Keilor Park Drive

I was driving down the Calder, sun shining, car purring and I saw a sign that said Keilor Park Drive. It was like something I didn't know. I had no information on that. It was somewhere I had never been and somewhere I would probably never go.

The closest I had was Jason from Glenroy. Not that that is really close at all. I laughed to myself, am I an inner suburb snob? I hadn't thought about Jason in ages.

I met him in the city, on one of those endless city visits that sixteen year olds seem to always do. He had that look in his eyes, hungry, I was attracted to it straight away. He seemed so straight boy and kind of tough, I wondered if it was some weird game he played, but he kept looking and then he followed me.

And when he said, nervously, "Do you know somewhere to go?" 

I felt nervous, but I knew I wasn't imagining it. It was suddenly real, not a game anymore.

He was hot and we did filthy things together in the CentrePoint bog. Upstairs, where guys used to line the walls, when they felt safe, they used to look over the doors. There would be people looking through every crack, sometimes they would speak. They'd scatter as soon as someone new came through the door, to every corner, looking away. then it would start again. Someone would move into position. The new guy would step forward to look over at the guys in the cubicle, who were back at it first, prove your "stripes," prove you were one of us.

It was the first time I went home with someone. It was a hell of a trip, to his place in the northern suburbs, when his parents were at work. It could have been one of the first times I had left the safe confines of my own suburb and my mother's bosom. In the holidays, it didn't matter how long it took.

Not long after I'd got my licence, I ventured out to his place, as one of the first things I did. As a horny eighteen year old, driving across town for a shag. It became apparent that there was a lot I didn't know, as I found my way through a multitude of suburbs that I never knew even existed. They seemed to be going for miles. I'd never seen these streets before. It was a foreign land.

I'd just left school.

It was the first time we did it in a bed, his bed. He was keen, not nervous at all.

It was funny to think that there was a whole group of people who I would never mix with, never meet. The other side of town, so to speak. People I would never know. Strangers in my own city, who lived around Keilor Park Drive.