Shots from the Cardinal Lounge

I never knew that I wanted to be a painter when I was growing up. I knew that I wanted to make films and be a writer. When I was eleven years old, my family moved from Springfield, MA, up to Royalston, MA. My father built a house there on roughly twenty acres of land. It sat over a mile into the woods on a long, winding dirt and gravel road.

I was a city kid suddenly deposited into the country. No running water, no electricity. Only kerosene lamps to do my homework by. After grocery shopping each week, my mom patiently pasted S&H Green Stamps into books. When she had collected enough, she would stack them and bind them with elastic bands and take my brother and me to the store in Keene, NH, and tell us to pick out something for Christmas.

I remember being so excited. I wanted a guitar and a bicycle, but we didn’t have enough stamps for those high-ticket items. We did have enough for a blue Royal typewriter. I would sit in my room for hours every day after school and write. There wasn’t much else to do in the woods: no kids to play with, no toys or books, no television, so I started writing my own short stories and screenplays. I would send them out to Vogue magazine when we went into town. I never heard back.

I dreamed of taking a bus out to Hollywood and becoming an actress, then modeling, then writing. I never really had a workable plan and I didn’t make it far when I left home. I was a National Honor Society kid living in a turbulent home. Ford Models was interested in me. They told me to send more pictures.

A photographer saw my French Club photo in the daily newspaper when I was 14 years old and promised to help me create a portfolio for Ford. He picked me up from high school after class one day. I was alone with him for several hours in his studio, trying on tiny white bathing suits under the lights. He arranged flowers around my head and covered my lips in cadmium red lipstick.

I never made it to New York or Paris that year. I made it as far as the next big city, Worcester, MA and the 1980s punk scene. The Reagan years, the AIDS crisis.

In 1982, I met a group of kids dressed like punk rockers on a street corner one night in Worcester. I met Daniel. He was a painter and Red, also a painter. I decided to attend Worcester State College and was admitted into the English program.

I wrote term papers for other kids on that blue Royal typewriter from the S & H store and would use the money to buy sundries. Red moved into my dorm room because her parents kicked her out of her house and she didn’t have a place to go.

Red talked a man into renting us an apartment on a run down section of Pleasant Street that sat over a place called Kartos’s Chinese takeout. It was just next door to a dive bar called the Cardinal Lounge, where trans hookers played pinball alongside rough tradesmen.

At the Cardinal, you could drink cheaply. The interior was straight out of the 1950’s with red pleather booths, green velvet pool tables. It was always dark and smoky inside even during the day.

I moved with Red into that shotgun flat on Pleasant Street and dropped out of college. The other street kids followed. We created something together there in that slice of time and space that I would never forget.

We called our apartment The Factory 2—after Warhol. We were a group of gay teenagers, discarded by our families, trying to survive and live and be relevant. There were drugs of course: cocaine, black beauties, valium, alcohol. Red befriended a local drug dealer called Miss V who would sell her valium and cocaine. The boys were at the local disco every night doing poppers and tricking in random cars in the parking lot.

I was not much into doing drugs, but drank alcohol, wrote poetry, and wandered the streets taking mental pictures of our neighborhood littered with bag ladies, hookers, condoms, and despair. I started writing poetry in that squat. Something about that urban grit made me feel alive more than I can ever explain. The rawness of it, the poverty, no safety net anywhere for anyone. We were seventeen years old going on sixty with the things that we saw on the streets. We figured that we would all be dead by twenty-one.

Daniel moved to Boston at some point in 1984 to attend Mass Art. I visited him a few times in his apartment in Jamaica Plain, where he lived with several Berklee musicians from Brazil.

My ebony haired friend called himself “Frail Woman” and made furious charcoal sketches in his journal about angst and feeling worthless. His Polish stepfather had brutalized him growing up. Danny painted a large African head on the wall of his bedroom on Pleasant Street that overlooked the gritty streets below.

We listened to Joni Mitchell and the B-52s and Jesus Christ Superstar in that old run-down kitchen with the peeling vinyl floors. At night, we smashed china plates out back in the alley against the brick wall as a form of rebellion. Red and I put on our long black trench coats and black Converse high-tops, and rode bikes tandem at midnight down the hill on Pleasant Street into the city. We danced to punk bands at Ralph’s Chadwick Square Diner. We worked on apple farms bagging apples with convicts on a day release program and then found work at a pizza shop that lasted for a year.

One day, Red brought me home an old cast-iron typewriter that she found on the street and told me to “write the book.” The book about us.

By this point, the fabulous Club 244, or the Factory 2 as we called it, had spiraled into a drug den with sleazy adult predators from the Cardinal. Junkies and hookers were walking in and out of our apartment and stealing whatever they could find. They would crash in our beds. One of the women was found murdered in a dumpster behind the Cardinal. What was once initially novel and exciting became extremely dangerous.

Red and I moved to a run down property in a more desolate part of Worcester on Milton street that looked like the Munster house. I made my first painting there on the bedroom wall with all of her paints. A creepy old man from upstairs would come down to our apartment at night and play the spoons on his leg and snort cocaine.

Cocaine and heroin had taken hold of Worcester in the 1980s. AIDS was a national pandemic, kids still raged against Reagan in music and fashion, but there was a sadness in the air. By 1985, I was working as a landscaper by day and attending Clark University at night, studying film, philosophy and taking photography classes with artist Stephen DiRado.

Danny had left Worcester to attend art school. He encouraged me to leave Worcester immediately and apply to Mass Art. I did. I followed him to Boston and moved in to his apartment on Day Street in Jamaica Plain. I enrolled at Mass Art for the first time in 1985 and took painting, film, and photography classes with Abelardo Morell.

I made experimental films of films of Daniel in the shower on Day street. His long lanky frame covered in yellow and blue tempera paint that blended together under the water.

We smoked black hash in his kitchen and drank strong French roast coffee from a press. We read O’Hara and Plath and Sexton. We wrote lines of poetry at his kitchen table in our journals. The kitchen smelled like cumin and garlic and wine.

Then everything changed when Daniel contracted tuberculosis from one of the children he was working with at a pre-school in Mission Hill. He was forced to quarantine, and to get sober because of the medication. Daniel left JP and I found myself living with three male jazz musicians. One of them would watch me shower from the deck outside the bathroom. I remember bolting myself into my room each night against the sound of saxophone and classical guitar coming from the other side of the apartment.

Now 21, I was working odd jobs, coat check at Man Ray, a goth club in Cambridge, landscaping, printing someone else’s vacation pictures on a machine at Photoworld on Boylston street.

I attended a Simmons crew party on the Riverway and the girl who had help move me to Boston was there. When she first saw me, she tackled me and knocked me to the ground. My right clavicle broke. My painting arm was gone and I didn’t have insurance. I withdrew from Mass Art.

After Daniel left Day street, I moved to Park Drive Boston. I lived across the street from Aimee Mann and was going to see bands just about every night of the week. Jumping Jack Flash, The Channel, TT’s, The Rat, the 1270. The punk and new wave scenes were converging. I shaved the hair off half of my head at the same New Wave salon that Mann went to.

Daniel met a rich older man from New York who wore a hefty gold and ruby pinky ring. They lived together in a loft filled with art and antiques in Fort Hill. It suited him.

Being with Daniel always felt like stepping into the 18th century. He looked like a figure in a Botticelli painting. At six foot four, he was much thinner than he should have been but striking with big black almond-shaped eyes and gentle features.

One summer day, I was painting a figure of a woman adorned with red flowers in the backyard in Truro. Daniel rode up on to my cottage on an old weathered english bike with a baguette, wildflowers, and wine bungeed to his bike rack. We walked on Pond Road out to Cold Storage beach and ate cheese and bread, smoked weed, read O’Hara, and watched the cold gray waves roll in. A perfect day like Lou Reed said.

Daniel and I lost touch for a few years when he lived in Roxbury. The next time that I saw him was at Mass Art. We walked to the Boston Common and I made a video of him next to a fountain. The older man from New York city introduced him to heroin during our absence. He recounted his overdose stories to me like a right of passage. He said he had died several times and come back. He said he didn’t regret it.

Daniel struggled with his heroin addiction and contracted AIDS in his twenties. I visited him at Mass General Hospital when he received the terminal diagnosis. It was early on in the pandemic and they treated him like he had the bubonic plague. We both were covered from head to toe in yellow PPE. He looked emaciated. It was surreal to see my young handsome friend in this condition. We lost touch again. He moved home to Worcester when he could no longer care for himself.

Daniel died in his early twenties.

While the genuine raw freedom of living on a razor’s edge could have turned into the end of my story, as it did for so many other street kids at that time, living on Pleasant Street changed my world view. It was there in that barren apartment over the Chinese takeout place next door to the Cardinal Lounge where I was first exposed to working painters and poets creating art in a real lived experience against the backdrop of a tired city.

I didn’t return to Mass Art until 1990. I attended a few painting classes then made a series of large format oil canvases of cartoonish naked yellow people. I was admitted to the painting program with this body of work called Slurs. For my sophomore SIM thesis, I built an installation called The Crisco Room.

I trowled out many pounds of grease until it covered the gallery floor. The white cube room housed a pyramid of empty blue Crisco cans emblazoned with photos of red cherry pie. At the apex, was my journal from Pleasant Street, to read the journal, spectators had to slide through the thick gobs of grease melting under leko lights.

They did.

In 1993, I created a series of work for the Inversions group show which hung at The Gallery at the Piano Factory. The day after the show closed, I packed my car with the work and drove across country to Los Angeles.

©Macaulay Woods 2026, All rights reserved.