Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. (21 page)

After a few more misadventures in petty larceny (with supplemental small-time loans), Stella and I decided to go back to working the street, but this time around we were going to be a team. I insisted that we work Zoo Station—but we'd only go with a customer if he agreed to take on both of us. That had several advantages: Although we'd never admit it, this arrangement provided us with a sense of security because we'd be able to see exactly how far the other was willing to go—and stop ourselves short accordingly. We'd always be at the same level. But we also felt safer. With two of us involved, it was harder to rip us off, and we could defend ourselves better if a customer didn't want to stick to the agreement. And it was quicker with two. One of us kept the guy busy up top, the other down below, and the whole thing was over and done much faster.

On the other hand, it was way harder to find customers who could afford to pay for two girls. And there were also all the experienced johns who were simply afraid to deal with two junkie brides at once because it was also easier for us to rip off a customer if we were double-teaming him. While one of us kept him busy, the other could get at his wallet. Stella was the one who liked the arrangement the best—whether it was with Babsi or me. She had more trouble attracting customers by herself because she didn't look as young as we did anymore.

It was the easiest for Babsi. Even when she still had Heinz, she earned some money on the side just to be able to treat us to dope. She never put makeup on her innocent baby face. Without a butt or boobs, and just barely thirteen, she was just the kind of “baby prostitute” the customers were looking for. Incredibly (to us), she once made two hundred marks in just a single hour, with five different customers.

Babsi and Stella blended right into our social group, which of course still included Detlef, Axel, and Bernd. So now we were three girls and three boys. When we went out together, I went arm-in-arm with Detlef, and the other two boys each grabbed one of the girls. There was nothing going on between them. We just all really liked each other. Each of us could still talk about
his or her life and problems with any of the others—despite the many fights we had over little things, just like any other group of heroin friends. During this phase of our lives, heroin simultaneously caused all our problems but also kept us all together. I'm not sure that this sort of friendship, the kind we had in our little group, could exist among kids who weren't addicted to drugs. And in all honesty, that kind of desperate closeness seemed like it impressed a lot of other young people. People looked up to us.

My relationship with Detlef started to get rocky when the two girls joined our group. We still loved each other, but we got into a lot more fights. Detlef was often irritable, so I spent a lot of time with Babsi and Stella, and he didn't really like that. But what really pissed him off was the fact that he didn't have any control over which customers I was going with anymore. I was now picking them on my own, or together with Stella or Babsi. Detlef started to accuse me of having sex with the customers. He was really jealous.

I now had a more relaxed view of my relationship with Detlef. I loved him, of course, and would always love him. On the other hand, I wasn't dependent on him anymore. I didn't need his dope or his protection. Actually, our relationship had become similar to a modern marriage—with no one holding power over the other. We were equals. We girls got used to treating each other to dope when one of us had a little extra, and the guys did the same thing.

But our friendships were still entirely dependent on heroin, when it really came down to it. We all became more and more aggressive from one week to the next. The dope and our frantic lifestyle, the daily struggle for money and H, the constant stress at home, the cover-ups and the lies that we used to fool our parents—it all wreaked havoc on our nerves. It was also getting harder and harder to manage all the little grudges that we'd developed toward one another over time.

I got along best with Babsi, who was still the calmest one of us. We worked together a lot. We bought ourselves the same tight black skirts, with long slits in them. Underneath we wore black nylon stockings with black lace garters. That really turned the customers on.

Shortly before Christmas 1976, my dad went on vacation, and he let Babsi and me sleep in his apartment, along with my little sister. On the first night there, we got into a huge fight. Babsi and I were so nasty to each other that my sister, who was only a year younger than me, started to cry. We really had that street talk down, and it came out in a fight. And my sister of course had no clue about our double lives.

The next morning, Babsi and I were best friends again. It was always the same: After we'd had some sleep and started to come down again, we were usually in a pretty peaceful mood. Babsi and I made a deal to postpone shooting up that morning for as long as possible. We'd tried this out a few times already. It had become a kind of sport, to wait until you couldn't wait any longer to shoot up. However, we couldn't talk about anything else except the awesome high we were about to get, any time we wanted to, with this great, first-class dope. We were like kids on Christmas right before our parents let us open our presents.

My sister knew that something was up. It didn't take her long to figure out that we had some kind of drug. But she didn't have any idea that we were addicted. She thought we were just experimenting. She sincerely promised not to tell my dad or mom, and to keep her mouth shut if someone from Babsi's family came by unexpectedly. Babsi's family was very strict with her, and neither her grandparents nor her parents had the slightest inkling that she was a heroin junkie and a hooker to boot.

Babsi reached into her purse and took out her strawberry-flavored powder called Quarkfein. She had a real addiction to
this stuff, which is a kind of powdered flavoring you can mix into dairy products like cottage cheese. She pretty much lived on cottage cheese with Quarkfein. My diet wasn't much more varied than that: Besides cottage cheese, I also ate yogurt and pudding and Viennese rings, a pastry you could get in the Kurfürstendamm subway station. By that point my stomach would reject pretty much anything else.

So Babsi was mixing up her strawberry-flavored cottage cheese in the kitchen, which was like a religious ritual for her. Meanwhile, my sister and I sat and watched her with appropriate reverence, all of us in happy anticipation of our huge, pink, cottage cheese breakfast. But obviously we weren't going to be able to eat until after Babsi and I had shot up.

When Babsi had whipped the cottage cheese into a really creamy confection, we couldn't stand it anymore. We told my sister that she should go ahead and set the table, and then we went and locked ourselves into the bathroom. We hadn't been there for more than two seconds when the drama started up between us because we were starting to go into withdrawal.

We only had one useable syringe left, and I said that I wanted to shoot up first, just real quick. But Babsi already had an edge on. “Why do you always get to go first? Today I should start. After all, I was the one who got the dope.”

That really rubbed me the wrong way. I couldn't stand it when she tried to gain an advantage like that. There were a lot of times when she'd have more dope than the rest of us, and she would always get like this. I said, “Jesus, don't freak out. It just takes you forever!” It was true. This girl needed like half an hour before she was done. She hardly had any veins left. And when she'd get the needle in and couldn't draw any blood, she'd freak out. She'd slam the needle into her skin again and again, getting more frantic by the minute. The only thing that she could hope for then, that would put a stop to her frenzy, was a lucky hit.

It still went pretty smoothly for me back then. If Detlef didn't do the shot for me—he was the only one I'd let near my veins— then I'd always aim for a spot in the crook of my left arm. That worked well until the day I got a thrombosis there, which ruined that vein for me. But later on, I also got to the point where I didn't know where to stick the needle anymore.

I got my way though—for that morning anyway. Babsi was totally pissed. I got the syringe, immediately hit a vein, and was done in a little over two minutes. It was a really fucking awesome shot. My blood was rushing like a river through my body. I got really hot. I went to the sink, let water run over my face, and then happily, absentmindedly fussed with my hair and clothes.

Babsi sat on the rim of the bathtub, plunging the thing into her arm again and again, and freaking out. “Shit!” she screamed. “Why's there's no air in this dump? Open that damn window!”

I said, “You'll just have to get used to it. Get off my case, will you?” I didn't care at all about what was going on with her. I'd had my shot and everything was okay.

Babsi was squirting blood everywhere, but she wasn't hitting any veins. She was seriously freaking out now. She screamed, “There's no light in this fucking bathroom! Get me some light. Get that lamp from the kid's room.”

I was too lazy to go out and get the lamp for Babsi. But eventually, after she kept going on about it, yelling and generally making a racket, I got worried that my sister would notice and went out to grab the stupid lamp. Then, finally, Babsi did it. She immediately calmed down. She cleaned the syringe and wiped the blood out of the bathtub and off the floor. She didn't say another word.

We went into the kitchen, and by that point, I was really looking forward to the Quarkfein. But Babsi grabbed the bowl, wrapped one arm tightly around it, and started to shovel it in. She actually forced down the entire bowlful of cottage cheese. The only time she even looked up was to say, “You know why.”

We'd both really looked forward to those days together in my dad's apartment, and the first morning had started with the fight of the century. And all of it over nothing. But we were heroin addicts, after all. And all heroin addicts turned out like this sooner or later. Dope destroys relationships among people—even with us. Despite how young we were, and how close we'd been. Despite the fact that, even then, I still believed that no one could ever be as close as we had been.

My fights with Detlef got nastier also. Both of us had physically deteriorated a lot already. I was about 5′5″, but I was down to under a hundred pounds, and Detlef, who was 5′9″, was down to 119 pounds. We felt sick all the time, and then everything got on our nerves, and we were deliberately vicious to one another. When we insulted each other, we always went for the jugular and tried to say whatever would hit the other person at the deepest level. Since we were both so ashamed of what we did with our bodies (and even though we both pretended that hooking was just a part-time thing), prostitution was usually the topic that we focused on.

Detlef would say something like, “Do you really think I want to sleep with someone who sleeps with such nasty scumbags all the time?” And then I'd respond with something like, “I'm not the one who gets buttfucked.” And so on.

Most of the time, one or both of us would end up crying. And when one of us was going into withdrawal, then the other could really tear him or her down—until there was almost nothing left. It didn't make things any better that at some point we'd inevitably huddle together, clinging to one another like two little kids. Things had gotten so bad, between us girls and now also between Detlef and me, that we could see our own miserable, shitty selves reflected in the other. Each one of us hated the rotten mess he or she had become, and therefore attacked that same rotten mess in
everyone else. It was all part of a feeble attempt to prove that we weren't as bad off yet as everybody else.

This aggressiveness would of course also get vented on strangers. I already lost my mind whenever I walked onto a subway platform. They were packed full of old ladies holding onto their shopping bags. To start things off, I'd usually get into a nonsmoking car with a lit cigarette. When the old ladies started muttering under their breath, I told them to switch to another compartment if they didn't like it in this one. I especially enjoyed stealing a seat right out from under one of their noses. The stunts that I pulled would sometimes set off pandemonium in the entire train compartment, and occasionally wound up with me being removed from the train and forced to get some “fresh air.” The way I behaved even got on my own nerves. It also got on my nerves when Babsi and Stella behaved like that. I didn't want to have anything to do with those drab, tedious old people. I didn't even want to be fighting with them. But I couldn't help myself and kept doing it.

I didn't give a shit what strangers thought of me. When I got the itch, when it was bad and I itched all over, then I scratched the itch—no matter where I was at that moment. It didn't matter whether it was under tight clothes or even beneath my makeup: I got at it. It didn't bother me to take my boots off in the subway or lift my skirt up to my belly button if I needed to scratch myself. The only people whose opinion mattered were the people in our clique.

There comes a time when junkies don't care about anything anymore. That's when they start to turn solitary. I knew a few of the old junkies who'd been shooting up for five years or longer and had somehow survived. We had a mixed relationship with the old veterans. To us, these loner types were almost celebrities—but not in a good way. Everybody knew them though, and it made an impression on other people when you could tell them
that you knew one of those guys. On the other hand, I despised them because they were all totally wrecked, ruined, fucked up. Above all, all of us kids were absolutely terrified of them because they didn't have any morals, conscience, or compassion left. They would hit their best friend over the head with a rock if he was standing in the way of a fix. The most infamous one of them all was Rip-Off Man. Everybody called him that because he was the absolute worst and was always on the hunt. When the dealers saw him coming, they scattered quicker than during a police raid. When he got hold of a small-time dealer, he took everything— all of his dope. Nobody dared put up a fight. Least of all some young junkie.