They Call Me Baloney

In a quiet garage on an ordinary Saturday morning, Kevin Davis opens a forgotten box and finds a cassette tape he hasn’t seen in decades. Labeled in careful cursive by a girl he once knew, it’s more than music—it’s a doorway. And once it opens, there’s no closing it again.

Transported back to Stockton, California in the early 1980s, Kevin is seventeen—standing at the edge of the last summer that still felt infinite. It’s a world of Walkmans and mixtapes, of river days and late-night conversations, of friendships forged in heat and recklessness. Alongside Jimmy, Rick, and Dougie, he moves through a season that feels ordinary while it’s happening—but will prove anything but.

At the center of it all is Teppie—a girl who sees something in Kevin he hasn’t yet recognized in himself. Through her, and through the quiet rhythms of home shaped by his mother Joyce, Kevin begins to understand that identity isn’t built in grand moments, but in the accumulation of small ones: a song captured at just the right second, a promise kept, a choice made without realizing its weight.

But summers end. People change. And the distance between who we were and who we become can stretch farther than we ever expect.

Told with humor, warmth, and unflinching honesty, They Call Me Baloney is a deeply personal story about memory, music, and the moments that define us long after they’ve passed. It’s a reminder that the lives we think we’ve left behind are never really gone—they’re just waiting for the right moment to press play.