words.
We’ve heard them all night, we’ve heard those same words all our lives.
So what’s the harm, Lizzie? What’s the terrible harm in hearing that Goodman the Sixth or Twelfth or Googooplexian has forced his seven-year-old son to gut a deer dog donkey toucan polliwog, has traversed all of Stockholm in just his stocking feet whilst decrying his own fraudulence, has watched his best friend’s blasted hand fly—goodbye!—through the blue, has developed a necessary vaccine or unnecessary literary theory, or slit his wrists with a dull knife from the prep school refectory, or invented the cotton-gin group-shaving-machine artificial-brain-liver-heart, or decamped to an abandoned campsite in order to do so many drugs? I mean, sure, maybe we already know about his potential and his professional perils and his patents… Maybe we have always known and will ever know how horrifically hard it is to be some father’s son, but is it really so hard for us to sit quietly inside the story once more?
Lizzie?
Lizzie?
11.
I don’t remember when I found out she was a grad student in Media Studies at the institution that counted my alma mater as its archrival. I don’t remember when I learned she was writing her dissertation on Cindy Sherman and Chantal Akerman. I don’t remember when I
discovered just how much we had in common, just how comfortable I should have felt in Lizzie Barmaid’s presence.
It didn’t matter. Anyway, by that time, I was comfortable.
An Old Fashioned appeared before me. Sunshine got it, or Goodman. I never had to ask, let alone make my own way to the bar. I never even had to say hello.
But Lizzie said it. “Hello, Charles. Hello, James.” She was the only denizen of the Lonesome to call Goodman and Sunshine by their staid first names.
“Queen Elizabeth,” Goodman would answer, “I am but your servant, so far be it from me to offer counsel, but this delightful beverage should be stirred, not shaken!”
“Above my pay grade, Charlie.”
I could always feel Lizzie before I saw her. Before she’d so much as swiped her arm across the scarred wood she was required to wipe down, I’d feel my chin tilt, my lids drop. Through the fringe of my lashes, I’d see my gold face in my glass. I’d open my mouth, and hear the brisk kiss of her voice in place of my own. “Jimbo. Chuck.” She never said anything to me.
“Don’t mind Lizzie,” Sunshine said one night. “She’s not really friends with girls. You know the type, right?”
I made a scoff-like sound that meant I didn’t. It seemed unseemly to admit I was conversant in his rhetoric.
“She doesn’t mean anything by it. She might even like you!”
“It’s okay,” I said, and it was. By this time, I was comfortable with the discomfort Lizzie’s visits occasioned. I knew the rule: at Goodman’s table, there was room for only one of us.