Almost Sixteen

When I was almost sixteen I was running around in Melbourne with a kid called Mozza and a few others. Mozza and I had been placed in the same youth refuge from a juvenile corrections center.

While we were there another boy turned up. He was almost seventeen and he was massive. His name was Pete. Pete didn’t look like a large kid to me. He looked like a large man. He had a clownish way about him though and wasn’t a threat to anyone.

So anyway, one afternoon Mozza tells us he has met a girl who is a hairdresser, and that she lives out in a suburb called Surrey Hills. She lives in a bedsitter behind a house and Mozza says that Big Pete and I should go with him to see her. So we agree to go and meet Mozza’s new girl.

We’ve still got this stuff we called ‘Grappa’. We met a girl called Dianne whose grandfather came from Yugoslavia or some such where, and he used to sell us two-litre glass flagons of the stuff. It was clear and had a faint liquorice, and I guess, paint thinners taste. Dianne said her Pop made it from potato peels. I believed her.

We mixed it with orange juice from the refuge kitchen and put it in small plastic bottles then crammed them all into a backpack for Big Pete’s back. We grabbed our smokes and headed out for the train station.

Surrey Hills was six or seven stops further out from where we were, on the same line. So we messed around on the train getting very drunk, very fast, on the old Grappa. That stuff used to make me pie-eyed and almost sent me blind once. By the time we got to Surrey Hills station, we were all wrecked.

We still had a bit of a walk according to Mozza so we set off still drinking. After walking for I don’t know how long we went past a football oval which I think is the Surrey Park Football Club. Mozza said we were about halfway there.

Big Pete was well known for his bragging and was the city gangster supreme. According to himself, Big Pete had robbed banks and stolen the best cars in town. He was the man. So his next story gave me and Mozza a good laugh.

Big Pete waved his arm to our left. “I know this oval well boys.”

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