Halloween with the Mu Fu's

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For this one, we have to get into the Wayback Machine and go way back to 1977. 

I was working at the Phoenix Gazette in the Feature Section, and I started paling around with this black guy, David, who worked in the kitchen.  David was cool and hilarious, so we spent some time together. 

David had a brother.  His brother was the head of a Phoenix street gang called the Mu Fu s. Mu Fu was a transliteration of Mo Fo, because all the gang members were serious motherfuckers.  All young, some under eighteen, and all good looking and about equally divided into athletic African Americans and Caucasian guys that looked like they belonged on a beach in Bali.  I’m serious, they couldn’t have looked any more different, but they all worked together, they all were trained in karate, and they carried guns. 

And … they all had a purpose: the Mu Fu’s stole cars. 

That’s right, the Mu Fu’s ran a chop shop.  The parts of the cars were worth a lot more than the cars themselves and the Mu Fu’s ran a highly efficient operation, turning the cars to parts and getting the parts distributed. 

So, the Mu Fu’s were, in fact, hard criminals.  But they didn’t do drug distribution or human trafficking.  They just did cars.

That means the Mu Fu’s had money.  And they like to spend it!  In addition to adorning themselves with gold chains and expensive watches, they threw parties. And man, could they throw a party.  Every year, they thew a massive Halloween party, except for the year when I was hanging around with them, when they decided to do something a little different. 

For Halloween 1977, the Mu Fu’s were going to Las Vegas.  And somehow, I managed to get an invitation to go along.  I think I got invited because I always showed up with high quality weed I would score off the roadies of the rock shows I was reviewing for the Gazette. But that’s another story!

Anyway, we’re going up to Vegas and I show up on Halloween day, and the Mu Fu’s have decided they’re going to do something spectacular for the trip.  And when I get to their house, there are four orange Volkswagen Beetles and a Red Trans Am sitting in front of the house.  And the orange VWs have been spray painted to look like pumpkins.  I shit you not, and I discover that these vehicles are what we’re using to get to Las Vegas.

In my mind, I’m thinking, what about the word discretion do you not understand?  I thought the approach with hot automobiles was to draw as little attention as possible to the vehicle?  Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound. 

I did have a costume that I thought up, last minute, that I had to show the Mu Fu’s.  What I’d done was taken a big piece of cardboard and glued a toilet paper fixture onto the center of the cardboard.  Then I put a roll of toilet paper in the fixture. I then put a strap at the top of the cardboard so I could wear the whole thing around my neck … and then I’d taken a magic marker and written my favorite bits of graffiti on the carboard.

For my Halloween costume for 1977, I was going as a bathroom wall. 

One of the graffiti I put up was “back in a minute” signed Gadot.  For a little literary humor. And I had the expected, “for a good time all 8675309”.  And of course, my favorite graffiti of all time, “profanity is the crutch of ignorant motherfuckers”. 

Pretty funny, huh? 

I thought so. But the Mu Fu’s were not that impressed with my abstract interpretation. 

But we put the costume in the front of one of the bugs and guys started piling in the cars and we were off to Las Vegas. 

We hadn’t made it out of the Phoenix city limits before I broke out with a fat blunt.  The blunt went round and round and pretty soon, we were all fairly high.  We’d only made it to about Wickenburg when the first round of cocaine started being passed around.  I’d never done coke before, but after trying it, I figured it could become a regular visitor.  We’d made it to Wikieup where we had to pull over for everyone to take a leak and while I was standing in the parking lot, one of the guys in my bug came up to me and said, “here, try some of these.”

Now, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. Up to that point in time, I’d only seen mushrooms on a pizza….

But I reached into the proffered baggy and pulled out this funny looking mushroom. I put it into my mouth, expecting some kind of nasty taste.  But it actually had relatively little taste and I munched and swallowed. 

“Here, take another one, you’re a big guy, you could probably use two.”

I helped myself to another one and then we piled back in the cars and took off again for Vegas. 

We’d made it to Kingman when the giggles started to set in with the guys in my car. 

I didn’t know what was going on.  Was there some joke I wasn’t privileged to?  I didn’t know that giggles and laughing are something that happens when you’re high on ‘shrooms!

The only thing was … I didn’t have the giggles.  I asked the guy with the mushrooms why I wasn’t experiencing the same thing as they were, and he said, “here, take some more.”

So I grabbed a couplethree more shrooms and ate them down. 

But the time we made it to the Dam, these guys were seeing streamers off the streetlights and laughing at anything and everything—and I’m still sitting there with nothing hallucinatory happening to me. 

“Here,” said the guy with the shrooms and he passes me the bag of psychedelic mushrooms.  I just start munching on the shrooms, one after the other, wondering what was wrong with me. 

Somehow we manage to make it to Downtown Las Vegas and we part all the bugs and the Trans Am in the side streets around the downtown casinos and hotels.  I grab the costume out of our bug and we’re making our way towards the Golden Nugget.

So these guys have all self-regulated with another round of cocaine, so their behavior doesn’t seem to erratic.  And I’m just wondering what the hell the deal is with the ‘shrooms. 

We make it over to the Golden Nugget and we pull open the doors and make our way into the casino … and they hit me. In a huge rush, the mushrooms overtake my senses, and I just kind of back up against one of the casino walls and I’m, like, frozen. Paralyzed.  I can’t move, so I just stand there, in my bathroom wall costume.  All the lights and noises and people surging and I am absolutely tripping my balls off. The walls are breathing, in and out, and it tickles my back as I stand there like a statue.

After a while, a waitress comes along.  “Would you like a drink?”

“Why, yes, I would, I’ll have a rum and coke.”

“You got it, one rum and coke comin’ up!”

After the waitress left, a group of people were walking by, they see me standing there, giggling like a maniac, and an old guy separates himself from the group and comes over to me.

“What are you supposed to be?”

I continue to giggle.  “I’m, I’m, I’m a bathroom wall!”

And the guys looks over my costume and starts to laugh himself. 

I have markers with me, so I say to they guy, “if you’d like, you could ad some graffiti to my wall.”  I reach out from behind the costume to offer the marker.

“Oh no I can’t think of anything off hand, but thanks anyway.”

The old guy walks back over to his group, and I can see him explaining my costume to the others.  A laugh goes up and then a different guy from the group comes over and puts something on the wall.  Later, I would see he wrote “flush twice, it’s a long way to the kitchen.”

And that’s the way it went, for hours. I just stood there explaining my costume to passersby. The waitress began a regular stop to check on my drink status, so I was catching a nice little alcohol buzz to go along with the rampaging ‘shrooms. 

After what must have been four or five hours—it felt more like a dozen hours—I finally regained the use of my legs and wandered off into the casino, still chortling, people smiling at me and my costume … and found most of the Mu Fu’s at a blackjack table.  There was a spot open on the table and the Mu Fu’s suggested I take it.  So I set my costume at an empty table in a lounge situated right next to the blackjack table and joined the boys at the game. 

By the way, I’m terrible at cards.  I’m always losing when I play … but that night, I was heavily under the influence, and somehow that turned things around and I was able to make brilliant calls on my hands and in no time, I had amassed a tower of chips!  I was cleaning up, and the rest of the Mu Fu’s were goin’ broke. 

While we are at the table, these three guys come through the area, and they catch sight of my costume.  I didn’t really notice them—until they grabbed the costume and walked off with it.

I’m, like, “Hey Mu Fu’s they just took off with my costume!”

The Mu Fu’s were unconcerned as they were desperately trying to win back their losses. There went my costume, I hadn’t even read all the new graffiti on it yet! Oh well….

Soon the Mu Fu’s were chipless—and it was time to go.  As if on a signal, the Mu Fu’s all got up from their  tables and headed for the door. 

But.

As we were leaving, we walked past this, like, mezzanine, standing in the middle of the casino, and up on that mezzanine were a desk and a couple of chairs, and on one of the chairs … was my costume.

“Look, Mu Fu’s, there’s my costumer and those guys that ran off with it.”

Ah, now the Mu Fu’s, who are sour on the casino after their extensive losses, are ready to go cause a ruckus to get my costume back. 

Until the head Mu Fu steps in front of the boys and pushes them back.

“Forget it, fellas. Those guys are the pros—we don’t mess with the pros.”

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.  

And we had one more surprise left for us on our way home.  When we got to the neighborhood with the pumpkin VWs, the place was swarming with LVPD!  They had tow trucks pullin’ the bugs out of their parking spaces.  Our ride home was burnt!

So we go over to the nearby Greyhound station and with my winnings from black jack, we have just enough money to get everyone on a bus back to Phoenix.  I don’t know what we would have done if I hadn’t won all that money.  Anyway, the Mu Fu’s were very grateful and was given honorary Mu Fu status.