A while back, somebody on TikTok asked people to share a fact about themselves that nobody would believe. So I told a story.
That video has now been watched over one million times. A casting director even reached out about putting me on a reality TV show. That part didn’t happen, which is probably best for everyone.
If you’d rather read it, here’s the whole thing. Including the part I left out, and what a million people had to say about it.
Here’s the first hard-to-believe fact: I used to be a private investigator.
If you’re still with me, here’s the second.
A woman hired us because she suspected her husband was cheating. He’d done it before. She handed us his address and basically said, “Have at it.”
So my partner and I parked down the street and watched the house. And watched. And watched. He never came outside.
After a while I started to wonder if we were staking out an empty house. So I told my partner to go knock on the door and make sure the guy was actually home.
He was halfway out of the truck before he turned around and asked the obvious question. “What am I supposed to say?”
There was a neighborhood close by with a street called Foxfire Drive. “Ask him where Foxfire Drive is,” I said.
So he did. The husband was very helpful about it. “Oh, you just missed it. Go back two turns.” My partner thanked him and walked off.
Apparently, we had woken him up.
That evening he got ready and left the house, and we had no idea where he was headed. So we followed him.
We started in Birmingham. We ended up in Nashville. That’s a two-hour drive no matter how you look at it, and we did the whole thing in two separate vehicles, swapping who was behind him so it would just look like traffic.
He pulled up at a friend’s house. Then a couple of lovely ladies showed up. Neither of them was his wife.
So I did what any reasonable professional would do. I went around back and climbed a tree.
From that tree I had a perfect view, and I got everything I needed on video. I’ll spare you the details. This is a family website.
Case closed. I climbed down, got in my truck, and felt pretty good about my life choices.
That’s when my partner looked over and said, “I dare you to go knock on the door and ask him where Foxfire Drive is.”
Now. I was a grown man. I was a professional on the clock. I had absolutely nothing left to prove.
But he dared me.
So I walked up and knocked. Nobody answered. I knocked again. Finally, one of the girls came to the door.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you know where Foxfire Drive is?”
She said she wasn’t from around here.
“Well, y’all are having a party or something, right? Could you ask somebody?”
So she turned around and hollered into the house, “Hey, where’s Foxfire Drive?”
And from somewhere in the back, I heard a man yell:
“Wait. Who’s there?”
And that’s where the video ends.
The part I left out
I’m going to be honest with you, since you came all the way over here.
I stopped the video right there on purpose. That was the bait. I was making a TikTok, and you don’t end a TikTok on the boring part.
Here’s what actually happened.
The man who yelled wasn’t our guy. It wasn’t the husband my partner had talked to earlier that day. It was the homeowner.
He walked up to the door, looked at me, and said he didn’t have a clue where Foxfire Drive was.
And we left.
That’s it. That’s the ending.
Did I want to press the issue? Of course not. I was a long way from home, standing on a stranger’s porch, asking for directions to a street in another state. I was not about to get shanked outside Nashville over a dare.
So I left a million people hanging. Not because the ending was too wild to tell, but because it was too boring to.
From the comments
A million views comes with a lot of comments. Three kinds kept showing up.
“Birmingham to Nashville in two hours? No way.”
This was the big one. A lot of you were shocked that we made that drive in two hours.
Fair. It wasn’t entirely true.
The real starting point was unincorporated Blount County. The real finish line was just south of Franklin, Tennessee. That one you can do in two hours.
But “I followed this guy from unincorporated Blount County to just south of Franklin” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. So I rounded. Storytellers round.
“Got the whole thing on video, huh?”
A lot of you had questions about what exactly I caught on camera.
I picked those words carefully for two reasons. First, my ten-year-old was sitting just off camera while I recorded, and nobody needed details. Second, I wanted to leave a little room for your imagination.
Your imagination went straight to the gutter. That’s on you, not me.
Once the comments started rolling in, I asked my son what he thought I meant. He said, “They were kissing.”
He was right. They kissed. I got a kiss on camera on the back deck. That’s the whole scandalous footage.
The ten-year-old read the story correctly. Several hundred adults did not.
“Wait, you climbed a TREE?”
One of the top comments was pure shock that I could climb a tree.
I CAN CLIMB A TREE. I WAS A NINJA.
Do I climb trees now, as a 42-year-old man? No. Could I? Absolutely. But as a 21-year-old private investigator, I did it kind of a lot, because of one simple truth about surveillance.
People don’t look up.
It’s easy to hide above someone. It’s a lot harder to hide on their front porch asking for directions to Foxfire Drive.
Now you know. I’m sorry. You’re welcome.
There’s always a story under the story.
If this one stuck with you, I’ll send the next one straight to your inbox.
More from the weird résumé: how a fingerprint examiner, a PI, a pizza manager, and a call center guy all turned out to be the same person in Nothing Was Wasted.