This book is true, more or less.
More, in the ways that matter: the music, the summer, the river, the van, the boys, the name. The bacon on Saturday mornings. The twenty-foot phone cord. The mother who set paper plates like they were china and watched her son's friends eat and knew, somehow, exactly what each of them needed.
Less, in the ways that protect the people who didn't ask to be in a book. Names have been changed. Details have been shifted. The places where fiction and memory have traded roles are mine to keep.
Kevin Davis is me, as much as any character can be their creator. The story is his, which means it's mine, which means it belongs to anyone who has ever had a summer that changed them and spent the years since trying to understand exactly how.
The tape is real. It's in my garage. I'm not telling you what's on it. Some things belong to the moment they changed you.
This book is for my four children.
You are the reason I slowed down enough to write it.
This is who your father was, before he figured out how to be your father. He was a kid in a hot town with a Walkman and a list of chores and a group of friends who felt like the whole world. He was seventeen and in a hurry and he didn't slow down enough, and he has been making up for it ever since, one Saturday morning at a time.
Don't lose them, okay? The people who make your table feel full. The people who show up even when showing up is inconvenient. The ones who yell your name across a field like it means the world is still simple.
Don't lose them.
And when life gets complicated — when the kingdom cracks and the dam dissolves and the summer ends the way summers always end — press play.
There will always be something there to remind you.
Paul Blakemore
Stockton, California
"Nicknames aren't insults.
They're proof you belonged somewhere once."
— Kevin Davis, "They Call Me Baloney"