by Christiane F
So this was my first time in Jürgen's apartment. When we got there, there were about a dozen people. They were all gathered around a giant wooden table that had candles in silver holders and expensive bottles of wine. Everyone was relaxed, and the conversation seemed to be flowing easily. It was immediately apparent that these people were pretty smart. Jürgen was leading the discussion, and I thought, man, this guy is sharp. It was also hard to ignore the fact that he was living in such an amazing apartment, packed with first-class stuff. And despite everything, he was still so laid-back, easygoing, and generous.
We were treated like we really belonged—despite the fact that we were obviously the only junkies there. After a little small talk, one of the couples asked if they could go take a shower. Jürgen said, “Of course, what else are they here for?”
The showers were right next to the living room. The first couple went in, and a few other people followed after them. A short while later, they came back in, naked and asking about towels. It seemed like a pretty cool environment to me, where everyone seemed to get along with everybody else and be up for anything. I felt like Detlef and I could live like this someday, in a first-class apartment, and invite totally cool friends like this.
A few people were already naked or with just small towels around their waists, and they were walking around and touching each other and starting to make out. One couple went into the bedroom, onto the huge bed there. The bedroom happened to be connected to the living room by a wide passageway, so you could look right in. This couple undressed and began to kiss, and soon they were joined by a number of the other guests, who crawled right into the huge bed with them. There were guys with guys, and guys with girls—everything. Some of the people there didn't even make it to the bed: They were going at it right at the table. But I'd realized that I was attending a certified orgy well before things had gone that far.
The guests obviously wanted Detlef and me to join them, but I wasn't into it. I didn't want to be groped by just anybody. I wasn't necessarily opposed to what was going on or grossed out by it. In fact, I was even a little turned on by how they were all having fun together and how chill everything was. But that's exactly why I wanted to be alone with Detlef.
Detlef and I went to a separate room and started making out. Suddenly Jürgen appeared next to us, watching. It didn't bother me though, because, for starters, I felt so safe, but also because I knew he was paying us for this. I only hoped that he wasn't going to join in.
But Jürgen just watched. While Detlef and I had sex, he jerked off. And then, when we left later on (my mom was still expecting me at home), he casually slipped Detlef a hundred-mark note.
Young addicts working the Kurfürstenstrasse in Berlin.
Werner H., 21, and Michael S., 21, at the Kurfürstendamm subway station. Werner H.: “I started shooting up at 16. I was sentenced to three years in jail, and after that no one had time for me any more…. I don't stand a chance anymore, I'm in way too deep.
Michael S.: “I started when I was 15. But I don't want to lose hope. I just have to find something that I can hold on to, that I can believe in, and then maybe I'll be able to get clean. ”
Bärbel W., 21, at the Eisenach youth hostel. “I shot up for the first time when I was 13 years old. Working as a hooker is disgusting, but for girls it's the only way we know to get the money we need. If you want to quit, you need to have a reason. And right now I just don't.”
Karin S., 17, in front of the public bathrooms at Bülowbogen: “I started shooting up when I was 13. When my mom realized what was going on, she called the police. She really thought that I would stop using in jail. But it was just as easy to score dope in there as it was on the street. When you start as early as I did, you don't really have a chance.”
A typically desolate apartment in the Beusselstrasse (Beussel Street), Berlin. Almost every heroin addict sells off anything valuable he owns right away—from the iron (and ironing board) to the stereo system—to help buy himself heroin.
Rudi H., 17, and Dirk L., 18, selling themselves at Zoo Station. Rudi says: “I've been shooting up for three months now, and prostitution is the only way that I can get the money I need.” Dirk had been shooting up for a year and a half: “Once I went into detox and got a job, but then my boss found out about my past and fired me. I'm not afraid of the physical withdrawal, only of what comes after.”
Jürgen became a regular. He was bi, and most of the time we visited him together. I would entertain him up top and Detlef would attend to things down below. We always got a hundred marks for that. Sometimes one of us would go alone, too, for sixty marks. It goes without saying that Jürgen was, on the one hand, a john like any other—not the best, but not that gross either. At the same time, he was the only customer for whom I felt something like friendship. I respected him. I liked talking to him. He was interesting and often had some real insights. He lived in the real world, and he lived well.
I especially admired the way he handled money. That was the thing about him that interested me the most. He told me once about how, once he'd invested in something, the money almost seemed to grow by itself. He was incredibly generous. He didn't pay anyone else who attended his orgies, but once I was around when a younger guy asked him for a couple thousand marks, for a Mini Cooper. Jürgen didn't get into a big discussion about it. Instead, he just wrote out a check and said, “Here.” Jürgen was the only customer who would sometimes have me over without asking for anything from me. I sometimes watched TV with him at night. When I did, it seemed like all was right again with the world, at least while I was there.
MEANWHILE, IT DIDN'T TAKE very long for Detlef and me to settle right back into our old routine. We never went to the clubs anymore—they were for kids. So when I wasn't hanging around Zoo Station; I was at Kurfürstendamm. Sometimes there would be like a hundred junkies just on the small subway platform there. That's where the dealing happened. There were a lot of johns there looking to take advantage of some desperate junkie, but that didn't bother us. It was just the place where we met up.
When I was there, I'd walk from group to group, talking with the others. I felt like I really mattered when I was making my rounds on that platform, right below the Kurfürstendamm. I felt like a star. I'd see the old ladies heading back from the department stores with their bags full of junk, staring at us with this disgusted, frightened look in their eyes, and I'd think, Oh my God, we have it so much better than they do. Our lives might be hard, and it might not be the safest way to live—the prognosis wasn't good, anyway—but at the same time, we wouldn't have it any other way.
For me at least, I liked it like that. I mean, think about the money I was making. Just for the heroin alone I needed a hundred marks a day. With all the other expenses included, an average month cost about four thousand marks. That's what I had to bring in, and it was a lot, but I still managed it. The way I looked at it was: I'm making more than a lot of my clients do, and I'm only fourteen years old.
Working the streets and turning tricks was pretty shitty work, obviously; but when I was on dope it didn't bother me that much. And anyway, I kind of ripped off my customers because they didn't get much for their money. I still called the shots. Sex was out of the question.
But I was a pretty small player in the overall scene. I was in awe of the guys who said they needed four grams of dope every day. That worked out to 500 to 850 marks' worth of heroin every day, but they almost always managed to get what they needed. So they were making more than almost anyone in Berlin at the time, and they were doing it without getting caught by the cops. And even if I wasn't at their level yet, I could still walk up to them at Kurfürstendamm, and they would talk to me.
Anyway, that's what I was thinking at the time, back in February and March of 1977, when I was still okay. I didn't feel great, but still, I hadn't hit rock bottom yet. I still believed the lies I was telling myself. I'd slipped right back into the life of a junkie. I thought I was really cool. I wasn't afraid of anyth
ing.
Before heroin, I was afraid of everything: of my father, and then later of my mom's boyfriend; of my shitty school and the teachers there; of landlords, traffic cops, and even subway ticket checkers. Now I felt untouchable. I wasn't even scared of the undercover cops who prowled around the station. And I had a reason to be cocky: At that point, I'd gotten through every police raid without so much as a scratch.
Back then I was also hanging around with some other users—junkies, really—who I thought were somehow still in control. Atze and Lufo were like that. Atze was my first boyfriend. The only guy I'd had a close relationship with before Detlef; I used to be crazy about him. In 1976, Lufo—like Atze and Detlef—was part of our pot-smoking clique at The Sound. Atze and Lufo got stuck on dope right before I did. They got an apartment, and it looked like they'd made it: The apartment had a French bed, a matching couch and recliner set, and wall-to-wall carpeting. Lufo even had a totally legit, minimum-wage job at Schwarzkopf.30
Both of them claimed that they'd never been physically addicted to heroin, and that they could go for weeks or even months without shooting up. I believed them, but at the same time, they were always high whenever I hung out with them. Atze and Lufo were my idols. At the time I was worried about sinking back to the state I was in before my first purge. I thought that if Detlef and I could be as cool as Atze and Lufo were when it came to our habits, then we could also make it like they did and live in an apartment with a French bed, matching couch and recliner sets, and wall-to-wall carpeting.
Also, neither of them was aggressive like the other junkies were, and Atze had a really cool girlfriend, too—Simone, who didn't shoot up at all. I thought it was awesome that they were so in love and accepting of each other even though one of them was a user and the other one wasn't. I liked spending time at their place, and sometimes, when I'd had a fight with Detlef, I slept on Lufo's couch.
But one night I came home, and since I was in a good mood and felt like things were going pretty well overall, I stopped in the living room to sit down with my mom. Right away she got up and went to get the paper without saying a word. I could sense what was coming next. She always handed me the paper like that when there was a report about a heroin death. I hated it. I didn't want to read whatever she wanted to show me.
But I read the obituary anyway: “Glassblower's apprentice Andreas W. (17) wanted to get off drugs. His sixteen-year-old girlfriend, a nursing student, wanted to help him: but to no avail. The young man died of an overdose in an apartment in Tiergarten, which his father had furnished for the young couple for several thousand marks.”
The story didn't sink in right away, because I didn't want to believe it. But all of the elements were there: apartment, glass-blower's apprentice, girlfriend, Andreas W. . . . It was Andreas Wiczorek—Atze!
At first all I could think was, Shit. My throat was dry and I felt like I was going to puke. I couldn't understand how Atze could have overdosed. Atze, of all people—who knew just how much dope he could handle and was always cool and in control. I didn't want to let my mom see how upset I was. She had no idea that I was using again. So I took the paper and just went back to my room.
I hadn't seen Atze for a long time, but the paper filled me in on his last few days. According to the news story, he'd already been shooting up way too much during the previous week and had eventually landed in the hospital. His girlfriend, Simone, slashed her wrists right after that, but both of them survived.
Then, the day before Atze died, he went to the police and ratted on all the dealers he knew, even these two girls who were known as “the twins” and who always had first-class heroin. Then he wrote a suicide note, which the paper reprinted in full:
I'm ending my life because an addict only brings anger, anxiety, bitterness, and despair to his friends and family. He drags everyone else down with him. Please tell my parents and my grandmother that I'm thankful for all they did for me.
I'm an absolute zero. To be a junkie means you're the worst of the worst—the bottom of the shit pile. Why do so many kids—so many young people who enter this world so full of life and hope—fall into this kind of self-destructive cycle? I hope that my life can at least serve as a warning to someone else who may at some point ask himself the question: Well, should I try it, just this once?
Don't be an idiot. Just look at me, and you'll have your answer.
You don't have to worry about me anymore, Simone. Take care.
I lay on my bed and thought, That was your first boyfriend, and now he's in a coffin. I couldn't even cry. I was totally numb.
When I hit the scene the next afternoon, no one was thinking about Atze. It makes sense: Nobody cries on the street. But on the other hand, some people were definitely pretty angry. Atze had ratted on some good dealers who sold first-class dope, and now they were all sitting in jail. Also, Atze still owed a lot of people a lot of cash.
The craziest thing about this whole story is that a week after Atze died, his girlfriend, Simone, who'd never used before and who always tried to convince him to get off the stuff, started shooting up, too. A few weeks later, she quit her internship in the nursing program and started working the streets.
Lufo died from an overdose about a year later, in January 1978.
ATZE'S DEATH COMPLETELY OBLITERATED this crazy fantasy that we all shared. We all used to believe that we could shoot up and still live normal lives. But now that dream was dead. Everyone in Atze's old crowd began to fear and mistrust each other. Before, when there weren't enough needles to go around, everybody wanted to be first. Now, all of a sudden, everybody wanted to go second. Nobody talked about how scared they were, but everyone was worried that the stuff would be too pure, too strong, or that it would be cut with strychnine or some other poison. You could die from an overdose, but you could also die from shit that was too pure or too dirty.
So there it was. Everything was all fucked up again. It was just like Atze said in his suicide note. In the meantime, I was making life hell for my mom. I came home whenever I wanted, just like before, but whenever I got back my mom would still be up, no matter what time it was. It's funny, but the first thing she would do as soon as she knew I was back was take some Valium so that she could finally get some sleep herself. In fact, I think the Valium is the only reason she made it through that period.
I was getting more and more freaked out by the thought that I was going to end up like Atze. But I'd find little things to cling to still—things that would give me some degree of hope for the future. Even at school. There was one teacher I really liked: Mr. Mücke. In his class, we'd have to act out certain situations from a normal adult life. So we'd pretend to be going to a job interview, for instance. One of us would have to be the employer, and the other one would have to play the role of the applicant. When I played the job applicant, I wouldn't let the employer get a word in edgewise. Instead, I turned the tables on him, so that he felt intimidated and quickly backed down. I thought that maybe I could learn to assert myself like that in real life, too.
We also went to the career services office with Mr. Mücke. But that meant that we also had to watch an Allied Forces military parade.31 The guys were all really into it. They couldn't shut up about the tanks and all the new technology. But I had the opposite reaction because the tanks made a hellish, head-splitting noise, and their only purpose was to kill people anyway.
But then I got another boost in the career services office, when I read about the job of animal caretaker. I read through everything I could find about it, and the next day I went back with Detlef and asked them to make me copies of everything they had on that kind of work. Detlef, for his part, found some information on a few jobs that he was really excited about. He was looking for something to do with animals or farming. We were so into it that we almost forgot that we still needed to get the cash for our next fix. So next thing you know we're back at Zoo Station, waiting for customers, but still holding our bags full of photocopies from the career services center. It
made everything seem so unreal again. If I kept on going like this, I felt like I probably wouldn't even make it through high school.
On my way to school the next morning, I bought a copy of Playboy at one of the subway stations. Detlef loved Playboy, and I bought it for him as a present for him (although I always read through it first myself). I don't know why we both liked Playboy so much. Today, looking back, I just don't get it. But back then Playboy seemed like a cleaner world. Clean sex. Beautiful girls who lived problem-free lives. No perverts, no pedophiles, no “clients” at all. The guys in the magazines smoked pipes and drove sports cars and were rich. And the girls had sex with them because they wanted to, because it was fun. Detlef said that that was all bullshit, but he still loved those magazines.
While I was in the subway that morning, I read a short story from that issue. I didn't understand all of what it said because I was already pretty messed up from my morning hit. But I liked the mood of the story. It took place somewhere far away under a blue sky and a hot sun. I got to this spot where a pretty girl is waiting around for her boyfriend to get back home from work, and I just started to cry. I couldn't get ahold of myself and kept crying all the way to my stop, where I had to get out.
When I was in school, all I could do was daydream about leaving with Detlef—going someplace far, far away. And that afternoon, when I met Detlef at the station, I told him about my daydream. At that point, he told me about his aunt and uncle in Canada.