Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F.

by Christiane F

  The three foreigners, however—who had their arms around each other's shoulders in a very collegial fashion—were unim-pressed. Stella then suggested we just cut and run. At first, I was all for it because it would be easy in my flat-soled shoes. (It was the first time in at least three years that I had worn flats, incidentally. I'd borrowed the pair from my sister.) But then I had second thoughts. I said, “We'll probably run into them again sometime, and then we'll be in for it.” I'd forgotten that this was supposed to be my last afternoon out here.

  Stella was pissed. She stopped and waited for the foreigners to catch up, and then she tried once again to get them to stick to the original deal. We were just passing under the stairs of the Europacenter, and after a pause I noticed that it'd gotten very quiet behind us. I turned around and Stella was gone. It was as if she'd been swallowed up by the earth. And the dope had gone with her. The three customers noticed this as well, and they looked pissed.

  This was typical Stella. I was fuming. Suspecting that she had to have disappeared into the Europacenter, I sprinted up the stairs of the pedestrian bridge toward the center with Detlef right behind me. The two Tinas didn't get away though. The foreigners had grabbed them. When we got inside the complex, I went to the left and Detlef went to the right, running like lunatics. Not a trace of Stella. And now Detlef was gone, too, and on top of that, I felt guilty because of the Tinas. In the distance I could see them being dragged into a hotel by the Turks, and I had to wait for hours outside, all alone, until they finally came back. At that point, they at the very least deserved to get their share of the dope.

  I had an idea where to find Stella. The Tinas and I took the subway to the Kurfürstendamm station. There wasn't much happening there because around this time of day the action moved to the club down the street. But we knew where to look and made a beeline for the station's bathrooms. As soon as we were through the door, I heard her. She was yapping at someone. This bathroom had a lot of stalls, but it was easy to find her. I banged against the stall door with my fists and yelled, “Stella, open this door right now, or else.”

  The door flew open immediately and out she came. Little Tina slapped her across the face. But Stella, flying high, just said, “Here, here's your dope. I don't want any of it.” And with that, she was gone.

  That was bullshit, of course. Stella had shot up a good quarter gram right away, just so that we couldn't get at it. But the two Tinas and I threw the remaining quarter in with the dope that we'd just bought and divided it all fairly amongst ourselves.

  For me, it was more than enough. In fact, I had trouble getting up again from the toilet. We went to Treibhaus—the club down the street. There was Stella, doing her thing. She was negotiating with a dealer. We got right in her face and told her to give us the half-gram that she had taken. She coughed it up without a fuss. So she did feel a little guilty after all.

  But I still let her know my mind. “You're a piece of shit, Stella. I never want to see you or have anything to do with you ever again.”

  In the club, I shot up my share of Stella's dope and got myself a Coke. I sat alone in a corner. It was the first time since the beginning of this afternoon that I'd had some quiet time. For a moment, I was hoping that Detlef would turn up again. But at that point, it was too late: I'd started to do some thinking.

  It all started harmlessly enough. I thought to myself, This is all so fucked. First your boyfriend ditches you, and then your best girlfriend rips you off. Friendships just can't exist among addicts. You're completely alone. You're always alone. Everything else is in your imagination. That whole terror this afternoon over just one shot. And what good did that shot do you. It wasn't anything special. Every day there's some new kind of terror. And for what?

  It was a moment of real lucidity. I did have lucid moments sometimes—but only when I was on H. When I was sober, I was completely unreliable and irresponsible (as this day, among others, proved so clearly).

  I sat there and continued to reflect on my existence. It wasn't at all dramatic. I was very calm about it—in fact, I couldn't have gotten animated even if I wanted to, with all that heroin in my system. I decided that there was no way I would be going back to the hospital. I mean, it was already after eleven o'clock.

  I would've been kicked out anyway, and no other hospital would've taken me in. The doctor had told my mom that my liver was about to go into cirrhosis.46 If I kept on going like this, he estimated that I had two years left to live—at most. As for the drug counseling center at the university, they were done with me. There was no point in even trying to call them since they would have heard all the news about me from the hospital. They were right not to take in someone like me. After all, there were plenty of addicts in Berlin who sincerely wanted therapy, and not everyone could get a spot. It made sense that they would only work with the people who wanted to help themselves out of their condition and who had enough willpower to really do it. I obviously was not such a person. I had probably started shooting up a bit too early to ever get clean again.

  I was thinking very clearly. I looked soberly at the facts of my life and sipped on my Coke. Where should I go tonight? My mom would've slammed the door in my face. Or she would've called the police the next morning to pick me up and put me into a home. That's what I would've done if I was in her shoes. My dad was in Thailand. Stella and I were over. And Detlef—I didn't even know where he was sleeping that night, or with whom. If he was serious about getting clean, then he'd be at his dad's. And if that was the case, then he'd be gone again soon anyway. So I didn't even have a bed. Not for that night, and not for the next night either.

  The last time I'd done some sober thinking, I'd come to the conclusion that I had two options: I had to either quit H for good and all, or I had to give myself the golden shot. The first option seemed like it was out. Five or six relapses were all the evidence I needed anyway. I was no better and no worse than any of the other addicts. Why should I of all people belong to the lucky subset of people who were able to get away from heroin? I was nobody special. I went onto the Ku'damm and took the subway to the Kurfürstenstrasse. I'd never done any whoring on the Kurfürstenstrasse at night. Girls avoided it at night because that's when the pros took over. I wasn't afraid though. I quickly did two customers and took the subway back to Treibhaus. With a hundred marks in my hand, I bought myself half a gram.

  I didn't want to use the bathroom in Treibhaus for my shot or the one at Kurfürstendamm. There was too much activity over there at night. I got myself another Coke and thought about where I could go. The toilets at the Bundesplatz came to mind. There wasn't a soul there at night. Even in the mornings it was usually pretty quiet.

  So I made my way over there. I wasn't panicking. I was totally calm. There's something really creepy about empty public bathrooms at night. But somehow I felt sheltered and safe when I got there. It was clean and bright. I had the whole place to myself. The bathrooms at the Bundesplatz are the best ones in Berlin. The toilet stalls are huge. There was one time when we crammed six of us into one stall. There's no space between the bottom of the doors and the floor, and there are no holes drilled into any of the walls. Because it was so nice and private, quite a few addicts had already killed themselves over here.

  No old ladies, no peeping toms, and no cops. So there wasn't any rush. I took my time. I washed my face and brushed my hair before I cleaned the syringe that I'd borrowed from Tina. I was sure that half a gram would be enough. After the last few withdrawals of mine, a quarter of a gram had been sufficient to knock me out. And I already had more than a quarter in my system. My body was also pretty worn down from the jaundice. I would've rather had a whole gram though. Atze had done it with a full gram. But I couldn't face doing another two customers.

  So with peace in my heart, I picked out the cleanest stall. I felt really calm. I wasn't scared. I'd never thought that committing suicide would be so prosaic. I didn't think about my past life. I didn't think about my mom. I didn't think about Detlef.
I only thought about the shot.

  I spread my stuff out around me in the stall like I always did. I put the dope on the spoon (another thing I'd borrowed from Tina), and suddenly realized that I, too, had ripped off Tina. She was sitting at Treibhaus right now, waiting for me to come back with her syringe and spoon. But there was nothing I could do about it now.

  I'd forgotten to bring some lemon, but the dope was good and dissolved without it. I looked for a vein in my left arm. It was just like with every other shot I'd ever done, with the sole difference being that this was supposed to be my last one. On the second try, I hit the vein. I could see blood. Then I banged the whole half-gram into my arm. I didn't get a chance to pull back the plunger and shoot in the remainder. What I felt was how it first tore through my heart and then absolutely exploded through the roof of my brain.

  When I woke up, it was light outside. The cars were making a huge amount of noise. I was lying next to the toilet. I pulled the plunger and the needle out of my arm. When I wanted to stand up, I realized that my right leg was somehow paralyzed. I could move it a little, but it made the joints hurt like hell. Especially my hip joint. Somehow I managed to open the stall door. I crawled at first, but then I pulled myself up. I could hop along the wall on my one good leg.

  When I came out of the bathrooms, there were two boys out in front, both about fifteen or so. Satin jackets and skintight jeans. Two young gay boys. I was glad that they were gay. They literally caught me as I came hopping out of the bathrooms, looking like a ghost. They immediately figured it out and one of them said, “Jeez, what the hell were you thinking?” I didn't know them, but they'd seen me at Zoo Station a couple of times. The boys brought me over to a bench. It was a freezing cold October morning. One of them gave me a Marlboro. I thought, Funny that these gay hipster-types are always smoking Marlboros or Camels. Must be because of all the attractive guys in the ads. Somewhere inside me, I was kind of glad that it hadn't worked with the half gram.

  I told the boys the story of how Stella had ripped me off and explained that afterward I'd shot up a full half gram. They were very sweet and asked if they could take me anywhere. The question bugged me because I didn't want to have to think. I said that they should just let me sit on the bench. But I was shivering with cold, and they thought I should go see a doctor since I couldn't even walk.

  I didn't want to go to any doctor. They said that they knew a really cool doctor, a gay guy, who could help me out. It reassured me that the guy was gay because in a situation like this I trusted them more. The boys hailed a cab and took me over to see this guy. It was just like they said: He was really cool. He let me lie down on his bed and examined me. He wanted to talk to me about heroin abuse and other stuff like that, but I didn't feel like talking to anyone. I asked him for some sleeping pills. He gave me one sleeping pill and some other medication as well.

  Almost immediately afterward, my nose started to bleed again, and I started to run a fever. I slept for the next two days. When my brain started working again on the third day, I couldn't stand it anymore. I didn't want to think. I had to really pull myself together and work at it just to keep from going crazy. I was obsessed with just two thoughts: (1) God wasn't ready for me to quit yet. And (2), the next time you try something like that, be sure to take a full gram.

  I wanted to get outside, out onto the heroin scene. I wanted to shoot up, wander around from person to person and group to group, and not think about anything again, until it was time to end things for real. I still couldn't walk normally. The doctor was really worried about me. When he realized that he couldn't hold me back anymore, he got me some crutches. I hobbled off on the crutches and then threw them into the bushes somewhere along the way when I got close. I didn't want people to see me with crutches. If I pulled myself together, I could still move around.

  I struggled over to Zoo station and made arrangements with a few johns pretty quickly. One of the sessions was with a foreigner, but I didn't care anymore about the taboo of not doing foreigners. I didn't care what Stella and Babsi would have thought. I didn't care about anything.

  Maybe I was still hoping against hope that my mom would come looking for me. If she'd been looking for me, she would have come here. That's why I probably didn't go to Kurfürstenstrasse. But I knew in my heart of hearts that no one was looking for me anymore. And for a moment, I remembered how wonderful it was when my mom was still concerned about me.

  I bought dope, shot up, and went back to the station. I needed money in case I couldn't find a customer who would invite me to spend the night with him.

  At the station, I met Rolf, Detlef's regular from before. In those days, I spent lots of weekend nights at his place. As it turned out, Detlef had been staying with Rolf again over the last few weeks, but Rolf wasn't a customer anymore. He'd been shooting dope for a while now, too, and was at the station looking for customers. He didn't have an easy time finding johns since he was already twenty-six.

  When I asked Rolf about Detlef, Rolf started crying. Detlef was in a therapy program, and now that he was gone, Rolf was absolutely distraught. He felt like life was meaningless; he wanted to withdraw, too, and he kept talking about how much he loved Detlef. He wanted to kill himself.

  All in all, it was the usual junkie soap opera. All this talk about Detlef kind of pissed me off. I didn't get why this rundown, sorry excuse for a man thought he had any claim to Detlef. He actually, in all seriousness, wanted Detlef to quit and come back to join him. He'd even given Detlef a key to his apartment. When I heard that, I lost it: “God you're such a dick,” I told him. “Giving Detlef a key to your place and encouraging him to abandon his plan to get clean? That's so selfish. If you really cared about him, then you'd do everything you could to support him right now. You're unbelievable.”

  Rolf was already in withdrawal, so it was easy for me to humiliate him. But then I realized that I could probably stay at his place if I played my cards right, so I forced myself to be more pleasant. I told him that if he'd let me crash at his place, I'd go off with a john myself and buy some dope. Rolf could not have been happier as it turned out—and I guess that sort of makes sense since Detlef and I were the only people that he knew in Berlin.

  That's how I came to share his big French bed with him. We actually got along great when Detlef wasn't there. He grossed me out, but in the end he was just kind of a sad, pathetic character.

  So there we were, Detlef's two lovers, lying together in a big French bed. It was the same thing every night: Rolf would start blabbering about how much he loved Detlef, and then he would cry his eyes out before he went to sleep. That whole act got on my nerves, but I didn't say anything. I needed that spot in Rolf's bed. I didn't even say anything when he bragged about how he wanted to furnish a nice apartment for Detlef once they were both clean and sober. I didn't give a shit, but I guess I was paying the price, in a way, for my previous crimes because what had happened to Rolf was really our fault. If he hadn't met us, he would've stayed a poor, lonely crane operator, who occasionally drowned his sorrows in alcohol.

  Things went on like this for a week. Whoring, shooting up, whoring, shooting up, and at night, Rolf's lovesick chatter. Then one morning I woke up earlier than usual, just as someone was unlocking the front door and banging stuff around in the hall. I thought it was Rolf, so I yelled at him to shut up and let me sleep. But then I saw Detlef.

  We grabbed a hold of each other and didn't let go—until it suddenly dawned on me why he was here: “Oh no,” I said. “Did they kick you out?” He nodded and then explained why.

  Like all the other people who had been newly admitted, Detlef had been given three weeks of early morning wake-up duty as his first chore. It's almost impossible for any heroin addict to show up anywhere on time. To wake up every morning at the same time and immediately jump into action is just about the most difficult thing for an addict to do. That's exactly why they demanded this of the new arrivals, to make sure that the few available spots were given to those w
ho really had the strength and willpower to make it. Detlef, in any case, couldn't do it. He overslept three times and was sent packing.

  Detlef told me that he'd actually liked it in the program. It was tough, but he would be able to make it the next time. Now his goal was to stay clean as best as he could, and then try once again for a spot in a therapy program. He said there'd been a few people there that we knew pretty well, like Frank, for example. Frank was there because his friend Ingo had recently died. He'd been fourteen, just like Babsi.

  I asked Detlef what he wanted to do, and he said, “First thing, score some dope.” I asked him to bring me back some. Two hours later, Detlef returned. He'd brought a former customer with him, a guy named Piko. Piko reached into his pocket, pulled out a plastic bag, and set it on the table. I thought I was seeing things. It was full of dope. Ten grams. Never in my whole life had I seen that much heroin. After I was done gaping at it in disbelief, I asked Detlef, “Did you lose your mind? Ten grams, here in the apartment?”

  He said, “Definitely not. I'm a dealer now.”

  I asked, “Did you think about the cops? If they catch you, you'll go straight back to jail. You'd wind up doing serious time. It could be a few years.”

  Detlef said, “I don't have time to worry about cops right now. First I need to make sure that I can make a living. So just let it go. Stop badgering me.”

  He started to measure off small quantities with his pocket-knife and gathered little piles of the stuff on bits of foil paper. I could see that the pieces of foil were way too small. I said, “Listen to me. People are just begging to be ripped off. You have to take larger pieces of foil, put the same amount of dope in it, and then roll it out so it looks bigger. People trust what they see, and they don't look too carefully either. Think of the candy at movie theaters. Gigantic boxes, but they're always never more than two-thirds full.”