I remember a friend — well, kinda friend of a friend, just a guy that was a part of my friend group a long time ago — who, I didn’t know it at the time, but I found out a little bit later that he was an incessant liar and would just make up stories, constantly. He — I have no idea how much of this is true — he told me that he worked at the Van Andel Arena the big, like, arena theater venue in our town, and that he like would set up for concerts and shows and stuff and had to like go up into the rafters and like, hang from a harness, like with a harness on like you know, pulley systems and like move around to like plug in speakers and do all these really cool sorts of setup work things. But like way up high in the facility, which sounded really cool. I — maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. I dunno. But then because of that, he would say things that he saw or like people that he said he would see behind the scenes.
And I remember him saying like he saw The Rock ‘cause he was at, I don’t know what, maybe this is back in early 2000, so probably like he was a wrestler coming for like WWE or whatever at the arena. And he, and he convinced me, I mean, at the time — this is like pre-internet days or like, when early in the internet days, where you like didn’t have your phone to Google things, and so people tell you stuff and you just believe them unless you have real good evidence for not believing them — and he told me that The Rock was short like, five feet tall short, and that all of it’s just like camera trick angles and stuff that make him look like this huge dude on the screen, but he’s actually not that big. And at the time I was like, “Oh, huh, no kidding. That’s funny.” I didn’t watch WWE. I didn’t know anything about wrestling at all, or The Rock for that matter. So I had no real basis for questioning that as being fact, and just being like, “Huh, okay, no kidding. Weird. Why wouldn’t they just you know, tell him he’s too short to be a wrestler?” I don’t know.
I didn’t really think anything of it. I think, I think I repeated it to somebody else and they were like, “No, he’s not. He’s like, six something. He’s a huge dude.” Like, “Why would you think he’s a short guy?” Yeah, those are the days when you just kinda believed whatever people told you.
That guy also stole a bunch of my CDs. Not because he like took them from me. He was just like, “Can I borrow this? I’ll give it back some time” and then just like never saw him again in my life. So he’s got like, five of my CDs. Which just sucks.