Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F.

by Christiane F

  As the month came to an end, my mom called and wanted to know if I wanted to come back or stay a while longer. Without a second thought I told her I was ready to come back. Maybe if she had asked if I wanted to spend the rest of my life out there, I would have thought more about it. But since I knew that it was only a temporary state of affairs one way or the other, it just seemed like it had all been a kind of a dream—a nightmare at the beginning, but in the end a sweet, gentle, beautiful dream. But now it was over. After four weeks, it was time for me to get back to Detlef.

  The first thing I did on the day that I was supposed to head back was to change back into my old set of clothes. My grandma and my cousin tried to convince me to stick with that old pair of checkered kids' pants (which at that point fit me perfectly again), but that was never a real possibility. Instead, I squeezed myself into my skinny jeans. The seams could hardly handle it, and there was no way in hell I could get the zipper up all the way. I slipped on my black men's blazer, and my favorite pair of high-heeled boots. So before I'd even left my grandma's house, I was already looking heroin chic. Or at least the best I could manage. I took the train back to Berlin with my pants undone.

  The next afternoon I went straight to Zoo Station. Detlef and Bernd were both there. Axel, however, was not. I figured he was off with a customer.

  The two boys gave me a huge welcome. They were genuinely happy to see me. Especially Detlef. I said, “So, you got a good job and dropped the dope?” All three of us laughed. I asked, “How's Axel?”

  The boys looked at me kind of strange, and after a while Detlef said, “Haven't you heard? Axel's dead.”

  That knocked the wind out of me. I couldn't breathe for a while. “You're joking,” I said between gasps. But I already knew that it was true.

  Axel.

  I'd spent most of my weekend nights with Detlef over at Axel's place. He always put clean sheets out for me, even though the rest of the house was always a mess. He kept up a steady supply of yogurt for me, and I always brought him his beloved canned tuna. He was always willing to hear me out whenever I had any problems or whenever I had a fight with Detlef. He was never angry or aggressive with anyone in our clique, and even though I was pretty guarded with everyone else, I could even cry in front of him. And now he was gone. “Why?” I asked.

  Detlef said, “They found him in some public toilet stall with a needle in his arm.” For the two boys, Axel's death was already old news. But they seemed uncomfortable talking about it.

  I couldn't stop thinking about the goddamn tuna fish. Suddenly I realized that Detlef might have also lost his place to sleep, so I asked him if he was still staying at Axel's place.

  “His mom has already sold the apartment,” Detlef answered. “I'm staying with one of my customers.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said. I just blurted it out because at that moment I thought that I'd lost Detlef to one of his customers for good. The fact that Detlef was living with a john hit me almost as hard as Axel's death.

  “The guy I'm staying with is pretty all right. He's still young, in his mid-twenties, and he's still kind of in shape, too. I've already told him about you. You can sleep over there, too.”

  We took the subway over to where we knew some dealers would be selling since Detlef needed a hit. We kept running into people we knew, and whenever we did I would say to them, “Doesn't that just fucking suck about Axel.” But the others didn't react at all. So I just kept muttering the same thing over and over to myself.

  After scoring some dope, we went to the public bathrooms on Bülow Street.32 Detlef wanted to take care of business right away. I came along to help, but I was also hoping Detlef would offer me some—I wanted to turn it down, just to show him that I was strong enough to do it. But I didn't get my chance because Detlef never offered me any.

  The thing with Axel shocked me to the core, and I was having a problem processing it. When Detlef was cooking up his dope, I suddenly got this insane craving. This is some serious shit with Axel and with Detlef, I thought, and a shot will help you out—plus it's not like one little shot means anything. You don't become an addict again just like that.

  Detlef said, “Are you serious?! You want to get high? I thought you'd quit.”

  “Course I did,” I replied. “But that's not a big deal. It's easy to quit. After all, while I was away getting clean, you did the same thing, right? But whatever. I'm just freaking out a little bit after hearing what happened to Axel. I just want a little shot.”

  “Yeah—quitting's not a big deal. I could have done it, too, I just didn't feel like it. But I'm just saying, if you're clean now, you should stay clean and not start up again now.”

  While we were talking—and despite what he was saying—he finished shooting up himself and left a little bit for me, too. After being clean for so long that little shot was enough to get me a little high. I almost forgot all about Axel. Almost.

  I went from sobriety to full-blown addiction way faster than I did the last time. My mom was clueless though. It took me a while to lose those extra pounds, and she was happy about how healthy I looked.

  If I wanted to see Detlef now, then I had to head over to Rolf's house. That was Detlef's client—the guy he was staying with. There was nowhere else we could go to sleep together anymore. I didn't like Rolf though. He was totally in love with Detlef, and as a result he was really jealous of me. He loved it when we'd fight, and he always took Detlef's side. That drove me crazy. Detlef treated Rolf like his own personal servant—like a submissive wife or girlfriend. He sent him shopping and let him do all the cooking and cleaning. That pissed me off too, because I would've liked to do some of those things for Detlef myself.

  So one afternoon I told Detlef that it just wasn't working out. The three of us just didn't make a good team. It was like Rolf was the third wheel on the wagon. But Detlef said he didn't have anywhere else to go. He said that Rolf was basically an okay guy, and it was nice to work for someone who wasn't a huge asshole.

  Detlef did what he wanted with Rolf. And when he was angry or annoyed, he'd tell him bluntly, “Just be grateful that I stick with you.” And Detlef only slept with Rolf if he needed money really badly.

  Detlef and I slept in a bed in the same room as Rolf. When we had sex, Rolf would watch TV or just turn away from us. He was gay and didn't want to see us together. I guess all three of us were pretty fucked up.

  I couldn't shake the idea that Detlef was going to “become gay” if he kept sleeping with men. There was one night in particular when I thought that it had finally happened. Detlef needed money, so he had no choice: He had to sleep with Rolf. I lay in the other bed. Detlef had turned off the light just like he always did when I was there and he had to satisfy Rolf because he needed to earn some money. The whole thing seemed to take a really long time. And at one point I thought I heard Detlef moaning. I stood up and lit a candle. Both of them were going at it under the blanket. It seemed like they were both touching each other. (That was against the rules. Detlef and I had an agreement: No one was allowed to touch us.) So I was insanely pissed off. So pissed off that I wasn't even able to articulate what I actually wanted. I just said, “You guys seem like you're having a lot of fun over there.”

  Detlef didn't say anything, but Rolf was furious. He blew out my candle and kept Detlef with him for the whole night. I cried silently into my pillow all night because I didn't want the other two to hear how much this affected me. The next morning, I was so upset that I honestly considered leaving Detlef. The heroin was undermining our relationship at every turn, but we weren't even aware of it. We couldn't see what it was doing to us.

  It was clear to me now that as long as we were on H, Detlef would never be totally mine. I would have to share him with his customers—especially Rolf. In my case, of course, it was different. I sold myself at Zoo Station every day, and since I was under more serious time constraints, I didn't have the luxury of picking and choosing all my customers. At this point, there were a lot of times w
hen it was the clients—and not me—who set the terms of our agreement.

  In order to keep away from Rolf, I started to spend more time again with the other people in our clique—especially with Babsi and Stella. But it was getting to be more difficult to get along with them as well. Everyone wanted to just talk for hours about themselves; nobody cared what was going on with anybody else. Babsi, for example, was going on and on about the weird punctuation on traffic signs, while Stella and I wanted to talk about how a dealer ripped us off (he gave us flour instead of dope). We told Babsi to shut up, but after Stella and I had gotten control of the conversation we wound up fighting with each other over who would get to tell the rest of the story.

  Most of our conversations ended with someone yelling, “Shut up!” We were all desperately in need of someone who could listen to us. But that person just didn't exist—at least not in our circle of friends. There was no real communication amongst us anymore. The only time anyone paid any attention was when we were talking about the cops. We were all united in our opinion against the fucking cops. I was actually a bit more developed than the others in that respect because in the early summer of 1977 I'd already been arrested for the third time.

  It happened at Zoo Station. Detlef and I were just coming back after an encounter with a customer. He'd given us 150 marks just to watch us. So we were pretty happy, each of us with a quarter of dope in our pocket and plenty of cash left over. I saw them first, the cops pouring onto the platform. It was a drug raid. A train was just pulling in, and I was running down the platform in total panic. Detlef, not thinking clearly at that moment, ran after me. As I jumped onto the last car of the train, I ran right into an old man. He said, “Fucking zombie hag! Watch where you're going!” He really said that. Thanks to the newspaper coverage, almost everyone seemed to know what was going on at Zoo Station. So even the drones in the subway realized quickly that this was a drug raid in progress.

  Detlef was right behind me—and behind him, of course, were two undercover cops. After all, we'd behaved suspiciously enough. The cops didn't have to work very hard to catch up with us, despite our head start. Even before they'd arrived on the scene, a bunch of geriatrics in the subway had grabbed hold of us, gripping our clothes and screaming hysterically: “Here they are! Police! Police!” I felt like an outlaw in an old Western, and it seemed like the next scene was going to show Detlef and me dangling from some tree.

  I clung tight to Detlef, but when the cops took us away, one of them just said, “That Romeo and Juliet act isn't going to cut it, so hurry it up; let's go!”

  We were loaded into a VW bus and taken to the police station. The cops were mean, but they didn't bother taking down any additional information on me. They just told me that since this was the third time that they'd picked me up, they already had a binder on me. One of them typed up the usual statement, and all I had to do was sign it. They didn't even take the time to notify my mom. In their eyes, I was just another hopeless case. They'd keep filing away these statements and filling up the binder until the day when they could finally put a cross next to my name and forget about me.

  Detlef and I were released about an hour later. Since they'd confiscated our dope, we had to go straight back to the hot zone to score two more quarters. Luckily for us, we still had some cash.

  The undercover cops all knew me by then, and they generally left me alone. One of them—a young guy, with a cute, friendly Bavarian accent—was even kind of nice to me. The first time he saw me he snuck up behind me and shoved his badge in my face. I was obviously freaked out and worried, but then he laughed and asked me if I was working the streets. I answered innocently, like I always did, “The streets? Me? Are you serious?”

  But he wasn't buying it. Still, he didn't even bother to go through my bag. He just told me to stay out of the area for a few days so that he wouldn't have to take me into the station. I bet the other officers at his station must have appreciated that, too, since taking me in would require that they write up yet another statement about a zombified fourteen-year-old addict.

  After getting arrested, we couldn't find our old dealer, so Detlef and I had to buy our dope from this new guy whom we'd never heard of before. Then we went to the public bathrooms at Winterfeldt Placz33 to shoot up. The doors on all the toilet stalls had been broken off, and the sinks were all broken and dry. I cleaned my syringe with the water from the toilet (which was in a pretty bad way). It was gross, but I used that tactic from time to time because a lot of the bathrooms were too busy for us to risk cleaning the syringe in plain view by the sink.

  I don't know what was in it, but the new dope from the new dealer totally knocked me out. I fell flat on my face right outside the bathrooms. And even though I picked myself up right after that, I was still really groggy. For the first time in a long time, we decided to go to The Sound.

  Detlef was looking for a party, so he went straight to the dance floor while I positioned myself (strategically) next to this unattended tank of orange juice. It had a hole at the top, so I leaned against the vending machine, pushed two straws together, stuck them into the top, and drank my fill. Without paying a cent, I was able to drink until I had to go to the bathroom to throw up.

  When I got back, one of the managers got up in my face. He called me a junkie whore and told me to come with him. He grabbed me by the arm and dragged me across the room. He opened a door that led to the storage area where they stacked the beverage crates. I also noticed that there was just one bar stool inside. Now I was scared.

  I knew immediately what was going on. Or at least I thought I did—since I'd heard so much about this room. In here, the management would make the junkies—along with anyone else they

  happened to despise—strip down to nothing, and then tie them up to the bar stool. After the person was rendered totally helpless, they'd beat him up with whips and whatever else was on hand. I'd heard about guys who'd ended up in the hospital with cracked skulls or other broken bones after just one session in The Sound's storage room. They were so traumatized and intimidated that they couldn't even go to the police afterward.

  I'm sure the management at The Sound justified what they did by saying that it helped to keep junkies and drug addicts away, which in turn kept the authorities from being able to shut the club down—but clearly they also did it because they were natural sadists, and they just wanted to.

  There was one thing that the girl junkies could do to save themselves a beating, though, because if you agreed to have sex with the manager then he would leave you alone. The Sound was just an absolutely brutal environment. If parents knew what really went on at “Europe's hottest club,” they would never have let their kids go there. Every day more kids started using heroin in and around the club, and every day another young girl was reeled in by one of the pimps or hustlers who lurked around the place, and still the management did nothing. They just didn't care.

  So there I was, standing at the door to the storage space and just absolutely consumed with panic and fear. With a strength that was surprising even to me, I ripped myself away from that guy and ran like crazy for the exit. I made it all the way to the street before he caught up with me. He grabbed onto me, but instead of dragging me back down he just threw me, hard, like a piece of trash, against a nearby car. I didn't even feel the impact though. I was more worried about Detlef at that point. They knew that we were always together. And after he'd run over to the dance floor, high as a kite, I hadn't seen him again.

  I ran over to a phone booth and called the police. I told the cops that my boyfriend was being assaulted at The Sound. They seemed thrilled to hear it, and it only took them a couple of minutes to show up—a whole vanload of them. They were clearly hoping to be able to finally shut the club down. But after the dozen or so cops that were there had finished combing the place for Detlef, there was still no sign of him. That's when it occurred to me to call Rolf. Detlef was already there, in bed.

  After all the drama, one of the cops came over a
nd said, “So, you were just high, right? Listen: Don't you ever pull anything like this again.” As I made my way home, I couldn't help thinking that all the heroin was making me lose my grip on reality.

  Because I'd been arrested and taken into custody so many times, I was eventually summoned to pay a visit at the police department's criminal division. My appointment was for 3 p.m. at a building on Gothaer Street, room 314. I'll always remember that room number because it was about to become the destination of many future visits as well.

  After school I went straight home to shoot up. I gave myself a healthy dose because I thought that if I was high enough, the cops wouldn't be able to rattle me. But it so happened that I was out of lemon, and that was a problem because the dope I had was far from pure. It was hard to get good stuff. Every time the dope changed hands—going from a big dealer to a middleman to a smaller dealer down the line—it was being cut with something else in order to increase the profit.

  So I had to find a way to dissolve this dope that had already been cut with so much else. I decided to use vinegar because, like lemons, it also has a fair amount of acid in it. I poured the vinegar onto the spoon with the dope, but I poured too much. So with that done, I had to shoot this vinegar solution into my vein along with the dope. It was either that, or I'd have to throw everything out—and that wasn't going to happen.

  As soon as I'd shot up, I was out cold. It took more than an hour for me to regain consciousness. When I did, I could see that the syringe was still stuck in my arm. My head felt like it was going to explode, and at first I couldn't even stand up. I thought that maybe this was it. That I was finally going to die. I just lay on the floor and cried.

  I was so afraid. I didn't want to die—especially not like this, all alone. So I made my way over to the phone on my hands and knees. It must have taken me about ten minutes to dial my mom's office number. When I finally did, all I could do was mumble: “Please . . . please Mom . . . come home . . . I'm dying.”