Louis Fratino on Seagulls and Seamen Cassandra

Good friend Lou is repulsed by the Cassandras’ Mediterranean oatmeal recipe, preferring instead a garnish of freshly grated nutmeg (never pulverized). We settle our culinary differences with the painter while dining on “the Bushwick pizza of record” during a final night at his old studio. He walks us through his campaign against the Guggenheim, opening Grindr in Annapolis, sailors putting lube on an obelisk, leaving his house in Italy to his gayest niece in his will, getting called out for kicking his senile dog Margaret by a Baltimore light rail employee, his secret past as an RA, his new french-vanilla country-kitchen abode in Greenpoint, the squirrel nibbling on his bergamot, swimming laps at the Y, the letter his stalker mailed to his mother, the nasty toys boyfriend Tom (diddling off-mic) collects off the street, his crucial high school musical voice-crack, the bitchy painters in Delacroix’s journals, “dappling” a la Anne Carson, a dead pigeon portrait as ode to New York, the sophomore pressures precluding his solo show Morning, and what gay men have to do with the mud in the Chesapeake Bay.