Before landing a role on Boy Meets World, Will Friedle lived a salacious life that predated his teenage years.

On a recent episode of Christine Taylor and David Lascher’s Hey Dude… The ’90s Called! podcast, Friedle opened up about his risqué childhood, telling the co-hosts that he was only 11 years old when he began taking the three-hour bus ride from Connecticut to Manhattan to audition for roles.

“I tell people my story and they think I’m lying or they think my parents had a serious problem,” he said, adding that his parents were busy attorneys when they allowed him to make the solo trips.

“I’d get off at Port Authority, and my manager would pick me up — most of the time — and I would walk the streets at 11 years old,” he said. “I started smoking at a very young age, so I would go and I would buy cigarettes.”

Friedle also admitted that he would buy porn magazines and sell them to his friends back at home for a higher price.

“I knew I could sell them for way more money to my friends back in Connecticut so I could jack up the price. So I would stop at the kiosk and they would look at me and say, ‘Well, you’re 11, so of course, here are cigarettes and porn,'” he said, to which Lascher joked, “This is like the dark Home Alone 2.”

According to Friedle, he has since come clean to his parents, who are “retroactively mortified that any of this ever happened.”

Despite this, he has no regrets over his rebellious experiences in the city.

“I loved it,” he said. “[Avon] was a wonderful place to grow up, but I experienced more real life in the three or four hours I was in New York City every week than I ever did in Avon. And it was a great way to see the world.”

That wasn’t the only surprising reveal to come from the podcast episode. Friedle, who played Eric Matthews on Boy Meets World, also admitted that he had to go on anxiety medication in between seasons of the beloved sitcom.

“You see one season I’m really, really thin, and then I come back, and I’ve put on like 30 pounds, and it’s because of the medication I had to take,” he said, before adding that everything was “different” after suffering his first panic attack in 1999.

He continued, “The colors are different; food tastes different; acting is different. You are a different person — human being than you were the nanosecond before you had the panic attack. And you’re different then for the rest of your life.”