Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F.

by Christiane F

  I didn't care about anything anymore, so getting into strange cars with strange men no longer horrified me. There were four of us at the corner of Kurfürstenstrasse and Genthiner Streets. Besides Stella and me, there were the two Tinas. Apart from their names, they had little else in common. One of them was still a year younger than me, so only just fourteen.

  We always worked in pairs—never less than that at least. When one of us drove off with a customer, the other would write down the license plate number, and we made sure that the driver saw us do it to stop him from getting any funny ideas. That was also a protection against pimps. We weren't scared of cops. The cop cars would drive by, and some of them would even wave. One of them was even a regular customer of mine. He was a strange guy with a lot of funny ideas. He wanted to feel like he was loved. And it was always a chore to explain to him that prostitution was work; love had nothing to do with it.

  He wasn't the only one who was like that either. A lot of them wanted someone to talk to. It was always the same script. How did such a pretty girl like me end up on the street? I really didn't need to do that, and so on. Those were the comments that really got on my nerves. I hated it when people talked like they also wanted to save me. I got real marriage proposals. And all the while they knew full well that they were only taking advantage of our misery, the misery of the addicts, to satisfy their own desires. They were a bunch of fucking liars. They said they could help us, when they already had more than enough problems of their own.

  As a general rule, these were mostly guys who couldn't even manage to deal with professional hookers. These guys had difficulties with women in general, and as a result they preferred young girls. They talked about how frustrated they were with their wives and their families and their whole lives; they complained about how nothing ever changed. Sometimes they even seemed to be a bit jealous of us—of the fact that we were still so young. They wanted to know what we thought was cool, what we were into, what kind of music we liked, what clothes we wore, and what kind of slang we used.

  One guy, almost fifty, was dead set on smoking some weed because he was convinced that that's what all the young people were doing now. So in return for some extra cash, I hiked with him over half of Berlin to find a dealer who had some pot. I'd never noticed it before, and it seemed crazy, but it was true: You could get heroin everywhere, at every corner, but it was almost impossible to find any marijuana. It took us almost three hours to find a dealer who had some. After this customer of mine had smoked his joint, he was ecstatic. It was like his dreams had come true just because he'd managed to smoke some pot.

  Our customers—who were all pretty bizarre in one way or another—broke up into two distinct sets: Some were just weird, but the others were malicious. One of them always insisted that I knock on the steel rod in his leg, which he'd had since a motorcycle accident. And another guy arrived with an official document of some kind or other. It had a stamp on it, and it said that he was infertile. (So obviously he didn't want to use any condoms.) The worst of them was the guy who pretended to be from a modeling agency and wanted to take some sample pictures. In the car, he pulled out a gun and demanded service without pay.

  The ones I liked best were the college students who came trudging over to us on foot. They were pretty inhibited, as a rule.

  But at least you could talk to them. They were mostly interested in talking about how fucked up our society was. Those were the only ones whose apartments I would go to. With the others, I'd do it in the car or in a hotel room. The room would cost the customer an extra ten marks minimum. And they'd put up an extra cot for us, as we weren't allowed to use the freshly made-up double bed. The hotels were the most depressing places ever.

  Stella and I communicated through coded messages on the advertising pillars (the iconic Berliner Litfa säule45) or empty poster walls. This way we always knew when we were changing shifts, what the other one was up to, and what my dad had in store for us when we got home: what new system he was going to implement to keep us under control.

  When I felt run-down and depressed, I sometimes walked into a store that called itself Teen Challenge. They'd set up shop suspiciously close by The Sound—not to mention the Kurfürstenstrasse, the street where all the teen prostitutes hung out—and they were hoping to convert kids just like us. Once you were in their shop, they handed you brochures and books about little, young prostitutes and child addicts in the United States. These were all kids who'd been saved by Teen Challenge and turned on to the righteous path of God. I'd unload my troubles there while drinking tea and eating sandwiches. Then, when they started talking about our dear Lord, I just took off.

  It's funny, because when you stop to think about it, the Teen Challenge people were just as interested in taking advantage of us as everybody else was. They tried to reel us in, because that's when we were the most vulnerable.

  Right next to their basement shop there was a communist group that had managed to set up a storefront. Sometimes I'd stop and read their posters in their shop window. They wanted to completely change society. I liked the idea. But their slogans didn't do anything for me in my situation either.

  Then I'd stroll by the shop windows of the big furniture stores located nearby on the Kurfürstenstrasse. But after a while, I couldn't stop myself from thinking about all of my old hopes and dreams with Detlef. And that just made me feel worse.

  At that point, I was pretty much at the bottom of the heap— even for a longtime addict. If nothing was happening on the street and I wasn't getting any customers, I turned to crime. Just small stuff because I wasn't a born criminal and didn't have the nerves for it. When some junkie pals invited me to come along on a robbery, I chickened out. My most impressive deed to date—which required almost an entire bottle of vermouth beforehand—was when I smashed in a car window with some brass knuckles and stole a boom box. Other than that, I mostly just helped people transport or hide stolen goods. I also worked as a mule, transporting stolen merchandise for lifetime criminals. I put the stolen stuff into lockers at Zoo Station and picked it up again for them, too. For that I got twenty marks, at most. And when it came down to it, that was even more dangerous than stealing. But I'd totally lost all perspective at that point anyway.

  At home, I lied to my dad and fought with Stella. I'd made an agreement with Stella that we'd split everything fifty-fifty: the jobs and the dope. That's what caused most of our fights. Because each of us believed that the other was ripping her off. It doesn't get much sadder than that, I don't think.

  My dad had figured out, of course, what was going on with me. But by that point, he was at a complete loss as to what to do. And so was I. I knew, however, that my parents couldn't do anything to help me anymore.

  I couldn't handle school any longer, even if I just sat there doing nothing. I also couldn't stand sitting around. I couldn't stand anything anymore. I couldn't fool around with customers, I couldn't relax on the scene with my friends, and I couldn't stand being around my dad.

  So it had come to this: end-of-the-world doom and gloom. Thoughts of suicide. I recognized this situation, and I knew that it absolutely couldn't go on this way. But I was still too chicken to give myself the golden shot, the overdose. I was still looking for some way out.

  That's when it occurred to me that I could voluntarily check myself into the asylum. That would be the Bonhoeffer Asylum, or Bonnie's Ranch, as it was called. This was pretty much the last option for a heroin addict. Bonnie's Ranch represented complete and utter horror to every junkie. On the streets, there was a saying: “Better four years in jail than four weeks at Bonnie's Ranch.” Some addicts who were forcibly admitted to Bonnie's after a breakdown would usually come back with horrific stories of their time there.

  But, naïve as I was, I thought that someone would start paying attention to me there, especially if I checked myself in voluntarily and freely submitted myself to this horror. Then the youth welfare office, or whoever, would have to finally notice that I was a teenager
who desperately needed help. And that her parents were completely incapable of helping her. The decision to go to Bonnie's Ranch was like a suicide attempt from which I was secretly hoping to wake up again so that everyone would say afterward: That poor girl. If only we'd taken better care of her. From now on, we'll do better.

  Once I'd made that decision, I went to see my mom. At first she acted pretty distant. I mean, after all, she'd already written me off. But I couldn't help it: Right away I started crying, really crying. Then I tried to tell her my story, sticking to the truth as best as I could. Then she also started crying, and took me into her arms and didn't let me go. We both cried so long, we cried ourselves happy. My sister was also really happy that I was back. We spent the night together in my old bed. And then, after that, I went into withdrawal again. Another, new withdrawal.

  I'd lost count of how many withdrawals I'd been through at that point. If withdrawing was an Olympic sport, I probably would have medaled in it. I didn't know anyone else who'd voluntarily gotten clean as many times as I had. And on top of that, I'd done it even though I knew that it wasn't going to make any difference. My mom took time off from work again and brought me what I needed: Valium, wine, pudding, and fruit. On the fourth day, she took me to Bonnie's Ranch. I really truly wanted to go there since I'd realized in the meantime that I would have just started shooting up again right away.

  As soon as we got there, I was forced to strip naked, and then I was pushed into a bathroom. They treated me like I was a leper. Two bathtubs were already occupied by two clearly insane old women. I was put into the third tub and was told to scrub myself. I had to do it under supervision. I didn't get my own clothes back afterward. Instead, they gave me a pair of underpants that stretched from my rib cage all the way to my knees and that I had to hold onto if I didn't want them to slide off me. And a pretty old granny nightgown. I was taken to the observation ward, where I was the only one under sixty. The ladies there were all very far gone—just totally crazy. There was only one exception. Everyone called her Dolly.

  Dolly was busy all day with one job or another. All on behalf of the ward. She really made herself useful and relieved the nurses of all sorts of work. I talked to her, and she didn't seem insane; she was just a bit slow. I mean her thought process. She'd been there for fifteen years. Fifteen years ago, her brothers and sisters had committed her to Bonnie's Ranch. Apparently, she'd never had any kind of therapy. She'd just always stayed in the observation ward. Maybe because she'd been making herself so useful there. I thought that something was very wrong if someone could be kept on the observation ward for fifteen years just because they happened to be a little bit slow.

  On the first day, wasting no time, a whole team of doctors came in to inspect me. I guess most of the white coats were probably students, who brazenly gave me a once-over as I was standing there in my thin little nightie. The lead physician asked me a few questions, and I answered, very naïvely, that in a few days I wanted to do a therapy program and then go to a boarding school in Western Germany so that I could eventually take the college entrance exams. He kept just saying, “Yes, mm-hm, yes,” the way you would when talking to a lunatic.

  When I was back in bed, I remembered a few jokes about lunatics. I wondered if I'd said or done something wrong that gave them the idea that I was yet another frothing maniac who thought he was Napoléon. I was suddenly scared that I'd never be able to leave the observation ward, just like old Dolly, and would have to doze away the rest of my days in my depressing hospital uniform.

  After two days, I was transferred to B ward since I didn't have any withdrawal symptoms anymore. I got my clothes back and was even allowed to eat with a knife and fork again, instead of just with a baby spoon like in the observation ward. In B ward, there were three more addicts whom I recognized from the outside world. The four of us sat at one table, which one old nut immediately dubbed the “terrorists' table.”

  One of the girls, Liane, had already done a lot of jail time. She said that Bonnie's Ranch was much worse than jail because in jail you could easily get some dope, whereas at Bonnie's Ranch it was almost impossible.

  So far, it was kind of fun on Bonnie's Ranch because there were four of us. Still, I was starting to get a little panicky. The doctors wouldn't give me a straight answer as to when I could leave to start a drug therapy program. All they said was, “We'll see,” and whatever other platitudes they dispensed to the lunatics on a daily basis.

  The agreement with my mom and the youth welfare office was that I'd be at Bonnie's Ranch for four days, to make sure that I was clean. And then I was supposed to get a spot in a therapy program. But I'd already done the withdrawal by myself and had arrived there almost clean. Nonetheless, nobody was talking about my spot in a therapy program anymore.

  The big blow came after a couple of days. They brought me a document, which I was supposed to sign, stating I was voluntarily staying in the asylum for three months. Of course, I refused to sign and said that I wanted to leave immediately. I'd come here of my own free will and could leave whenever I wanted. Then the supervising doctor came and said that if I didn't sign off on staying for three months, he'd commit me to involuntary hospitalization for six months.

  I felt totally conned. I got chills; I was so horrified. The truth hit me like a bolt of lightning: I was completely dependent on these idiotic doctors. I had no idea what kind of diagnosis they were manufacturing for me. They could say I had a severe neurosis or schizophrenia or who knew what. As a patient in an asylum, you didn't have any rights at all. I thought that I was going to become Dolly's heir.

  The worst thing was that I myself wasn't convinced of my own sanity. I already knew that I was neurotic. I had learned through conversation with my drug counselors that an addiction is a neurosis, a compulsive action you can't control. I thought about all the things that I'd done. All those withdrawals I'd gone through, only to start shooting up again as soon as they were over, even though I knew full well that it was the path to my own destruction, and that someday it would lead to my death. I'd fucked up every single thing in my life. I caused other people pain, including my mom. That wasn't normal. So I was kind of a maniac when you thought about it. Now it was just a matter of figuring out how I could hide my craziness from the doctors and nurses.

  The nurses all treated me like an idiot—the same way they treated all the other patients in the ward. I pulled myself together—to an extent that I could hardly believe—and restrained my own impulses so that I stopped reacting in my usual aggressive way when they provoked me. When the doctors came and asked questions, I tried to give them the answers that they wanted to hear (despite the fact that it went completely against my nature to do so). I tried desperately to hide my real self and appear to be someone who was completely and totally “normal.” And once the doctors were gone, I was always convinced that I'd made a mistake and said the wrong thing. I was afraid that they'd seen through me and thought I was crazy for sure.

  The only thing they offered me in terms of rehabilitation was knitting. I couldn't have cared less about knitting, and I didn't think it would help.

  In front of the windows were iron bars, of course. But these weren't the normal kind of bars like you'd see in jail; no, these were nice, ornately curved bars—because this was no jail (obviously). But after a while, I realized that, if you twisted yourself just so, you could get your head through the curves in the bars and get a good look at the outside world. Sometimes I stood there for hours, the iron bars around my neck, just looking around. The season was changing to autumn, the leaves were turning yellow and red, the sun was low in the sky, and, for an hour each afternoon, it shone directly through two trees right in front of the window.

  Sometimes I would tie one of the tin cups to a length of wool thread, let it dangle out of the window, and bang against the house wall. Or I'd try all afternoon to pull a branch close to the window using the wool thread, in order to get at a leaf. At night I thought, If you weren't crazy before, you'
ve certainly gone crazy now. This was the place for it.

  I wasn't even allowed to go into the little garden to walk in circles with the grandmas. Even a terrorist has a right to go outside once a day. Not me though. I was considered a flight risk. And I was. Damn right.

  In an old cupboard, I found a soccer ball. I kept kicking it again and again against a locked glass door, hoping that it would break the glass. But then they took the soccer ball away. Then I rammed the glass with my head. But of course it was made of reinforced glass. I felt like a wild animal in a tiny cage. Like a tiger, I prowled along the walls for hours. Once, I thought I couldn't stand it anymore. I just had to run. And so I just started running. Always up and down the hallway. Until I couldn't take another step and literally collapsed.

  I got hold of a knife, and at night Liane and I scratched and scraped at the putty of a window that was locked but not barred. The glass pane didn't move an inch though. The next night, we took a bed apart and tried to break the bars of an open window. Before we started on this plan, we intimidated the old ladies in the room to such a degree that they didn't dare make a peep. Some of them actually thought we were terrorists. The plan didn't work though since the bars were so strong. And anyway, we made so much noise that the night watch caught on pretty soon.