Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. (14 page)

AFTER THAT FIRST SNORT
of heroin, I ran into Detlef at The Sound. He got up in my face immediately: “You've done it now, haven't you! You're completely crazy.” He'd already heard about what I'd gotten into from Astrid.

“You started with it, and now you're already a total junkie. But I'm not going to let that happen to me.”

That shut him up. He wasn't feeling well enough to put up a fight anyway. He didn't have withdrawal symptoms yet because he wasn't yet physically dependent, but he was clearly craving a fix. After some initial stumbling, he finally made his intentions known: He didn't have any cash, but he wanted to find some way to buy a little dope.

I said, “Well, there you go.” And then I suggested that we both go panhandling. He agreed, although he must have known how it would turn out. In twenty minutes, I made about twenty marks. Detlef earned much less. But overall, it did the trick and was enough for both of us (because back then, a very small dose still got us plenty high). We didn't even discuss whether or not I would get some of it. That was just a given. Later that night,
Detlef shot up and I snorted. My resolution to avoid heroin for a month was already shot to hell.

So, suddenly, Detlef and I were back together again, and it was as if we'd never been apart. Neither of us talked about the time when we treated each other like strangers. It just felt right. Things were as good as they'd been when we shared that Sunday dinner together at my place.

Overall, I think I was pretty happy about how everything had turned out. I reasoned that if I hadn't done heroin, then I never would've gotten back together with Detlef. I deluded myself into believing that I would be able to keep on being just a weekend user. Everyone who gets into heroin thinks that way, even though hardly anyone actually manages it. On top of that, I believed I could save Detlef from becoming a junkie. Those were the lies I told myself at the time.

Deep down, I probably knew that I was deceiving myself, even at the very beginning. When someone tried to talk to me about H, I'd freak out. I'd scream at them and tell them to fuck off. I treated people who wanted to talk about it the exact same way I'd treated Astrid when she first confronted me. And I started to hate all the other girls who were my age and looked like they were on a similar path. I could easily pick them out in the subway and at the club, all the little posers with their clumsy attempts at heroin-chic style—twelve- and thirteen-year-old runaways, usually. Even though I was generally very easygoing, seeing those girls really made me aggressive. “That one will definitely wind up on a street corner, begging for a hit,” I'd say to myself. I absolutely hated them. It didn't occur to me at the time that the person I actually hated was myself.

After a few weekends of snorting heroin, I did in fact take a short break. I felt pretty good, and so I decided that it hadn't had any real effect on me. Physically I didn't feel worse. But the old attitudes were all coming back. I didn't care about anything, and
I started fighting with my mom again. That was shortly before spring break, in 1976.

The first Saturday of spring break I went to The Sound and sat down on a bench near the stairs. I didn't really know what my agenda was at the time—or if I had an agenda at all. Two girls came down the stairs—they were about twelve years old, but they had on makeup and bras and were all decked out like they were sixteen. (Incidentally, I also told people who didn't know me already that I was sixteen, and I used makeup to try and support that lie.) I instantly disliked these two girls, but at the same time, they were compelling. I didn't let them out of my sight.

I could tell by the way they moved through The Sound that they were looking to make some connections. They wanted in. There was probably nothing they wanted more than to fall in with the hard-core druggies—with the heroin users. It seemed like they already knew Richie, the cook from The Sound's cafeteria. He was in his late thirties, the only real adult working at The Sound, and he got along well with all the kids. He acted as a kind of father figure for a lot of runaway girls. So those two girls kept up a steady stream of chatter with Richie at the bar. They must have noticed that I was watching them because they kept looking over at me—probably because I was their age. One of them eventually came over. Her face was as innocent as an angel's. She said her name was Babsi and asked if I could give her any LSD.

I said, “Come on, give me a break. What would you want with acid?” I enjoyed this sense of superiority. I felt like I was miles above her and years ahead. She should have known that you couldn't just hit someone up for acid—especially if that person was already on to the next big thing: heroin. She apparently thought I was cool, though, just like I used to think all those other guys were cool, a few months ago, just because they'd tried a bunch of drugs that I hadn't. She said she wanted to buy me a drink and would come right back.

After Babsi walked off, the other one came over. Her name was Stella. She asked what Babsi had wanted. I told her.

Stella asked me, “Did she give you any money? I can't find five marks. I bet that bitch stole it from me.” That was already classic Stella—the exact same person I'd get to know and come to expect in the days that lay ahead. Babsi and Stella were going to become my best friends—that is, up to the point when Babsi made headlines for becoming Berlin's youngest heroin fatality.

Babsi came back with my soda. I hated her, obviously, but at the same time I also found something appealing about her baby-faced naïveté and her straightforward manner. We started talking. Babsi and Stella'd been kicked out of school because they apparently skipped more classes than they attended. They'd started skipping school because they fell in with a group of regular potheads. So now they'd left home and become runaways; they wanted to experience more than what their little pot-smoking group could offer them. Babsi was twelve. Stella was thirteen.

I invited Babsi over to my house the next morning. Since she didn't have much of anything, I gave her two of my old T-shirts and a pair of underpants. After a minute she fell asleep in my bed, and I cooked something to eat. I'd gotten to really like her. The next day, I became friends with Stella, too. The two of them reminded me of the person I'd been just a short while ago. I felt much more comfortable in their company than with those totally wrecked junkies. They smoked pot and dropped acid, but with them I also managed to gain some distance from the more hard-core drugs and all the junkies. I only had my little snort at the club on Saturdays. The others from my clique made fun of me because I spent so much time with these two teenyboppers. But I didn't care.

The three of us had a lot to talk about. We all had pretty similar home lives. Babsi's dad committed suicide when she was still
a child. She said that her mom used to be a dancer in East Berlin and then a model in the West. Her stepfather was supposed to be some kind of pianist. A world-famous artist, she said. She was really proud of her stepfather—especially when, one day, we went into a record store and found a ton of his records. This pianist didn't seem to care very much about his stepdaughter though. As a result, Babsi lived with her grandparents, who'd adopted her. She lived there like a princess. I visited her house later on. She had an awesome room with amazing furniture and a top-of-the-line stereo system, with tons of records. And more clothes than she knew what to do with. But she didn't get along very well with her grandmother, who had a bad temper and a very short fuse. What Babsi really wanted was to live with her mom again. When all the clothes and furniture didn't make up for the way her grandma treated her, she decided to run away.

Like Babsi, Stella had a mom who also happened to be beautiful. Stella loved her, too—but her dad had died in an apartment fire when Stella was only ten. And since then, her mom had had to make do on her own. She didn't have much time for Stella, and she'd started drinking heavily. In those days, Stella was totally obsessed with Muhammad Ali. She was always bragging about how strong he was. In a way, he seemed to replace both her dad and all of her potential boyfriends.

The three of us all came from more or less the same place and were headed in the same direction. Right from the very beginning, I'd known that they wouldn't stop pushing the envelope until they wound up as real, full-blown junkies. But when Stella actually asked me for some H, I was honestly shocked. I couldn't help myself and just started ripping into her: “Stay away from that shit!” I yelled. “Nobody would give you any, anyway. I'm gonna stop using soon, too. It's bad news, trust me.”

So I didn't give Stella anything, and I told the others not to give her any either—not under any circumstances. A few days
later, she still found a way, via Ralph, one of the guys from The Sound, whom she'd just made friends with. And Babsi got in on the act, too, of course.

But for a while after that, they were pretty limited in terms of what they could do. They were picked up during a drug bust and escorted back home. I didn't see them again for a few weeks.

In the meantime, spring had arrived, and it was getting warmer every day. The first sunny days of the year always carried happy memories along with them. Even when I was a kid, I was immediately reminded of running around barefoot, stripping down to my underwear, splashing around in the water, and watching the flowers open up in the garden. Every new spring, I experienced that same rush of joyful memories. But in the spring of 1976, I waited in vain for that feeling of contentment. I thought it was impossible for life to keep dragging along once the sun came out. But even after the spring came I was still lugging all my old problems around with me. I wasn't even sure what I was worried about, or what was bothering me, or what my problems were. I snorted H, and the problems were gone. But the high didn't last anywhere near as long as it used to.

I celebrated my fourteenth birthday in May. My mom gave me a kiss and fifty marks. She'd cobbled it together out of her household budget. I was supposed to buy myself something that would make me really happy.

That evening, I took the subway to where the dealers hung out at the Kurfürstenstrasse. I spent forty marks for a half-gram of heroin. I'd never had so much all at once. For six marks, I also got a pack of cigarettes. I smoked all the time now, sometimes even chain-smoking one after another. I could go through a whole pack in just a couple of hours. That left four marks for The Sound.

I ran into Detlef right after I got there. He gave me a kiss (which was extra sweet) and wished me a happy birthday. I
returned the favor, since his birthday was just two days before mine. He was a little disappointed at the time because his parents didn't even say anything to him on his birthday. Only his grandmother remembered. He had it worse than I did. I tried to console him by saying, “Don't read anything into it, just let it go.” It helped that I also had an awesome present for him. I bought him a fix. I had enough dope to keep us high all the way through to Sunday.

After the double birthday party (which consisted of a huge snort for me and a decent fix for Detlef), we started dating seriously. Until then, Detlef had just gone from one casual date to the next, and I'd spent a lot of my time with Babsi and Stella. Now we spent as much time together as possible. Detlef had just quit his apprenticeship as a pipe fitter and was pretty much always free. When we had enough money, we shot up and got high together.

SUMMER VACATION HAD FINALLY ARRIVED.
On the very first day, Detlef and I and a few others from our group went to the Wannsee public beach, at one of the many lakes in Berlin. We were completely broke, as usual. But it didn't take long for me to learn how to snatch loose-lying valuables and then convert what I'd stolen into cash. We hung around in the back, near the woods, where the older ladies sat. (They were there for the shade because they couldn't handle too much sun anymore.)

First, we started small and just took what we needed. So we'd go to a blanket with a cooler next to it, after the people sitting there had gone out for a swim. Then I'd say, “Where'd grandma go?!” and take a few cans of Coke out of the cooler. Then after that, I swiped a towel and a blanket. And then in the evening, I
was able to grab a boom box and some other little things, and Detlef got a watch.

Back at The Sound, I was able to sell the boom box in no time-and made fifty marks on the deal. It was an awesome day. And the way I saw it, it was only going to get better from that point on. When I had the money in my hand I told Detlef, “Enough of this snorting stuff. Today I'm going to shoot up instead.”

Detlef put up a weak protest, just like he had before. But it was absurd. Whether you got high by snorting your dope or shooting it into your arm, it made no difference, really. The only difference was that when you were snorting, people didn't consider you a real junkie. As long as you were snorting, you could still consider yourself just an “occasional user.”

We went to a hot spot just around the corner, on Kurfürstenstrasse. By now our regular dealer was able to spot us from pretty far away. He started walking over as soon as he saw us and then waited until the coast was clear to actually come and meet us. I bought two quarter-gram packets from him for forty marks. I was finally ready to shoot up. When you snort, it takes a while for the high to take effect. But when you shot up, people said it was like a hammer hitting you. I'd overheard some of the guys in our clique saying it was almost like having an orgasm. Without pausing for even a second, and without considering that this next step would also entail a simultaneous drop into wretchedness, I gave in to my basic, overwhelming desire.