Police Van Rave

Living in a converted ex-industrial mill surrounded by mostly empty ex-industrial mills in the heart of Manchester’s canal basin certainly had its advantages. New Year for instance, New Year was a very good time to live within the immidiate proximity of a host of vast mostly empty crumbling buildings with their underground networks, hidden rooms, thick cool walls and unnatural darkness - a clubber’s paradise in the right hands. Jose was such a hand, or at least his right hand man was. Jose was the son of a Brazilian wood magnet. The magnet himself remained in Brazil whilst his boy learnt the ropes in Manchester, overseeing movements from a nineteenth century red brick industrial unit, vastly oversized for the business, complete with its own sweat shop on top. The problem was, his drug habit, well it was for him anyway, but it worked to the advantage of some of those who worked for him, provided they kept things ship shape and ran things properly. Daddy need never know if the books were good and the clients happy. Clever boys indeed, keeping Jose alive, and the business too. Everyone got what they wanted, even the old boy overseas, despite his ignorance. Perhaps he knew, maybe there were favoured sons doing well closer to home whilst Jose was kept out of the way. This could be down to his extreme drug use, or maybe it caused it. Who the fuck knows? What I do know is that those boys threw a party. Their one and only risk of the year; the hugest most spectacular underground illegal rave known to man, well certainly the post Hacienda generation of Manchester man. I’d been attending these parties over the years, watching their hosts learn and evolve year on year. I even got sucked to death by a beautiful Goth claiming to be a vampire on the first year. This was to be their final year however. I took the girl I would later marry, the mother of my child. It was not her scene, at all. This is a girl who took a sip of a mushroom shake in Thailand and became catatonic for days, a crumb oh hash cake alone put her to sleep for twelve hours. She learnt early that recreational drugs were not for her, neither were raves; pop and peeve, that’s our Sam. She must have really loved me following me into that! Not that much though, oh no, I reckon within an hour I was being dragged up and out of the guts of it and into the cooler corridors towards the surface. There was no-one around really as we neared street level and came up upon and through a delivery bay and out onto the road. There we hit traffic, under the amber glow of flickering street lights, three long wheel based Maria vans sat still and silent in the cold air like some kind of memorial to troubled times. A light snow fall disclosed the fact that they hadn’t been there long, the dry borders along their undersides was as defined as a citadel division. Without thinking I’d already started peeing all over the back door of the nearest van in some drug fuelled act of deluded defiance. It was early days in my relationship with Sam; I had a lot to learn. As the clock struck twelve and I progressed into the rapid eye movement of pissing, the van doors swung open and twelve riot police looked down upon me weeing on their step, my mouth open, left arm swinging, vacant as a monkey. Sam grabbed my shoulder and pulled me backwards still urinating. The boys in blue went straight through us like storm troopers, like we weren’t even there, marching as one to raid the rave. They had bigger fish to fry. She dumped me for the first time on New Year’s Day that year.