‍ ‍Shots from the Cardinal Lounge

by Macaulay Woods

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. Over a mile into the woods on a long winding dirt and gravel road. My father built a house there on many acres of land. I was a city kid suddenly deposited in the country. No running water, no electricity. 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 stacks, she would bind them together 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 — we didn’t have enough stamps for those high ticket items.

But we did have enough for a Blue Royal Typewriter. And 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 magazines when we went into town. I never heard back.

I dreamed of being an actress first and taking a bus out to Hollywood, then modeling, then writing. I didn’t make it far when I left home. I never really had a workable plan. I wanted to go to Emerson College—but couldn’t afford it. 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. At 14 years old, a man saw my photo in the daily newspaper and claimed to be a photographer who was going to help me create a portfolio for Ford. He picked me up from high school by myself.

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

In 1982, I met a group of kids dressed like punks on a street corner at night in Worcester. I met Daniel. He was a painter, and H, also a painter. I decided to attend Worcester State College and was admitted into the English program. I wrote papers for other kids and would use the money for sundries. I was too young to understand how to get a job. One of the kids that I had met on the street moved into my dorm room. She didn’t have a place to go. So we kind of took care of each other, and she somehow got an apartment for us on the mean streets of Worcester — in the barrio over a place called Kartos’s Chinese Takeout 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. I remember the interior being red pleather booths, green pool tables and it was always dark and smoky inside even during the day.

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

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, uppers, downers, alcohol. The boys were at the gay bars every night. I was not much into drugs but drank alcohol, wrote poetry, wandered streets that were littered with bag ladies, hookers, condoms and despair taking mental pictures. I started writing poetry there 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 would listen to Joni Mitchell and the B-52s and Jesus Christ Superstar in that old run down kitchen. Smash china plates against the walls in the alley at night as a form of rebellion, dance to punk bands at Ralph’s Chadwick Square Diner, put on our long black trench coats and black converse high tops and ride bikes tandem at midnight down that hill on Pleasant Street into the city. H brought me home an old cast iron typewriter one day. We called our apartment on Pleasant Street The Factory 2 — after Warhol.

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. He convinced me to leave Worcester. 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. What was earlier novel and exciting became just — dangerous. H and I moved to another even worse place that looked like the Munster house. One that was embarrassing to call home in a more desolate part of Worcester. A creepy older guy from upstairs would come down to our apartment at night and play the spoons on his leg. The one time my family came to visit me there, I remember my mother crying as she left and passed an old Christmas tree still laying dumped in the hallway in June.

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

My beautiful friend Daniel was the first person who saw me clearly as an artist. He called himself “Frail Woman” and made furious charcoal sketches in his journal about angst and feeling worthless. His stepfather had brutalized him growing up. He painted a large African head on the wall of his bedroom on Pleasant Street, and another on my dark blue wall on Park Drive in Boston. He encouraged me to leave Worcester immediately and apply to Mass Art. I did.

I followed Daniel to Boston and moved in with him on Day Street in Jamaica Plain. The girl who drove out to Worcester and moved me to Boston so I could be closer to her got cold feet and broke up with me after we unpacked the van. She was a rich kid from New York at Simmons College. I think the gritty Hispanic neighborhood was a dose of reality she hadn’t intended to experience.

I enrolled at Mass Art for the first time in 1985 and took painting and film classes. I made films of floating white plastic bags in Kenmore Square, 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. 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 school in Mission Hill.

He was forced to quarantine, to get sober because of the medication. Daniel left and I found myself living with three male jazz musicians. I remember bolting myself into my room each night. One of them would watch me showering from the deck outside the bathroom. I felt lost again. 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 moved me to Boston was there. She tackled me and knocked me to the ground when she first saw me. My right clavicle broke. My painting arm. 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. My broken clavicle never healed properly because I continued to work landscaping at a country club in Brookline. I was 21 and already feeling like things were hopeless.

Daniel met a rich older man from New York who wore a ruby pinky ring. They lived together in a loft in Roxbury Crossing. Daniel looked like a Botticelli painting — six foot four, jet black hair, much thinner than he should have been, big black almond-shaped eyes, a beautiful smile. This older man introduced him to heroin.

Being with Daniel always felt like stepping into the 18th century. He came to visit me on my birthday when I was living in Truro on Pond Road, painting under the clothesline in the backyard summer sun. Big beautiful brown women’s bodies with red flowers to cover their nakedness. He rode an old weathered English bike to my cottage with a baguette, wildflowers, and wine bungeed to the bike rack. We went to Cold Storage beach and ate cheese and bread, smoked weed, read O’Hara, and watched the cold gray waves roll in.

We 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. He recounted his overdose stories to me. 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 a diagnosis of AIDS. It was early on and they treated him like he had the bubonic plague. We both were covered from head to toe in PPE. It was surreal to see my young handsome friend in this condition. We lost touch again because he moved home to Worcester when he could no longer care for himself.

Daniel died in his early twenties.

I attended a few painting classes before reapplying to college. I didn’t return to Mass Art until 1990. I submitted a series of paintings that I made while living in an old Victorian in Malden where I lived and worked with disabled adults. Large format oil canvases of naked cartoonish yellow people on red ground. I was admitted to the program with this body of work I call Slurs.

For Tony Oursler’s installation class, I made Fragility — a video projection onto a bed of dozens of eggs. In my sophomore year I built The Crisco Room. A white cube room. A pyramid of empty Crisco cans at the center. Pounds of grease covering the floor. My journal from Pleasant Street was at the apex. To reach it, spectators had to slide through the grease that I had trowled on to the floor. They did. In 1993 I created a series of work for the Inversions show which hung at the Gallery at the Piano Factory — oil stick and oil pastel, mostly. The night after the show closed I drove across the country to Los Angeles.

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