Stockton
For a die-hard fan, life's previous disappointments pale in comparison to losing his musical idol. New short fiction by J. M. C. Kane.
By J. M. C. Kane,
The Silver Legacy wasn’t a casino so much as a place where casinos came to feel tired. Gary Phelps had driven six hours from Bakersfield to be here, which was not unusual. He had driven farther for less. This was show number forty on the five-year reunion tour, and he’d missed only three—two for his mother’s funeral and one for a kidney scare that turned out to be nothing.
He found his spot at the bar where he could see the stage and ordered a club soda. He didn’t drink anymore. Linda had taken that from him when she left, or given it to him, depending on how you looked at it. Sobriety was the one thing in his life that had stuck.
The t-shirt he wore was older than his marriage had been. Columbus, 1974. An arena show, back when Denny Avalon could fill an arena. Gary had been fifteen, paper route money folded in his pocket, and when Denny came out for the encore and played “Carry You Home,” Gary had understood something about the size of his own life for the first time. How small it was. How the song made that okay. He’d bought the shirt at the merch table and gotten it signed in the parking lot afterward, Denny leaning out of a tour bus window with a Sharpie, laughing at something someone inside had said. The signature had faded to a gray smear decades ago, but Gary could still trace where it had been.
He didn’t wash the shirt. Hadn’t in years. Before each show he’d spray it with Febreze and let it hang in whatever motel bathroom he was using, and that was enough. Linda used to say it smelled like devotion gone sour. She’d said a lot of things. The kids had sided with her in the end, which felt fairer than he liked admitting, and after his brother died there wasn’t anyone left who still called just to hear his voice. For the last five years it had really just been the shirt, the drives, and Denny, and that had turned out to be enough. Better than enough, some days.
The room was half-full, which was better than Laughlin last month. Mostly women Gary’s age, a few older, the kind who remembered when Denny’s face had been on lunchboxes and bedroom walls. The men who came were usually husbands, dutiful and bored. Gary was neither. He was something else, something he’d stopped trying to name.
The first set went the way first sets went. Denny’s voice had thinned over the years, gone reedy in the upper register, but he knew how to work around it now. He told the same stories between songs—the time he’d met Elvis, the session musician who’d played on “Carry You Home” and later joined Fleetwood Mac, the night he’d gotten so drunk in Tulsa he’d played the whole show in his underwear. Gary knew the stories by heart. He mouthed some of the punchlines.
At intermission, Gary made his way toward the stage door where Denny usually came out to shake hands. This was the ritual. Forty shows, thirty-seven conversations of increasing length. Denny knew his name now, asked about his drive, remembered details Gary had mentioned months ago. Last time, in Reno, Denny had said, “You’re the most loyal person I’ve ever met.” Gary had thought about that sentence every day since. Linda had once told him loyalty was just stubbornness that learned how to apologize, but Denny hadn’t meant it like that. He’d meant it as a blessing. Gary had been happy to carry it around like one.
A few women had gathered near the door, clutching tour programs and old vinyl sleeves. Gary stood apart from them, not wanting to seem like that, though he was exactly like that. He watched the door.
When Denny came out, he looked grayer than he had three weeks ago. Tired in a way that went past tired. He signed the programs, posed for photos, made the small jokes that kept people moving. Then his eyes found Gary and something in his face softened. “My man,” he said. “Forty shows. You’re out of your mind, you know that?” “Probably,” Gary said.
He thought of correcting the record to thirty-seven shows, but before he or Denny could say more, a man appeared at his elbow. Mid-sixties, thin, carrying a manila envelope thick enough to matter. He didn’t look angry. That was the part Gary would remember later—how calm the man was, how ordinary, like someone returning a library book.
“Mr. Avalon,” the man said. “My name is Ted Kendrick. I’ve been trying to reach you for some years now. Letters, then emails, then Facebook comments.”
Denny’s face did something complicated. “I don’t—”
“I wrote ‘Carry You Home,’” the man said. “I sent you a demo tape in 1971. I have the registered mail receipt. I have affidavits from three people who heard me play it before you ever recorded it. I have the original cassette.” He held up the envelope, let the cassette slide out into his hand. “It’s all here.”
The women with their programs had stopped talking. Gary felt the floor shift beneath him, though it hadn’t moved.
“I don’t want money,” Ted Kendrick said. “I don’t want to sue you. I just want you to go back on that stage and tell the truth. Credit me. Promise never to play it again. That’s all. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
Denny’s mouth opened, closed. He looked at Gary, then away. He appeared to be having trouble swallowing. Gary moved toward him, holding out his club soda, but Denny suddenly turned and walked quickly toward one of those black domed trashcans. His head nearly swallowed inside the little chrome spring door as he vomited.
Gary winced and Denny pushed through a door marked STAFF ONLY, and disappeared. Ted Kendrick stood holding his envelope. The women drifted away, muttering, looking for somewhere to smoke. Gary didn’t move.
“You’re the one who comes to all the shows,” Ted said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry,” Ted said, and he sounded like he meant it. “I didn’t know there’d be someone like you.”
Gary thought Linda would have a field day with that line. He could almost see her sneer and had to blink it away.
He looked at the staff door. It stayed closed. From somewhere down the hallway came a sound that might have been more retching, or might have been the smoke-digester kicking on.
“Avalon’s not coming back out,” Ted said. “I can tell.”
“No.”
“I really am sorry. You seem like a decent man.”
Gary couldn’t think of anything to say to that. After a while, Ted Kendrick put the envelope under his arm and walked toward the exit, past the slot machines and the empty blackjack tables, and was gone.
Gary waited. He wasn’t sure what he was waiting for. The staff door didn’t open. An announcement came over the speakers: the second set would be delayed. Then, ten minutes later: the second set had been canceled. Refunds available at the bar in the form of drink tickets.
The women who’d been waiting came back, complained to each other, left. The bartender started putting chairs up on tables nearest the stage. Gary sat at the bar, then stood in the hallway until a security guard asked if he needed help finding the exit.
He drove to Stockton the next afternoon. He’d had the motel booked for a week—the tour was supposed to play three California dates, Stockton and Fresno and Sacramento, and he’d planned to see all of them. The Stockton show was at a converted movie theater downtown, the kind of place that hosted comedy nights and tribute bands. Gary had looked it up online. It seated four hundred.
He parked on the street and walked toward the entrance. The marquee still had Denny’s name on it, black letters on white plastic. But taped to the glass door was a printout on plain paper: DUE TO UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES, TONIGHT’S PERFORMANCE HAS BEEN CANCELED. ALL REMAINING TOUR DATES SUSPENDED. REFUNDS AVAILABLE AT POINT OF PURCHASE.
Gary read it twice. Then he read the marquee. Then he looked down at his shirt—the Columbus shirt, the faded signature, the smell of Febreze and fifty years.
There was a Smoker’s Outpost by the door, one of those plastic pillar things with sand in its belly. Gary pulled the shirt over his head. The evening air was cool on his chest, cooler than he’d expected. He looked at the shirt in his hands. He’d worn it to forty shows. He’d worn it to his mother’s funeral, under a blazer. He’d been wearing it the night Linda told him she was leaving, which was also the night she told him why.
He realized, standing there in front of the locked glass, that for five steady years he had known where he was going, where he’d sleep, what song would be waiting for him at the end of the drive. It wasn’t much of a life, maybe, but it was assembled, held together, something that could be pointed at. Fuck Linda and her disapproval—he had been happy in it, genuinely happy.
He draped the shirt over the Smoker’s Outpost, centering it so the faded signature faced the street—smoke ghosted through the thin fabric. Then he turned and walked back toward the motel, past the dark theater, past his parked car, his chest pale and bare in the last of the light.
The room was paid for through Friday. He had no reason to stay and no reason to leave. In the morning, he thought, he’d figure out which one mattered less.
J.M.C. Kane is an autistic writer from England, though now claimed by New Orleans, who has spent most of his adult life trying to fit long stories into short boxes. He has worked as a paperboy, a contracting executive, and an amateur cataloguer of human regret—none of which he was formally trained for. He was formally trained as a lawyer, but he is, frankly, a better cataloguer. His fiction has appeared in almost three-dozen journals that appreciate compression—and his willingness to obey word counts. Kane was Shortlisted for the 2025 Letter Review Prize for Short-Fiction, Shortlisted for 32nd Annual Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest (2025), Longlisted for the L’Esprit Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration, and has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His most recent work, “After the Cut” was published in Palisades Review in December 2025.