She was standing in the snow in her parka with a casserole dish wrapped in a dish towel and a thermos under her arm. Her cheeks were red with cold. Her stocking cap had a pompom on it that he had not noticed before.
"Tater tot hot dish," she said. "My mother's recipe. Cream of mushroom, not cream of chicken, because we're not animals. And coffee. You look like a man who lives on coffee."
"How did you even get in the building?"
"A security guard named Leon. I fixed the Pac-Man at his brother's bar." She held up the dish. "Are you going to let me in or am I going to eat this out here in front of God and the Lutherans?"
---
The booth was the size of a walk-in closet, lined with egg-crate foam and record crates and a hand-lettered sign that said NO JOURNEY, NO EXCEPTIONS, NO, NOT EVEN THAT ONE. Frankie sat on an upturned milk crate with the hot dish on her knees while Augie ate it straight from the pan with a plastic fork, between records, talking into the microphone in his low bored voice and then switching it off and becoming, as she watched, a different person: faster, warmer, more nervous, a man who laughed at his own jokes a half-second before he finished them.
At four, with a twelve-minute Hüsker Dü track on and the hot dish gone, he told her.
The Vestibules had been him, his cousin Dwight on drums and later kazoo, a kid named Terry Pohl on guitar who quit after two months to join the Navy, and a borrowed Farfisa organ that had belonged to Dwight's church. They were sixteen. They practiced in Augie's mother's basement in Roseville. They had written one song worth recording, and that song was "Lake Street Moon," and Augie had written it in an afternoon about a girl named Cheryl who worked at the Dairy Queen on Lake Street and did not know he was alive.
"Your uncle paid for it," Frankie said.
"Uncle Gus. He sold insurance. He thought we were the Beach Boys. He paid a place in Shakopee to press three hundred copies, and he took one to Big Jim Brekke at KTWN, because Big Jim was in his Kiwanis club, and Big Jim played it as a favor. For two weeks." Augie looked at the turntable, going around. "It was the best two weeks of my life. I'd hear it come on in the Rainbow Foods parking lot. I'd hear it at the pool. I'd walk around with my chest out like I was Paul McCartney."
"And then?"
"And then I grew up and heard it."
He told her the rest in a flat voice. How he'd gone to the U in 1978 and discovered punk and the Longhorn and the bands that played there, and how he'd understood, for the first time, that music could be sharp, could cut, could mean something besides a moon and a Dairy Queen. How he'd hidden "Lake Street Moon" in a drawer. And how, in the fall of 1979, a photocopied punk zine called Twin Cities Sludge had gotten hold of a copy from somewhere and run a review under the headline THE WORST RECORD EVER PRESSED IN THE STATE OF MINNESOTA.
"It got passed around," he said. "Parties. People would put it on as a dare. See if you could make it through the kazoo solo. Someone figured out it was me. People I respected would see me at the Longhorn and start singing it. Somebody spray-painted LAKE STREET MOON on my car. A guy I'd been trying to get to notice my record collection for six months called me 'Dairy Queen' to my face for a year." He shrugged, one shoulder. "So I decided I'd never be caught liking anything stupid again. If you only like the right things, nobody can laugh at you."
Frankie was quiet for a long time. The Hüsker Dü track churned toward its end, a wall of beautiful noise.
"That," she said finally, "is the saddest thing I have ever heard a man in a Hüsker Dü shirt say."