Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F.

by Christiane F

  His apartment didn't look like it belonged to a businessman. And that's what Babsi and Stella had always said he was. In the old living room hutch I found some of his ties along with cheesy porcelain trinkets and a bunch of empty Chianti bottles. The curtains (which were yellow with dirt) were drawn, so that nobody could look into his shabby surroundings. There were two old sofas pushed together against the wall, and that's where we hooked up—on top of an old checkered wool blanket that had fringes at the end. There weren't any linens around here.

  This Heinz guy wasn't that rude or mean or anything, but he definitely got on your nerves. That was his main talent. He was so persistent and so annoying that in the end I agreed to sleep with him so that he would finally leave me in peace and let me go home. He also insisted that I enjoy it myself, and so I pretended that I did. At least he paid well.

  After that, I became Heinz's regular girl—just like Stella and Babsi had been. At first, I thought that the arrangement was really practical and convenient because he saved me a lot of time. I didn't have to hang around the park for hours just for one tiny snort, I didn't have to wait around at Zoo Station for johns, and I didn't even have to go to the corner to score my dope. So now I was able to take care of the house again, tend to the pigeons, and get all my shopping done without all the old stress.

  I spent almost every afternoon with Heinz, and to tell the truth, I didn't really mind him anymore. He loved me, in his strange way. He constantly told me that he loved me, and I had to tell him that I loved him back because he would get mad if I didn't reciprocate. He was super jealous and was always afraid that I was still working Zoo Station. But all in all, he was pretty nice.

  He was the only person left that I could still talk to. Detlef was in jail. Bernd was in jail. Babsi was in rehab. Stella had somehow fallen off the face of the earth. My mom didn't want to have anything to do with me. And as for my dad, I had to constantly lie to him. Every sentence that I told him was a lie of one kind or another. Heinz was the only one I could be honest with, the only one who I didn't have to hide things from. The one exception to that rule, of course, was the fact that we couldn't ever talk honestly about our own relationship.

  Sometimes, when Heinz held me, it just felt so good. I got the feeling that he respected me and that I meant something to him. Who else respected me? When we weren't on his grungy couch, I felt more like his daughter than his lover. But he really did have a talent for annoying people, and that problem only got worse the more time you spent with him. He wanted me to be with him constantly. I had to help him in his store and was supposed to be there when he wanted to show me off to his so-called friends. In truth, he didn't have any friends.

  The amount of time that Heinz required of me was making my dad suspicious again. It was putting me under pressure.

  My dad was constantly snooping around in my stuff, so I was careful not to bring anything that would be at all suspicious into the apartment. I encoded all the phone numbers and addresses that were connected to drugs or prostitution. For example, Heinz lived on Forest Street. So I drew some trees in my notebook. House number and phone number I converted to currency figures. The phone number 395-4773 I wrote out as: 3.95 marks plus 47 pfennigs plus 73 pfennigs. And then I also worked out the answer like a good girl. So I hadn't totally abandoned math in the end.

  One day, Heinz solved the mystery of where Stella had gone: She was in jail. I hadn't heard anything about it before he told me since I didn't spend any time at Zoo Station anymore. Heinz was pretty shocked by the news. Not because of Stella—but because of the cops. He was terrified of them. He was afraid that Stella would turn him in. In the course of this conversation, I learned that a while back the police had begun to put together a case against Heinz, on suspicion of seducing minors and some other stuff. Up to that point, he hadn't let it bother him, even though he had in fact been previously convicted. He said he had the best lawyer in Berlin. But now he was scared to death by the thought that Stella would tell the police about how he paid the girls in dope.

  I was shocked, too. And like Heinz, it wasn't Stella that I was worried about, but me. If they put Stella in jail at fourteen, then they certainly wouldn't hesitate to do the same to me. That was not my idea of a good time.

  I called Narc Anon to give Babsi the bad news. We usually talked on the phone about once a day. Up to that point, she'd agreed that the withdrawal therapy at Narc Anon was okay— although it should be noted that she had already slipped out twice to get a quick fix. But when I called in, they told me that Babsi was in the West End hospital with jaundice.

  It seemed like Babsi and I tended to stumble over a lot of the same obstacles. She was just as fragile as I was. As soon as we started withdrawing, we both got jaundice. Babsi had tried to get clean countless times before. The last time she'd even gone all the way to Tübingen40 with a drug counselor to begin a therapy program there. But she'd chickened out at the last second because of how strict the program was supposed to be. We always kept a close eye on each other. We could always tell how run-down the other one was because we were usually dealing with the same issues, the same illnesses.

  The first thing the next morning, I left to visit her at the West End hospital. I took the subway with Janie to Theodor-Heuss Place, and then we ran through the district of West End. It's a really cool area. Beautiful villas and lots and lots of trees. I had no idea that a place like this existed in Berlin. It made me realize that when it really came down to it, I didn't know the city that well after all. I knew how to get around in Gropiusstadt and the surrounding areas, and I'd spent a lot of time in the little quarter of Kreuzberg where my mom's apartment was, and I knew my way around the four main drug markets, but that was it.

  It was pouring. Janie and I were soaked. But we were both in a great mood. We were happy about having all these trees around us, and I was especially happy that I would get a chance to see Babsi soon.

  After we got to the hospital, we ran into a little problem that I hadn't quite anticipated: Janie wasn't allowed inside. But one of the doormen was great. He offered to take Janie into his little kiosk and look after her. I asked him the way to the ward where Babsi was, and when I got there, I asked the first doctor I saw where she was. He said, “Well, that's what we'd like to know, too.” Babsi had taken off the day before. He said that if she did any drugs right now it could be fatal because she hadn't yet recovered from the jaundice, and her liver wouldn't be able to take much more.

  Janie and I walked back to the subway. I considered the fact that my own liver was probably just as poor off as Babsi's. Our lives already had so many parallels. I missed Babsi and I longed to see her. I'd forgotten all about our fights. We both needed each other—now more than ever. I wanted to let her talk about whatever she wanted to talk about and for as long as she wanted to talk. And I wanted to convince her to check herself back into the hospital.

  But then I sobered up again. I knew that Babsi wouldn't go back to the hospital after she'd been on H again for two days. I knew what I would do myself. I wouldn't have gone back either. she and I were so damn similar. But I didn't know where I should be looking for her. She was either flitting around on one of the drug scenes or working the streets, or she was with one of her regulars. I didn't have time to look for her everywhere because my dad was due to make his checkup calls home. So I did what any self-respecting addict would do: I looked after myself. I went home. I still had dope from Heinz, so I didn't have any reason to head out to the streets or to the station.

  The next morning, I went downstairs to get the paper, the B.Z.41 Ever since my mom had stopped confronting me with all the death notices, I'd started buying the paper myself—and without even thinking about it, I still searched the paper for news about heroin victims before I read anything else. As the heroin-related deaths increased, the write-ups got smaller and smaller. But the more I read, the more people I was able to recognize. A lot of them had been found with a needle still stuck in their arm.

  So o
n that particular morning, I was making myself toast with jam while flipping through the paper. On the first page was a headline in giant print: “She Was Only 14.” I didn't even need to read the rest of the article. I knew right away. I'd had a feeling it was coming. Babsi was gone. I don't know what I was feeling. It felt like nothing. It felt like I was dead—like I was reading my own obituary.

  I went into the bathroom and shot up. That helped me to cry a little. I wasn't sure if I was crying about Babsi or myself. I sat on my bed and lit a cigarette, and then I read the rest of the article. It was written up like a sensational entertainment piece:

  When they found her, the syringe was still stuck in the vein of her left hand. The name of this young girl: Babette D. (14), a student from Schöneberg. Dead. The youngest victim yet in Berlin's heroin epidemic. Nadjy R. (30), the acquaintance who found her, explained to the police that he'd picked the girl up at “The Sound,” a club on Genthiner Street. Since she didn't have a place to stay, he took her to his apartment. Babette is the 46th drug victim in Berlin this year.

  And so on. Pleasantly callous, and so simplistic. In the papers, every junkie was the same. Even the magazines got in on the story because up to that point she was still the youngest victim of a heroin overdose in all of Germany.

  Around noon I'd recovered enough to experience a feeling of intense, wild rage. I was convinced that some slimy dealer had tried to make a few extra marks by selling Babsi a bag of dope that was laced with some cheap poison, maybe even strychnine. Every month, more and more strychnine found its way into the dope that was sold on the streets. I took the subway and went to the police. I ran straight into Mrs. Schipke's office without knocking and started to just vent. I told her everything I knew about corrupt dealers and about pimps who were in the heroin business and about The Sound. Most of it didn't seem to interest her very much. At the end of it all, she just repeated her standard goodbye: “Well then, until next time, Christiane.”

  I thought the cops didn't give a shit if someone sold dirty dope. They were just glad when they could cross another addict off their lists. I swore to myself to find Babsi's murderer on my own.

  The guy who lived in the apartment where Babsi was found seemed innocent enough. He was an okay guy. I knew him pretty well from before. He was a little weird—but kind of funny— and he had a lot of cash. He liked to surround himself with very young girls. He'd once given me a ride through the city in his sports car, invited me to dinner, and then given me some money. But he would only sleep with a girl if she was actually interested in him. So it never went any further with me. I wasn't interested.

  Even though the guy was a businessman, he never seemed to realize that all the young girls he chased after were also running their own kind of business.

  I decided to go to Kurfürstenstrasse, where there was never any shortage of girls or clients. My plan was to make as much money as I could so that I could buy dope from all kinds of sleazy dealers and then test it to figure out who was selling the deadly shit that was killing all these girls. But then I just flitted around the drug scene, scored dope from a couple of guys, and succeeded only in getting super high. It wouldn't have made a difference anyway: Nobody seemed to know who had sold Babsi her last shot.

  Obviously, my plan to find Babsi's “killer” was just an excuse to get as high as I could. It was a way of taking my foot off the brakes. I was telling myself, “You've got to find that scumbag, even if it kills you.”

  That's the point when I stopped worrying about how anything would look to anyone else. I just wanted to get high.

  I didn't bother putting on an act for my dad anymore. He'd known something was up for a long time already. I think he was just waiting for proof. And he wouldn't have to wait long to get it.

  One night when I'd used up my morning's supply of H prematurely and couldn't get away (because my dad was home), I called Heinz and told him to meet me in Gropiusstadt. My dad surprised Heinz and me in front of the Hungry Woodpecker. Heinz barely managed to clear out in time. But after a determined search, my dad found the dope that Heinz had given me.

  I confessed everything right away—including the developments with Heinz. I didn't have it in me to lie anymore. My dad forced me to make a date with Heinz for the next day. We set up a meeting at the park, where he was supposed to give me dope again. Then my dad called the cops, told them everything, and demanded that they arrest Heinz during his meeting with me. The cops told him that they'd have to conduct a real raid at the park, and that sort of thing was impossible to organize on such short notice. They weren't that interested in going after this kind of “cradle-robber”—as my dad referred to Heinz—because it just created too much trouble for them. But of course I was hugely relieved that I didn't have to play the role of a police informant.

  I always thought that my dad would beat me half to death if he found out how much I was getting away with. But it wasn't like that at all. He seemed desperate. Almost like my mom. He spoke to me very gently. He'd finally figured out that you can't quit H just like that, even if you seriously want to. However, he was still hopeful that somehow he'd be able to help me work through it.

  The next day, he locked me into the apartment again and took my dog, Janie, with him. I never saw Janie again after that. I started going into withdrawal in a very bad way. By the middle of the day, I already felt like I was dying. That's when Heinz called. I begged him to bring me some dope. Since he couldn't even get into the building without a key, I came up with the idea of letting down a rope out the window. I finally convinced Heinz to do it, but in exchange he wanted me to write him a love letter and lower the letter down to him along with a pair of my panties. He never gave out dope without getting something in return. After all, he was a businessman.

  So I looked through the apartment for anything that resembled a rope. Kitchen string, plastic laundry line, a belt from a bathrobe, etcetera. I had to tie dozens of knots and keep testing the length, until the makeshift knotted rope could reach down to the ground from the eleventh floor. Then I scribbled out the letter as best I could without the aid of any dope.

  Heinz announced himself with the signature doorbell ring that we'd agreed upon. I grabbed a pair of panties (a pair that I'd embroidered myself) out of the wardrobe, stuffed it, along with the letter, into the plastic cover for my hair dryer, and sent the mail down through the window. It worked. At the bottom, Heinz put in the dope. Meanwhile, a bunch of people had started paying attention to this strange little game of ours. But it didn't seem to faze Heinz, and I definitely didn't care what other people thought. I just wanted to get high. But when a little boy leaned out of a window on the ninth floor and tried to grab the string, I lost it. I screamed at him and swung the rope away. I was terrified about losing my heroin.

  After an eternity, I finally managed to haul it all inside, and I was just about to cook up the dope when the phone rang. It was Heinz. There'd been a misunderstanding. He wanted a pair of panties that hadn't been washed yet. I had the dope and, in a way, I didn't care about anything else. But I knew that he would keep at it if I didn't give in, so I reached down to the bottom of the hamper and threw the oldest pair of panties I could find out of the window. It landed in a shrub. At first Heinz ran away, but then he snuck back to fish his prize out of the bushes.

  Heinz was a total perv. As I found out later, while I was lowering my panties down to him with a rope, he already had an arrest warrant out on him. The cops just hadn't had the time to come and pick him up yet. And his lawyer had already told him how bad things looked. But when it came to girls, Heinz didn't care. He would risk everything.

  I had to appear as a witness at his trial, and I told the truth. Honestly, Heinz didn't matter to me anymore than any other customer. But despite that, it wasn't easy for me to testify against him; I felt sorry for him. He wasn't any worse than my other customers. I just felt bad for him because he was literally addicted to girls. If anything, he should've been put in a psychiatric ward rather than in
a jail.42

  Heinz's dope just about lasted for the couple of days that my dad kept me locked up. Then, when he left the front door unlocked one day, I took off. I managed to bum around on people's couches for an entire week before my dad found me and took me home again. I was sure that he was going to give me a serious beating. But instead, he just seemed to sink deeper into his own brand of despair.

  I told him that I couldn't do this by myself. There was no way anyone could if she was completely alone all day. Babsi was dead. Detlef was in jail. Stella was in jail.

  I told him about how Stella was already rotting away in jail, at only fourteen. I'd heard all about it from a girl who used to share a cell with her and had since been set free. Stella was consumed with suicidal thoughts. The only support she was getting was from some female terrorists who were being held in the same jail. Stella had talked to Monika Berberich from the RAF43 a couple of times and had become a fan of hers. A lot of the addicts thought the terrorists were awesome. Some of them had even attempted to join a terrorist group themselves before they washed out on H. When the Schleyer44 kidnapping happened, even I thought it seemed pretty cool. That being said, I was still opposed to any kind of violence; I could never have hurt anyone myself. But all the people in the RAF seemed like they knew what was going on behind the scenes. And maybe they were right. Maybe you needed to resort to violence if you wanted to make a difference in a society like this that was already so totally fucked up.

  Stella's story had a profound effect on my dad. He wanted to get her out of jail and adopt her. I had convinced him that together with Stella I could make it. I could quit heroin and stay clean. That's what he was hoping for, too. It was idiotic, but how could he have known any better? My dad didn't always do the right thing during the time that I lived with him, I'm sure. But still, he did what he could. Just like my mom.

  So my dad barged through the doors of the youth welfare office like a bull chasing red. He finally wore them down and managed to pry Stella out of jail. She was a complete and utter wreck—both physically and emotionally. She was even worse off now than she was before she went to jail. I was still using when she came to live with us—even though I'd planned on getting clean—and I got her to shoot up again with me on the very first day. She would've started using again anyway. We only talked seriously about withdrawing during the first few days. Between the two of us, we figured out a way to get around my dad's rules. We divided up all the chores and then went out and worked the streets in shifts—sticking to the Kurfürstenstrasse, waiting for cars to pull over.