The Cops Raided my House this Week.

(Will's notes: The contents of this post, as well as the entire blogsite, are created solely for entertainment purposes and in no way constitute an admission of guilt. I also wish to state that generally speaking, I have nothing but the highest respect for all members of the Law Enforcement Community, and that in particular, the Tempe Police Officers who visited my house on Thursday, December the 6th conducted themselves quite admirably, given the circumstances.)

I keep odd hours.

Working 2 part time jobs plus this whole writing thing will do that to a guy, I suppose, but I can understand why my neighbors might find me a little off-putting at times. I hold no ill will towards anyone over what happened this week, except for myself and Kirk, who as usual, was at the center of the whole frigging mess.

Overall, it could have gone down a lot worse. The kids were all in school, and nobody got hurt, so there's that. Still, I could have done without having the guns pointed in my face, and getting blinded by several 4,100 lumens "stunner" maglights. It was only for a few seconds, granted, but I really thought I was too old to get caught up in these kind of shenanigans.

Let me backtrack a bit. About a month ago, I had a lot of fun chronicling a few drug-fueled misadventures of a guy named Kirk Moufe. If you missed them, just backtrack a few pages. While I'll admit that I might have taken some artistic license with a few of the details, Kirk (obviously a nomme de guerre) is in fact a very real person with very real demons, and he's also like a brother to me. I love the guy to death.

The truth of the earlier stories was that Kirk did manage to get himself into some troubles with John Law, and he decided to lam it, rather than face jail time.

That's when things got a little weird. He made it about as far as Durango Colorado, when, while stopping for gas, he decided to stop at an Indian Casino just off the freeway. As Kirk relayed the story to me, he and a couple of the folks that he'd been traveling with got bit by the gambling bug as soon as they saw the giant electric casino billboard poking through the trees. Kirk, having about $60 dollars to his name at the time, started out at a $5 dollar blackjack table, and lost all but 7 dollars in the space of 15 minutes. He left, dejected and got a beer from the bar. Which, minus the tip, left him a total of 2 bits. The bartender paid him his change in quarters, which Surprise - surprise! one could use for the video poker games, if one were so inclined. Kirk, with little else to lose, was so inclined.

Much of how the next few hours transpired are debatable, but the fact is, somehow Kirk Moufe ended up leaving the casino with just over $9,000 that night. For once in his life, Kirk decided to quit while he was ahead, and he and his traveling party hit the road just past midnight with their tires squealing at about a hundred miles an hour, and drove until they were as far the fuck away from the casino as possible.

If only he had maintained that "quit while you're ahaead" mindset.

But, Kirk decided to come back to Phoenix instead and hire a lawyer. That was the stated plan anyway, when he showed up at my door about a month ago, and could I lend him my couch to crash on, by the way? Only for a couple of days of course, while he found himself a lawyer and got this whole situation figured out.

For those of you not in the know, up until his most recent extralegal escapades, Kirk Moufe had been living on my couch for the better part of a year. In fact, if you look close enough at the upholstery, on my sectional there's a vague but discernible alteration in the fabric in one spot; a silhouette of a grown man in repose, just a shade lighter than the rest of the couch. I never knew a person could just sit still like that, and do nothing, and yet still get into so much fucking trouble, over and over again.

Of course I said he could crash on my couch.

"Only for a few days, dude. I swear."

Right.

That was about a month ago. Kirk wanted to celebrate his big win by taking everybody out to Ruth's Chris Steakhouse. "Everybody", in this case meaning our extended clan, about 40 or so people once you get to counting kids, and stepkids, and significant others. We went out to a nice pizza joint instead. He bought a couple more takeout dinners and some couch covers and a few DVDs for the kids and I started to get nervous, but when I brought up the whole lawyer thing he said he was handling it, no problem. This was about a month ago.

After the first week or so, he cooled off with buying stuff, at least that I could see and I started to relax. He wasn't really doing a whole lot, but other than the kids not being able to use the PS3 downstairs it's never been a big deal for him to crash here. Then a few days ago, he came up to me and said he was going to turn himself in, after all.

I asked him about the lawyer, and he said he was broke. Actually, he said "I fucked up, man."

Kirk had started using again. I was angry, mostly because it meant that he had taken hard, dangerous drugs somewhere in the vicinity of my house, where my kids live and stuff. But again, I should have known on some level what was going on. The truth is I turned a blind eye to his problems because I was always busy with something - one job or another, one deadline or another, four kids, my relationship with Cassie, all that stuff, that real life grownup stuff - and it was just easier to look at Kirk on the couch and figure he was just being a lazy ass. I should have taken a closer look.

I got a call the next day from Buzzard's girlfriend (Buzzard was one of the other guys involved in the original trouble) saying the cops had just stormed into her house and dragged him off. They knew the guys were back in town, somehow. I'm not one for histrionics, but at that moment, I felt like there was some sort of invisible net just fucking hovering over my house. I relayed the message to Kirk, and he made a couple of calls. As it turned out, the cops had stopped by a few other places looking for him.

"What do you want to do?" I asked him.

"Dude, I can't go straight to jail like this. I need to go into detox," he said. Seeing as how he'd managed to blow close to 10 grand in a month on hard drugs, I saw no reason to dispute this.

So I decided to call a few churches. Then I remembered Kirk was Jewish. So, we found a Synagogue (I'm not sure if you're supposed to capitalize the "S" or not, but moving on) and they said they could get him someplace the following morning at 8:30

All Kirk had to do was wake up, and make one phone call, and they would come and get him. This was Thursday the 6th. I had a job to do that morning at 4 am, a short commercial gig that would only take a few hours. I left at 3:30 or so, and Kirk was staked out in his usual position on the couch. I was home by 7. I woke Kirk up, and said "Make the call."

He said, "Yeah, no problem." And then he went back to sleep.

I went upstairs. Cassie was on her way out, to take the kids to school and go off to work herself. I kissed her goodbye and laid down to take a short nap myself, as I had another job to do right around 1 in the afternoon. She came back up and said Kirk was sleeping. I told her to wake him up before she left, which she did.

I woke up at exactly 10:22 . I know this because I thought an earthquake was happening and so naturally the first thing I did was check my phone. Kirk was standing in the doorway to my bedroom and I could hear my dogs downstairs going berzerk.

"The cops are downstairs," Kirk said.

Did I mention the earthquake? I should mention it again, because it felt like my whole house was going to fall apart any second. I'm surprised chunks of plaster weren't raining down from the ceiling. Kirk locked himself in the upstairs bathroom without another word and turned on the shower. I cursed, and then I put on a pair of pants and went downstairs.

The front of my house has a big bay window that looks out to the whole neighborhood, but I usually keep the blinds down so the dogs don't go nuts every time somebody walks by. Even through the blinds, I could see about a half dozen guys in blue suits all lined up.

"TEMPE POLICE!!! OPEN THIS FRONT DOOR NOW!!!"

I tried not to sound like I was yelling back to them, but at the same time I didn't want to be misunderstood. "You're going to have to wait a minute," I said, "while I put my dogs in their kennel."

"KIRK MOUFE!!! OPEN THIS DOOR NOW OR WE'RE GOING TO KNOCK IT DOWN!!!"

I got right up on the other side of my front door. Perhaps for emphasis (I'm just guessing), one of them thumped it with that bazooka thingie and it jumped in its hinges. "Listen," I called out "I'm not Kirk Moufe. My name is Will Millar, and this is my house. I just want to put my dogs away, so nobody gets hurt."

"DO YOU HAVE ANY ID?!!!"

"No," I said. "I mean, it's upstairs in my room. I can get it, do you want me to, like, slip it through the door or something?"

The door thumped again. "KIRK MOUFE!!! COME OUT OF THIS HOUSE NOW OR WE'RE COMING IN!!!"

"Hang on," I shouted back. And: "Could we just take a second and talk about this?"

Another thump.

"Okay, listen. I am not Kirk Moufe. I am going to put my dogs away, and then I am going to open this door," I said. "My hands will be on top of my head, and you'll have no problem with me."

"IS KIRK MOUFE IN THERE?!!!"

I heard the guy, but I just couldn't bring myself to answer that question. "I didn't quite catch that," I said, "but I'm putting my dogs away. Then I'm going to get my ID, and then I'm going to open this door."

The door thumped again, but it was kind of a half-hearted sorta thump, not like the others. I put the dogs in their kennels, and then I went upstairs and got my Driver's License. I used it to jimmy open the bathroom door. Kirk was in the shower. "I'm letting them in man," I said. "I don't have a choice."

Kirk said that was alright.

By the time I got back downstairs the cops had revved themselves back up again, and we had ourselves another exchange at the door that I won't go into. When I opened the door I was looking down the barrel of several different types of handguns, all of them pretty much trained on my face.

"Did you put your dogs away?" One of them asked. I did. "You're not hiding a dog somewhere in here, because we don't want to shoot you or your dogs."

That might sound like a ridiculous question, but I'd be surprised if somebody somewhere didn't try to use a dog like one of those Saw "Murder-traps" on a cop at least once. Again, I told them I didn't have any dogs hiding anywhere.

"Do you have any weapons?" Somebody asked.

"Not on me," I said. A few more questions along those lines were asked and answered and again, I won't go into details. By then, Kirk had gotten dressed and come downstairs and was in cuffs. Somebody else had taken my ID outside and was running it.

Even though I know I haven't done anything in recent years that would warrant an arrest, I was so fucking sure that I was going to jail that morning, that when everybody left, I was amazed to be sitting there in my empty house. It took me 15 minutes just to stand up from where I was sitting when the cop gave me back my license and told me to have a good day. Then I walked around the outside of my house looking for... I don't know, like a stakeout van or something.

But that was it. Like a German Blitzkrieg, they came in and snatched Kirk and then they were gone. It was like having a small hurricane hit your house. Afterwards I was stuck with sorting through Kirk's personal effects, and figuring out what to keep and what to dispose of while avoiding committing as few felonies as possible in the process.

I'd like to apologize to a few people for a few different things. To Kirk, I'm sorry I wasn't a better friend. Perhaps if I had gotten more involved, or had been - I don't know, tougher on you or whatever, I could have gotten you into detox before you got picked up. I'm sorry to my family, for displacing you from your normal daily life while trying to help a friend get his shit together. I'm sorry to the Tempe Police Officers who had to spend their morning dealing with Kirk and myself and my dogs. I tried to do right by everybody, and I'm not sure what, if any, good I did in the 1st place.

That's all for now folks. Peace.