Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. (33 page)

I had to go to the cold turkey room since now they knew I was doped up. There were two others in that room, but one of them hightailed it out of there the next morning. That worked out well for the Narc Anon people because when someone left right away, they still got to keep the full payment for the month.

They gave me some books about the teachings of the Church of Scientology. Some of the stuff I read was pretty incredible. It all sounded okay to me. At least they had some good stories—stories that you could choose to either believe or not believe. So I looked through their books for something that sounded believable.

After two days, they let me leave the cold turkey room since I didn't have bad withdrawal symptoms after only two shots. I was put into a room with someone named Christa. She was certifiable. From the word go, she was resistant to all of their attempts to help her—laughing at the therapists and mocking the therapy in general. She walked into our room and searched the baseboard trim for pills. She was convinced that someone, sometime, must have hidden some acid or pills in there. She took me up to the attic at one point and started talking about how we should bring some mattresses up there, along with some weed and wine, and have an orgy. This woman really depressed me. Even though I knew she was nuts, she made it hard for me to get my mind off drugs, and she was always talking about how the Narc Anon people had “shit for brains.” Meanwhile, I was still trying to take it seriously and get clean.

On day two, my mom called to say that my cat had died. That was my fifteenth birthday. She wished me a happy birthday only after she had given me the news about my cat. She was upset about it, too. After that I spent the rest of my birthday morning sitting on my bed and crying.

When the Narc Anon guys saw that I was crying and couldn't make myself stop, they said that I needed a session. I was locked in a room with a guy who used to be a junkie, and he started right out by giving me a bunch of seemingly useless instructions. I was only allowed to say yes and was supposed to obey every command.

The guy said, “See the wall? Go to the wall. Touch the wall.” And then he'd point to a different wall and start all over again. For what seemed like forever, I was forced to run wall to wall in this stupid room. At some point, I'd had enough and said, “Come on, what is this crap? Are you guys nuts? Leave me alone. I can't handle this anymore.” But he just stared at me with this dumb smile plastered across his face. That smile of his never changed,
never wavered, and after a while he wore me down, and I agreed to keep going. After the wall, he would point to something else, and we would keep going. But finally I couldn't move another step, and I threw myself onto the floor, screaming and crying.

He smiled and I kept going after I'd calmed down. By now I was also smiling that same smile. I was completely unemotional, like a robot. I'd touch the wall even before he'd issued his command. The only thing I kept thinking was that, at some point, it had to end.

After exactly five hours he said, “Okay, that's enough for today.” I actually felt kind of awesome. I had to follow him into another room. Inside there was a funny-looking, homemade instrument—a kind of pendulum between two tin cans. He told me to touch the pendulum. “Are you feeling well?” he asked.

“I feel good,” I told him. “It seems like I'm way more aware of everything I'm experiencing—way more conscious.”

The guy stared at the pendulum and then said, “It didn't move, so you weren't lying. The session seems like it was a success.”

I guess that funny little thing was a lie detector. In any case, I was happy that the pendulum hadn't moved. For me it was proof that I was really doing well. I was ready to believe anything in order to get off of H.

They were doing all sorts of weird things there. When Christa came down with a fever that same evening, they made her touch a bottle over and over again, and every time she did they would ask her if it was hot or cold. In her feverish state of mind, she didn't seem to care though. After an hour of that routine, they declared that her fever was gone.

I was so excited by all this that first thing the next morning, I ran into their office and asked for another therapy session. For that whole first week, I was a 100 percent committed to the program and really bought into the Scientologists' outlook on things. The therapy program ran all day. Conversation, chores, kitchen
duties, etcetera. All day, every day, until 10 p.m. It didn't leave you any time to think.

The only thing that bugged me was the food. I wasn't spoiled or a picky eater—not by any means—but I could hardly swallow the glop they offered up. Plus, I thought that with all the money they were pulling in, they could give us something a lot better. They had almost no other expenses. The sessions were led by former junkies. They were all supposed to have been clean for at least a couple of months, but even these “employees” weren't really paid anything. They were told that it was part of their treatment to lead these sessions, and all they got for compensation was some occasional pocket money. I also didn't like it that the Narc Anon bosses always ate apart from the rest of us. Once, I happened to walk in on them during lunch, and they were feasting on amazing-looking food.

On Sunday, I finally had some time to just sit and reflect. First I thought about Detlef, which made me pretty sad. Then I took a minute to think long and hard about my options after I was finished with this therapy program. I asked myself if the sessions had actually helped me. I had all these questions but no real answers. I wanted to talk to somebody, but who could I go to? One of the first rules of the house was that making friends was not allowed. And the Narc Anon people immediately slapped you with another session if they heard that you wanted to talk about your problems. I suddenly realized that I'd never really talked to anyone the whole time I'd been at this place.

Monday morning I walked into the office and let loose. I didn't let anyone interrupt me. I started with the food. Then I said that almost all my underwear had been stolen. You could never get into the laundry room because the girl who had the key kept disappearing—probably to go shoot up herself. Speaking of which, there were a few patients who ran off to score heroin
and shoot up and came back whenever they wanted to. I told them that all this stuff threw me off and made me feel defeated. And then there were the chores. I was totally exhausted because I never had enough time to sleep and rest up. I said, “Okay, your sessions are pretty effective—I really like them. But the thing is, they're not solving my actual problems. Because everything is just one big drill. You're just drilling us into submission. But I also need someone whom I can sometimes talk to about my problems. And anyway, I need some time alone, too, every once in a while, where I can just relax and think.”

They heard me out (smiling the whole time, as always), but they didn't even try to offer a response. When I was finished, they just prescribed an extra all-day session for me. After that, I was completely defeated, totally apathetic. And I thought, Well, maybe they do know what they're doing. When she visited, my mom told me that Social Services was reimbursing her for the cost of the Narc Anon program. So I reasoned that if the government was willing to pay for this, then it must be an okay program.

There were other people in the house who had it way worse than I did. Gabi, for example. She had a crush on some guy in the building and was desperate to sleep with him. Being the naïve moron that she was, she told the Narc Anon bosses about it right away and was promptly prescribed an extra session. And when she did have sex with the guy, it came out, and the two of them were exposed and ridiculed in front of everybody. Gabi ran out on the program that same night, and we never saw her again. The guy, who apparently had been clean for a few years and who worked there as an assistant, bailed on the operation a little later on. It sounded like he'd reverted back to his old ways.

The Narc Anon people weren't actually that concerned about the sex—it was really just relationships that they were afraid of. But that guy'd been there for over a year, and how are you supposed to last that long without any friendships?

During the short amount of free time we had late at night, I hung out with the younger crowd. I was the youngest person in the entire house. But in our little friend group that came together, nobody was seventeen yet. It was around about this time that the first wave of addicts came in who had first starting using when they were literally kids. After one or two years, they'd become just as devastated as I was; the younger you were, the more the poison seemed to affect you. Like me, there was no way they would be accepted by any of the other programs.

Almost all of these new admissions struggled with the methods here just as badly as I had. When two of us—the younger ones, I mean—were together, the whole session dissolved into chaos. How could you stay serious for long, anyway, when you were supposed to yell at a soccer ball or stare into each other's eyes for hours on end? There wasn't any need to worry about the lie detector anymore because we'd readily admit that the session hadn't done anything for us anyway. I guess that wasn't true because it made us laugh, but that was it. The poor session leaders were totally at a loss when they had to work with us.

At the end of the day, there was just one thing we talked about now: H. I started making plans to leave.

After two weeks at Narc Anon, I'd figured out an escape plan, and it worked: Two boys and I disguised ourselves as the “great housecleaning platoon.” With a garbage can, a mop, and a bucket, we got through all the doors. The three of us were blissfully happy. We almost peed our pants in our giddy anticipation of shooting up. At the subway station we went our separate ways. I was headed to Zoo Station, to see Detlef.

Detlef wasn't there but Stella was. She almost fainted when she saw me. She said that nobody had seen Detlef lately, and I was afraid that he'd landed in jail. Stella said that Zoo Station was in a real depression, so we went to the boulevard at Kurfürstenstrasse
instead. Things were dead there, too. We made our way from the subway stop at Kurfürstenstrasse up to Lützow Place before someone finally pulled over beside us. We recognized the car and the guy inside it. He'd followed us before—and one time he even stuck around when we went to a public bathroom to shoot up. We always thought he was an undercover cop, but apparently he was just a customer who had a thing for young heroin junkies.

He only wanted me, but Stella came along for the ride.

I said, “Thirty-five for a blow job—and I won't do anything more than that.”

He said, “I'll give you a hundred marks.”

I was blown away. That was totally unprecedented. Even the customers in the biggest, brightest Mercedes had a fit over a mere five marks. And this guy, in a dinged-up rusty old VW, was volunteering to give me a hundred. After a minute, he said that he was an officer in the Federal Intelligence Service—so in other words, he was probably full of shit. But these kinds of cocky, conman types were also some of my best clients back at Zoo Station because they liked to puff themselves up by throwing money around. He really did give me a hundred marks though.

Right away Stella found us some dope, and the first thing we did was give ourselves a shot, right there in the car. We drove over to the Pension Ameise, a small hotel. Stella waited in the hallway outside. I took my time with this guy because I was super high from my first fix in two weeks, but also because he had paid a pretty decent amount. I was so doped up that I didn't want to get up off the narrow cot in that grubby hotel room.

I talked with the guy for a little bit afterward. He was a funny kind of show-off. At the end, he said that he had half a gram of heroin, and that he would give it to us if we would come back to the Kurfürstenstrasse in three hours. And then, after that, I managed to squeeze even more out of him—another thirty marks.
I said we needed the money to get some good food for a change. I told him that I had never been fooled by his VW. I knew it was a cover-up, and that he was rich since he was working in intelligence. So he couldn't very well say no then. He had to hand over the cash.

Stella and I went back to Zoo Station because I was still hoping I'd be able to find Detlef. Suddenly this small, shaggy, spotted dog ran over and jumped up on me. I must have reminded the dog of someone. I thought the dog was unbelievably cute. It looked like a sled dog that had shrunk a few sizes in the wash. A couple seconds later, this ratty, disheveled old guy came after the dog and actually asked me if I wanted to buy it. I did. He wanted seventy marks, but I talked him down to forty. I was high—both on dope and due to the fact that I finally had a dog again. Stella thought I should call it Lady Jane. I decided to go with Janie.

We ate pork chops with vegetables and potatoes at a restaurant in the Kurfürstenstrasse, and Janie got the leftovers. The intelligence officer really did come by, right on time, and he gave me a real half of a gram. I couldn't believe it. This half-gram was worth a hundred marks.

Stella and I then went and paid one last visit to Zoo Station in the hopes of finding Detlef. We ran into Babsi instead, and I was so, so happy to see her because despite all of our fights, I liked her a lot—even better than Stella. The three of us went into the station café and sat down. Babsi looked terrible. Her legs were like matchsticks, and her chest had completely flattened out. She said she weighed sixty-six pounds. Only her face was as beautiful as always.

I told them about Narc Anon and how cool it had been over there. Stella didn't want to hear anything about it. She said she was born to be a junkie and that's the way it was always going to be. Babsi, however, was totally into the idea of the two of us
going to Narc Anon together and quitting H for good. Her parents and grandma had also unsuccessfully tried to find a place in a rehab program for her. Babsi was couch surfing again, but she really wanted to quit. She was in a horrible state.

Once we'd all caught up, I took Janie into Metro, an expensive but still pretty underwhelming store in the station that stayed open at night for a while. I bought two bags of dog food and a whole bunch of instant pudding for myself. Then I called Narc Anon to ask if I could come back. They said yes. I said that I'd be bringing along a girlfriend but didn't let on that the friend was Janie.