Reply All - #79 Boy in Photo [Rebroadcast]

Episode Date: May 31, 2018

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From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm PJ Vote. Okay, so this week's episode has significantly worse language than usual. And not only bad language, there's bad behavior, there's bad judgment, there's very bad decisions. And it all starts with this picture. A guy named Grady told me about it. Can you describe the photo to me? It definitely looks like a shot on film.

It definitely looks like a teenager's bed. room, maybe like a college kid's dorm room. In the center of the frame, there is like an unmade twin bed, and there is a dude sitting on it, and he's got like baggy jeans and black skateboard shoes. The dude looks like a pudgy metal head. He's got long hair, goatee, glasses. He's clutching a miller light. He's on the left side of the bed.

On the right, all the way on the right, are these two really clean-cut girls. One of them's wearing a gap jacket. Like, they might as well be in a completely different room in the house because they're not looking at him at all. And he has just kind of like a keep it together, don't know what to do, but just, like, keep it together kind of look on his face. I first saw the picture a couple years ago,

and at the time, I didn't see what made it special. It looked ordinary. A picture you'd look at once and then immediately forget. You'd move on. Except, of course, That's not what happens when people look at this picture. It's not what happened to Grady. It is not at all what happened to me.

But we'll get to that. The photo first showed up on the internet in 2006, on a message board for music nerds called ILX. Somebody'd stumbled across it randomly, and they'd posted it just because they thought it was really funny. A picture of an awkward silence. But there's something else in this photo. The boy in the photo looked so lonely, so out of place.

If there was an entire nation dedicated to teenage longing, they'd put his face on the $100 bill. This username Roxy was the first one that posted it, and she included a caption that I think sort of hints at this. So not going to happen. So not going to happen. Meaning...

Meaning this poor guy is with these two women and maybe expects that it is a date or will have some kind of romantic outcome. But as observers of the photo, we can see that that's unlikely. I don't know. It's pretty mean. mean, I guess. Within minutes

of this thing being posted, kids on ILCs are tripping over each other to make jokes. Just picture pages and pages of black text on a white background. Everybody's trying to outdo each other. And lots of people are just imagining the dialogue between the boy and the girls on the bed. You know, look, just sell us

the weeds so we could leave. Another one. Don't let my skin condition fool you, ladies. But pretty quickly, they start to wonder, like, really wonder, what's going on in this picture. Someone's saying, what, like, what are they doing on his bed? How did this boy end up here with these girls? And then someone says, like, what if the bedrooms is one of the girls' bedrooms?

And then, like, Roxy posts, like, first of all, no one brings a purse into their own room. It's, like, pretty obvious. It's not a girl's room. There's a lot of theorizing, but it all comes down to basically one question. Who is this guy? And of course, there's no way to know. This is 2006. Facebook's barely a thing. There's no reverse image search. If you want to to stock somebody online, it's actually really hard. So it's surprising over the next few hours how much these ILX message board kids are actually able to figure out just by looking really closely at the photo. Here's another guy from the board, John. One of the details that someone seized upon was the window AC unit and that there was like duct tape and said, you know, well, this probably

isn't a dorm room, but it probably isn't mom's house because she would have central AC. It's probably someone's college apartment. They're able to carbon date the photo by using Photoshop to zoom in on a stray stack of DVD boxes piled on the dresser. There was a copy of Anchorman or Old School or something like that. And it's like, oh, okay, this isn't the 90s because those movies came out in the early odds. And then they pinned down the boy's location. He's wearing a Hooters t-shirt, but the t-shirt says Hooters King of Prussia. It's a suburb of Philly.

I actually grew up 15 minutes away from there, famous for the mall. Anyway, they've got his location. And so now they're like paleontologists, beholding the entire fossil of some new dinosaur. And, like paleontologists, they name their find. We all called that guy, Wayne. Why Wayne? I think he just looked like a Wayne.

Which, I don't know. Like, I think at some point someone started calling him Bill, and they're like, no, he's not a Bill. He's a Wayne. Over the course of that first evening, they overanalyze every possible detail around Wayne. The angle of Wayne's hand on his knee, the allegedly fake coach purse on the floor, the textbook with a paper bag cover, a weirdly controversial smudge that turns out to be a speakerwire, until finally it's like there's nothing left to zoom in on.

And it's then at 9 p.m. that Roxy, the person who first posted the photo and started the madness, she shows up and she tells them, I've cracked it. Roxy has found where the picture originally came from. It's somebody's personal webpage, and on that webpage, not only, is there the actual original picture? There are tons of other photos taken from the same night that the boy in the photo picture was taken.

I remember gasping. Like, I remember my jaw dropping and, like, gasping. That was just like, the best, shocking plot twist. So as the message board zooms out and sees the entire party that happened around Wayne, their feelings about Wayne starts to change. They're seeing all these pictures that Wayne isn't in. And what they're seeing in those pictures

is that all these other kids some of the people on the message board called them jocks some of them called them rednecks whatever they are they're all the same and Wayne's different like Wayne didn't look like he was friends of these people I think there was like another photograph of him

like Wayne was holding two cans of beer and someone called him the two beer queer and like the caption and it was like was that like an affection nickname for him or was like this guy really like the guy who just like hung out with them and like he really was like kicked around all the time

Like, was he friends of these guys? Somebody else on the board sums it up much more concisely. His friends seem like cunts. So up until this point, everything the message board has done is actually by today's standards almost normal. Like, they're just early adopters of a kind of judgy stalking that 10 years later is going to be pretty commonplace. Up until this point. First of all, the investigation, which at this point, remember, is only a few hours old, it ramps up. So picture a cop show.

The same way on cop shows, they always map out the criminal organization, they're trying to do this with just like a random group of teenagers. Center of the bulletin board is the boy in the photo, that picture of him sitting on the bed. They want to draw a map of everybody who knows that kid and everybody that those people know. And so the message board starts with this guy named Ryan. Ryan Deal. Ryan is a soldier who deployed to Iraq.

The party was actually his party. The website they found with all the photos also blowing. That really opened it up. They find this picture of Ryan where he's got a six-pack and he's jumping off a diving board. The important thing about Ryan is he's popular. These are not people that I would be friends with. So when they go to his MySpace, they can get all this other information about all these other people at the party. There's this guy Tansey, there's this guy Turnbull, and they've all got Myspaces,

and so they can look at all these guys's pictures just building their dossiers. They can see their messages to one another. They get the names of the two girls on the bed, Megan and Laurel. and another person brags about calling Laurel's mom to get more information about her daughter. But as invasive as they're willing to get, as far as they're willing to go, they never actually get closer to the person they really wanted to know about,

to the boy sitting on the bed. They learn just one more thing about him. They find it in some throwaway comment under a photo. Someone referred to him as that shade ball, Tommy loft us. Tommy Loftus. The boy in the photo has a name, which means that this boy who somehow accidentally somehow personified all of human longing for one moment at some house party, he actually exists.

But that is the one and only thing that they can find out about him. The thread doesn't die, though. For the next nine years, the message board keeps an eye on all Tommy's friends. Through Facebook, through Google searches, they watch everybody grow up. up. High school couples split. People get pregnant. People go bald. Some people move away. The board watches as all these things happen to all these minor characters. But Tommy, it's like he walked out of that party and disappeared. Grady says they never stopped looking for scraps of him. Even if just it was like, you know, one of his friends that had like

more loose privacy restrictions on their Facebook, like, had posted a picture of like, 2013 Tommy Loftus. That would have been like a big, big day on ILX. That would have been like huge, you know, but he really did kind of like fade out. Until January 2015, when the other side makes contact. Somebody signs up for ILX with the username Wayne's Crew 610. Wayne's Crew 610 writes a message. Message says basically, hello.

The whole time you were watching us, We were watching you. We knew about the thread, and so did Tommy. RIP Wayne. So everyone starts freaking out. Like, someone says, holy shit. And someone says, hi, Wayne's crew, 610. And someone says, wow.

And someone posts two exclamation points. And then I'm the first one to say, wait a minute, RIP Wayne. Wayne's crew 610 posts a photo. It's a new picture of Wayne. And it's like the first new picture of Wayne that we've seen, like, in years and years and years. and it's him at the beach.

The photo looks like it's taken on one of those last beach days he's still from early September. Wayne's wearing sunglasses and a backwards baseball hat. He looks happy. He's smiling at whoever's taking the photo. And above it, it says 1231-85 to 0312-14. And there's a quote from FDR, to reach a port, we must set sail.

Sail, not tie at an anchor, sail, not drift. And then at the bottom it says Tommy Loftus forever in our hearts. Delco's finest. It's a memorial photo. And along with it, Wayne's crew 610 post these screenshots from a long group message thread between all the guys that the board had been stalking for all these years. And they're saying, hey, remember that thread about us and Wayne? And that's when the people on the board realize how real all of this is.

A lot of people offered their condolences. And then he says, You guys are right Loftus was a great dude And us his friends are a bunch of cunts He was the kind of dude That would do anything for anyone And love to make people laugh

Often at his own expense He was obsessed with this thread And would call us up When there was a rather amusing comment Or a picture left on here We're sure he was just happy To be a source of entertainment For so many people

He was talented and caring And we're all lucky To call ourselves his friend And how What did you think of that? That was like, I might have even like started tearing up when I read that. It was like kind of the best possible thing that, you know, I mean, after finding out that he had died, this guy that we had kind of, you know, unnecessarily obsessed over. But like that post, that was like probably the best thing that you could, that you could hear that we were right, that this guy was a little bit different from his friends, but his friends loved him.

Were you ever able to find out how he died? No. Did you wonder about that? Yeah. I mean, because he's obviously pretty young. No, he was, what, 29? So I heard about this story. I thought it was interesting.

And I've been working on it for a few weeks when a new producer started at Replyal, Shruti Pidiminani. This was back in February 2015. And I sent her the thread, and she was like, hey, have you really looked at this memorial photo? So it's like a picture of a dude, like a really like dude capital D. He's like, what do you call that like hand position he's making with his hands?

He's like, yeah. And he has like sunglasses and a backwards baseball hat. Basically, it was way too spring break to be a real memorial image of someone. Shruthy said it's just it's got to be fake. Ergo, he didn't really die. Ergo his friends made this up. Ergo, this was a hoax. We'd found a death hoax.

Like, this was exciting. And so I emailed a bunch of Tommy's friends. I just said, I wanted to talk to them about Tommy and what had happened to him. One of them, Tansy, he writes me back and he just says, Tommy's dead. That's not enough for you? I felt so bad. And I would have stopped, maybe. But Truthy was like, no, no, no, no, no.

He's trying to get in your head. He's messing with you. because she's been doing research and she can't find an obituary. More importantly, she's convinced Tim, our executive producer. He is now fully a Tommy Truther. And Tim has a plan. He's like, well, we know that their friend Bill Wynens

is a bartender at this pub in Upper Darby called Collies. Why don't we just drive down to Pennsylvania? We can stay at your mom's house. We'll just go to the bar and ask him about this in person. So we go. Okay. So... We leave from New York, we cross the line in New Jersey,

we cross the line of Pennsylvania. Tim was in a great mood. He was really excited. All right, I'm taking a picture. But I just kept thinking, what if we're wrong and he is dead? Like, what a bad thing to get wrong. I feel so uncomfortable. Oh.

Tell me where we are. We're actually in the suburb that I grew up in. We're five minutes away from the pub where Bill Winan's works. I still just feels like a rock tumbler. Okay, so now we're driving through what... This is Route 3. This is the road. The road. It's Westchester Pike.

We're going to... It's coming right here on the left. It looks very, very Pennsylvania. Yeah, this is every street that I go on. Sharky's Wrangler. there's the something lube family wash day Eagle National Bank Busties Tavern

But we're going to pass it Chris's pizza, Cooley's Irish pub and restaurant Collies was the first floor of a brick building Nondescript Irish pub with a neon three-leaf clover in the window I wanted to vomit There's a biker gang There's not a biker gang Is there a biker gang? There's not a biker gang?

Oh, man, I'm like stopping an intersection out of anxiety. My body's like, you could go back. Okay. So, I'm turning this off. We promised Shruthi that no matter what happened in the bar, we tell her first. And so the next day, we called her. Hello. Hey.

Hold on. I'm going to bring the 10 minute, okay. Hello, Sruti. Hey. I've been distracted all day. Like, yeah, I feel like my brain is totally in upper derby. Okay. So, I'm trying to think where to even start.

Okay, so we drove, we drove down from New York to Upper Derby, and we went straight to Collies. We walked in at seven, and the hostess asked us, she was like, you can sit wherever you want. And, like, I started to walk towards the table, and Tim was like, PJ. And I was like, oh, actually, you know, We were just here to, is Bill working tonight? PJ, he's not expecting me, but I've been, I'm a journalist. I've been trying to. And she was like, okay.

And so she walked into the back. And then we were sitting there, and I was just like staring at Tim because I was scared to look anywhere else. And then Bill came out of the kitchen. Oh, my God. Hey, PJ. Yeah. And he was like, hey,

how can I help you? And I said, hi, I'm PJ Vote. I'm a technology journalist. And I'm working on this story about Tommy Loftus, and is there any way we could talk about it? And he was just like, yeah, yeah, we can talk about it. Can you come back in a couple hours? Oh, no. So we were like, okay.

So we went and ate something, and we came back at 825, and we get there. and he, he, like, he's like, give me just a minute, and then he comes out of the kitchen, and he's like, I called, like, a bunch of the other guys who are, like, involved in all this. They're just over at the other end of the bar. Oh, my God, they were all there? They were all there.

I mean, not all of them, but many of them were there. Like, there were a lot of faces that I recognized. I feel like I know exactly. Yeah. Were you scared at all? Were you like, they're going to beat the shit out of me now? We, we, we, there were, it went up and down, but definitely like the thought that we were just going to get our asses kicked was near the front of my head. So we get over there into the corner and there's a table.

So everybody's just kind of smoking and watching the hockey game that's above the table and four guys. You could totally recognize them from the website. They're more like extras in the photos, but we knew their names at this point. There's John Tansy, Bill Wynens. There's a guy who he really didn't want to use his name, but we'll call him Rupert. And did one of them admit to being Wayne's Crew 610 on the other threat? They're all Wayne's Crew 610. They share the login.

And everybody's just kind of hanging around and it's very awkward. But then like it kind of like the first engagements come in this sort of defensive. What the hell is going on? Yeah, absolutely. And we're explaining, like, listen, we're not from the message board. And then, like, this guy, John, who is actually one of the first people told PJ to fuck off over email. He buys me another beer, and then he gets, which I was like, oh, I don't want to be drinking. But it was sweet, you know, it was like nice.

He bought me a beer. Did he buy you a beer? Bought me a whiskey. Bop J. Whiskey. And then he comes with our drinks plus five shots of whiskey. And we all have a round of whiskey. This is like right in the first five minutes, right? So I was a little like, oh, fuck, we are in for a long night.

But also good, right? Because, like, they're going to talk. But wait, I mean, go, like a few steps back. Like, first of, like, I have so many questions. I mean, Tommy, is he alive? when we walked in, I was completely convinced he was alive. And then we started talking to them and like the realness of everything kind of sudden.

Like, Oh shit. Okay. They didn't even talk about Tommy for the first. That Tommy was the elephant in the room for half an hour? Yeah. And finally they said they'd talk about it, but we couldn't record. So Bill was like, he'd been quiet for a really long time.

And then he was just like, I don't understand what it is about that picture. He's like, you know, who has? has not had the party where your parents go away for the weekend of the shore and there's like you get to use the house and there's like one room and where everyone's drinking and there's one room where everybody's smoking and like a guy's up stared on a bed with some girls like I don't understand why these people were so fascinated and he's even like a little piss while he's saying it he's not like I don't understand he's like what's the big deal about that fucking picture it's like what like who hasn't seen a picture like that yeah like what are you gawking at I mean what did you guys say when

he said that. Rupert was like, well, it's iconic. Like, it's not that it's weird. It's that it's like a thing that everyone's experienced. So it feels like rich and you like put yourself into it. They said like, those guys made all these predictions about us. Rupert said like they, you know, they predicted that I was going to go to jail. I just got out of jail. Oh shit. And they and they were like, and they predicted deal was going to be the guy who got out of here and like deal got out of here and all this stuff. and then I think that like that's when we started talking about it right yeah so they said Tommy they said Tommy was the kind of guy like you know we'd be at a party and he'd like chug a whole bottle of maple syrup to like make people laugh and they said like their version of him that he was

like a loser was totally wrong like the reason he had that haircut was like a bet like it was like a bet to see him and this other kid, like, who could grow their hair the longest. Like, he was, like, a goofball. But, like, he was a goofball where, like, the joke was not on him. Uh-huh. And then finally, Tim said, like, do you mind if I ask, like, what happened? Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then, uh, uh, Rupert. Yeah. Rupert's not looking. He's looking up at the hockey game and he's smoking a cigarette. And he's speaking, like, in a very slow, heavy manner. He says, like, yeah. Yeah, like Tommy got into bad stuff. Basically, he was like, like, I don't want to get too much into it,

but he had substance abuse issues and his dad died and things got worse after that. And he said he found out that Tommy had died while he was in jail. And he was like, that was not a call that I enjoyed getting. Oh, shit. I feel like I can know him after researching the hell out of him. Obviously, like, I don't. But suddenly the whole thing feels so much more intrusive and disrespectful and, like, wrong. But so he, he dies.

What the hell makes them think of posting to the message board? I think they said that they had gone back a while after and just been surprised that it was still there. And they thought, like, because they had in the end gotten a kick out of the message board, it was like, we should tell these people, like, how this story ended, basically. Like, we should tell these people about the person. they were always so curious about. It's like the one place he kind of had celebrity almost. Yeah.

So then like, yeah, we went home. We woke up today and we felt like just like the frustration of feeling like we thought we were going to know more than we did. Like we thought we were going to get closer to this person, whether he was alive or he was dead. And so we just decided like we went to the cemetery, like his family plot. Ritter. Pickard, Sukato, Keo. Lindgren, Engel.

He's not buried there. So where is he buried? I don't think he's buried at all. What? Shut the fuck up. I think they're completely lying to us. No. Can I tell you some things that in retrospect do not end up?

Oh my God, I can't believe you did this to me. I feel like you just pranked to me, man. You've got to experience. All the somber tones and all this. Oh, my God. I feel totally like let on. up after the break, to reach a port, we must set sail. It should be right here.

Like right here. Riley. Riley. Loftus. Oh, yeah, there's straight up nothing. Boy in photo is not in ground. Boy walks among us, is my theory. We told Shruti the story of what happened when we went to the bar to meet Tommy's friends. But there was another version of that story.

And that version started the exact same way, with us walking into the bar and talking to the hostess. But he's not expecting me, but I'm a journalist. But the moment Bill came out of the kitchen, and we started seeing these clues that pointed to another version of what might have happened to Tommy. All right, tell me what are the clues? Okay, so first of all, when we first got to the bar and we talked to Bill, and we asked him, I said, I was like stammering and whatever. and then I said, Tommy Loftus, and he looked to his left, and he looked to his right, and then he smirked at us. And then he said, yeah, I can talk to you at 8.30.

And that smirk was... It was a quick little thing that, like, it's like there and gone like a summer day. And, like, when we came back to the bar, he was totally withdrawn and, like, somber-faced and whatever. Yeah. And then, fucking mastermind Timmy. Howard. At the end of the night, Tim goes, I was like, the in-memorium card had had a quote on it that I didn't recognize. And like to set sail, you have, you can't tie anchor, whatever.

And Rupert is like, oh, yeah, FDR. Yeah, he says, oh, yeah, yeah, FDR. Why? I'd never heard that quote. Why that quote? And he goes, Tommy was a staunch repatri, Republican. Huh? Yeah. What? Huh and what is exactly right. Because we're both a little drunk, but we both immediately are like, FDR was not a staunch

Republican. And, yeah, when we asked at one point somehow, we asked, when did he die? And it was like a lot of dates got said very quickly, and none of them were right. Tim was like, was it a couple years ago? and someone sort of half agreed with him, and then somebody else was like, 13 months ago, and then somebody said, yeah, last May.

The card says March. March 2014. No one forgets when their friend died last year, particularly off by a season. So we got off the phone with Ruthie, and then just to be 100% sure that we had this right, there's one other thing we realized we could check. The guys at the bar had said that before Tommy died,

he used to work at this local painting company. And it turns out that company had a very robust YouTube presence. And so we got on my mom's computer, and we watched this recruitment video that they'd published after the date that Tommy had supposedly died. For somebody who's nice and friendly... They wouldn't want to satisfy customers. In fact, my saying is hire nice and trained painted.

We have a full curriculum from customer service to prepping and painted. All the people that work for Noah painting are employees full-time. That's him. That's him. you clearly see Tommy. That's awesome. That's him. That's totally him. Tommy was alive.

I couldn't wait to talk to him. I had so many questions. Like, who are you? What do you think about this whole ridiculous thing? Are you anything like that kid in the photo? My mom, meanwhile, was watching me and Tim go crazy about a painting YouTube video in her living room. And she was like, wait, if he doesn't want to talk to you, why are you trying to talk to him? And everybody in my family felt this way,

including my dad, who almost never agrees with my mom about anything. And so they got in my head. I went back to New York, and just, like, for three months, all I wanted to do was avoid the story. I'd just suggest other stories that we could do. And Tim and Truthie would be like, what's going on with the boy in the photo? And finally, they won.

And me and Truthie went back to Philly. Taking it right here. 14. Oh, God, I'm so off here. It's here, I think. 33. That's it. When we first started researching him,

we turned up a lot of possible addresses for Thomas Loftus. But there was one right around the corner from the painting company. That seemed like it had to be his home. Let's just... I can pull up here. Yeah. It was a three-story Victorian on a quiet street. Shruthy went and checked out the neighborhood while I went to the house.

I sat in the car for a while just staring at it. Hey. My name's PJ Vote. Are you Tommy Lostis? Hi, my name's PJ Vote. Hey, Tommy? Hey, Tommy. I'm just PJ Vote. I've been trying to get in touch with you for over a year. Do you have a second to talk? In the driveway, I saw a nice sedan in a pickup truck,

and a little girl's bicycle tipped over on its side by the back steps. I walked up the porch to the front door, and then I saw it. Right next to the door I was knocking on, there was another door. Peering through it, I could see a male. box for an upstairs apartment. The letters were kind of scratch off, but I thought I could make out loftus. So Tommy lived upstairs, which meant the girl's bike, the nice car. They were probably as landlords. I stepped back off the porch into the yard, and I looked up. Every window on the second floor was closed. Every blind was pulled down. I just felt this sense of foreboding. The whole

time that I've been chasing Tommy, I've been telling myself that my story needed an ending, and it was going to be Tommy who got to tell it. But now I finally understood. Whatever had happened in Tommy's life, he didn't want to share it. He'd already told me what he wanted to say. And it was the same thing he told the message word people. Nothing. But then Shrthy got back in the car.

They don't live here anymore. Come on. We'd had an ending. Shruthi says, listen, here's what we're going to do. We're going to go around the corner. We're going to go to the paint company. We're going to try to catch Tommy as he gets off work. So a minute later we're there.

We're at the paint company. My heart's in my throat. We're getting out of the car. And there's these two women standing outside smoking a cigarette. And we ask him, hey, is Tommy around? And they're like, Tommy Loftus? Actually, he doesn't work here anymore. But you want his phone number?

Back in the car on a random residential block, I take out my phone, punching the number for the boy in the photo. My hands are shaking. Oh, shit. Show you a message. Hi, Tommy? Yes. Hey, this is PJ Vote.

I'm that reporter who's working on the story about the insane prank that you pulled on the message board. What was that? My name's PJ Vote. I'm a reporter. I talked to your friends a few months ago. I'm working on the story about the insane, hilarious message board prank. Oh, what for, uh, what was, I'm trying to think what the prank was. The thing where they were being dicks and then you, like,

You guys said that you had died? I can't really remember. Wait. Are you messing with me? I don't really recall what you're talking about or what's going on. Can I try to explain? It's like, I don't think it's like a funny story, not like a bad story. Do you have a sec?

I guess. Okay, so literally two years ago. I calmed down and I tried to give him the shortest version of a very long story. how I'd found out about the message board, how the message board found out about him. We ended up back at the beginning, and I tried to see if I could jog his memory about the photo itself.

So do you know about this picture? I have a vague memory. I think the picture of me with like two girls or something? Yes, sitting on like a mattress. Like you are just a normal kid wearing jeans and a hooter shirt. You're sitting at the edge of a bed.

And then there's these two girls who look like normal girls with blonde hair sitting next to you. And you're holding a beer and they're holding beer. Do I have long hair in the picture? Yeah. Okay, that was a while ago, man.

Okay. Do you remember even, like, is this high school? This has to be either high school or a year or two after high school. Got it. And do you remember, you don't remember, like, the party

or wherever that was? No. Back in those days, I went to a lot of parties. So Tommy said all the parties kind of learned together. But as I started telling about the message board, he said, oh, yeah, I think my friends actually showed me that. Like, they showed me to pitch.

They're like, oh, look at this. They think your name's Wayne. I'm like, oh, that's cool. You know, disregarded it completely. Did you feel anything about it? No, no. I was just like, all right, whatever. You know, it's people on the internet, you know, messing around, you know.

But you didn't. Did you know? that they were this obsessed? Absolutely not. Wow. Yeah. I was floored. It turned out the reason there was no trace of Tommy on the internet, it wasn't because he was hiding.

It was because, get this, he didn't care about the internet. I know. And his friends, they hadn't faked his death as some desperate rescue attempt to save him from cyberbullying. They'd done it because they thought it was funny. They only showed him the fake memorial. photo they cooked up afterwards. Well, they show me that picture. I'm like, I'm like, sure.

Sorry, I didn't mean to curse. Oh, you can curse. Okay. I was like, what the, you know? And I was like, Jesus, that escalated. And I guess my sense of humor is kind of like a, it's kind of dry and a dark dry humor.

So I got it right away. I was like, oh, that's funny. So it's like, because I think the only person that they could probably pass this off on would be me. I mean, I didn't care. So I was like, whatever, man, do whatever you want. Like anybody else would have been like, what are you doing telling strangers I'm dead?

And you were like, oh, that's kind of funny. Yeah, exactly. I wonder why his friends hadn't at least just told him that me and Tim had visited the bar. But Tommy said actually they texted him around then. He'd just forgotten to get back to them. I still wanted to know who Tommy had been back when the photo was taken. And at this point, all I really had to go on was what his friends had said. The impression I had from talking to the guys, and they were also saying that you died, so I don't know if this is Drew or not Drew.

But they were like, they kind of described you as like almost like a Chris Farley type. Like they were like, oh, he's the kind of guy. He would like drink a jug of maple syrup to make a girl laugh, basically. Yeah, that's pretty much how I was back then. Is that true? Did you drink a jug of maple syrup? Uh, it wasn't a jug. for some odd reason

I kept doing it at parties and then it became a saying and then it was like oh Jesus Christ that's who I kind of was too it's like you get the laugh but then you kind of have a stomach ache sometimes about the laugh

you're like I mean not from people start but you're just like I don't know if I want to keep getting this specific laugh yeah I was that kind of guy but Tommy said that not long after high school he stopped being that guy

it had a lot to do with this car accident he was in It was a rainy day and his brakes locked up. His car slid into a bus. The doctor said if Tommy were any taller, he would have been decapitated. Did you ever think about, I don't want to say what you're, like, did you ever think about that moment? It's sort of a dumb question for me. I guess what I meant was like, did your life feel differently afterwards?

Like, did you think like, yeah? Yeah, yeah. And the funny thing is that picture, that's another thing. Like I started trying to get back in his shape and stuff like that. So I don't look like that guy at all. Like, you know, I mean, I'm still the same height, obviously, but, you know, everything else about me is pretty much changed. You know, I got priorities.

My priorities are straight now. I got my partying out in my 20 is what I would like to say. Tommy says that picture. It's like a final snapshot of this person he used to be. He's cut back on his drinking. He doesn't really see the guys they hang out with in high school that much either. He's too busy trying to start his own painting company. I found myself asking Tommy questions that were like

the kind of questions you'd ask an old friend you'd just run into. I think I was just so relieved that things had turned out all right for him that he seemed like such a good dude. Even though I was a total stranger, we ended up talking on the phone for an hour. And at the end of it, I told him, by the way, I hope this isn't too weird, but I have a present for you. Yeah, I got you a hooter shirt from King of Prussia. Oh, wow.

That's funny. It gets the momentum, I guess. That's exactly what I meant it to be. All right. All right. Cool. I'm really glad you're alive. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I know. So am I. All right. Have a good one. All right. You too, be there. Bye. I checked the message board one last time this week,

and the thread's still going. Nobody there knows Tommy's alive. Wayne's Crucix 101 actually still shows up from time of time. always promising more Wayne photos, never delivering. The board's still waiting. Reply all associated by me, PJ Vote, and Alex Goldman. Our show is produced this week by Shruti Pinaminani, Fia Bannon, Chloe Prasinos, Damiano Marquetti, Catherine Wells, and Chris Neri.

Our executive producer is Tim Howard. We were edited by Peter Clowny, production assistants from Thane Faye. We were mixed by Rick Kwan. Special thanks this week to Sharina Ong, Emily Kennedy, Mark Slutsky, and Jorge Just. extra special thanks to Breakmaster Cylinder, who composed original scoring for this episode, and Nancy Warren, who provided free lodging for our reporters in the field.

Matt Lieber is a perfect Halloween costume. Our theme song is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder, and our ad music is by Build Buildings. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. You know what I mean? Like, I keep finding myself trying to come up with justifications for why it's okay to be paying attention to this, which is not something I'm used to doing.

The thing that drives you, the thing that drives me for sure is it's, these guys did a thing. That's a skating. That's where I learned how I skate. Sorry. I had my first cherry coke there. I love that that's a moment in your life. It was the best drink I've ever had in my life. We had this crazy, it was my first practice, and I was horrible at hockey, obviously.

and it was just some brutal coach who was like crossover backwards skating like blah blah blah and he wouldn't let us drink water and then practice ended and I had a dollar in my pocket and I went to the soda machine and I was like cherry coke I'll try that and it was like so cold and so refreshing and like it obviously should be drinking water but like it was the best drink I've ever had my life right there at the skateium I can't believe it's still there see this town's not all pain no that was the end of a story of lots of like all that is is like I stopped feeling pain after a while. I also choked on a hot dog there.

My coach's like, Peter, Peter, what? You can choke on a hot dog? This guy had a fucking DUI that was in the newspaper. It's like, yeah, I choked on a hot dog. It's not a choice I made.