Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. (38 page)

The guy who lived in the apartment where Babsi was found seemed innocent enough. He was an okay guy. I knew him pretty well from before. He was a little weird—but kind of funny— and he had a lot of cash. He liked to surround himself with very young girls. He'd once given me a ride through the city in his sports car, invited me to dinner, and then given me some money. But he would only sleep with a girl if she was actually interested in him. So it never went any further with me. I wasn't interested.

Even though the guy was a businessman, he never seemed to realize that all the young girls he chased after were also running their own kind of business.

I decided to go to Kurfürstenstrasse, where there was never any shortage of girls or clients. My plan was to make as much money as I could so that I could buy dope from all kinds of sleazy dealers and then test it to figure out who was selling the deadly shit that was killing all these girls. But then I just flitted around the drug scene, scored dope from a couple of guys, and succeeded only in getting super high. It wouldn't have made a difference anyway: Nobody seemed to know who had sold Babsi her last shot.

Obviously, my plan to find Babsi's “killer” was just an excuse to get as high as I could. It was a way of taking my foot off the brakes. I was telling myself, “You've got to find that scumbag, even if it kills you.”

That's the point when I stopped worrying about how anything would look to anyone else. I just wanted to get high.

I didn't bother putting on an act for my dad anymore. He'd known something was up for a long time already. I think he was just waiting for proof. And he wouldn't have to wait long to get it.

One night when I'd used up my morning's supply of H prematurely and couldn't get away (because my dad was home), I called Heinz and told him to meet me in Gropiusstadt. My dad surprised Heinz and me in front of the Hungry Woodpecker. Heinz barely managed to clear out in time. But after a determined search, my dad found the dope that Heinz had given me.

I confessed everything right away—including the developments with Heinz. I didn't have it in me to lie anymore. My dad forced me to make a date with Heinz for the next day. We set up a meeting at the park, where he was supposed to give me dope again. Then my dad called the cops, told them everything, and demanded that they arrest Heinz during his meeting with me. The cops told him that they'd have to conduct a real raid at the park, and that sort of thing was impossible to organize on such short notice. They weren't that interested in going after this kind of “cradle-robber”—as my dad referred to Heinz—because it just created too much trouble for them. But of course I was hugely relieved that I didn't have to play the role of a police informant.

I always thought that my dad would beat me half to death if he found out how much I was getting away with. But it wasn't like that at all. He seemed desperate. Almost like my mom. He spoke to me very gently. He'd finally figured out that you can't quit H just like that, even if you seriously want to. However, he was still hopeful that somehow he'd be able to help me work through it.

The next day, he locked me into the apartment again and took my dog, Janie, with him. I never saw Janie again after that. I started going into withdrawal in a very bad way. By the middle of
the day, I already felt like I was dying. That's when Heinz called. I begged him to bring me some dope. Since he couldn't even get into the building without a key, I came up with the idea of letting down a rope out the window. I finally convinced Heinz to do it, but in exchange he wanted me to write him a love letter and lower the letter down to him along with a pair of my panties. He never gave out dope without getting something in return. After all, he was a businessman.

So I looked through the apartment for anything that resembled a rope. Kitchen string, plastic laundry line, a belt from a bathrobe, etcetera. I had to tie dozens of knots and keep testing the length, until the makeshift knotted rope could reach down to the ground from the eleventh floor. Then I scribbled out the letter as best I could without the aid of any dope.

Heinz announced himself with the signature doorbell ring that we'd agreed upon. I grabbed a pair of panties (a pair that I'd embroidered myself) out of the wardrobe, stuffed it, along with the letter, into the plastic cover for my hair dryer, and sent the mail down through the window. It worked. At the bottom, Heinz put in the dope. Meanwhile, a bunch of people had started paying attention to this strange little game of ours. But it didn't seem to faze Heinz, and I definitely didn't care what other people thought. I just wanted to get high. But when a little boy leaned out of a window on the ninth floor and tried to grab the string, I lost it. I screamed at him and swung the rope away. I was terrified about losing my heroin.

After an eternity, I finally managed to haul it all inside, and I was just about to cook up the dope when the phone rang. It was Heinz. There'd been a misunderstanding. He wanted a pair of panties that hadn't been washed yet. I had the dope and, in a way, I didn't care about anything else. But I knew that he would keep at it if I didn't give in, so I reached down to the bottom of
the hamper and threw the oldest pair of panties I could find out of the window. It landed in a shrub. At first Heinz ran away, but then he snuck back to fish his prize out of the bushes.

Heinz was a total perv. As I found out later, while I was lowering my panties down to him with a rope, he already had an arrest warrant out on him. The cops just hadn't had the time to come and pick him up yet. And his lawyer had already told him how bad things looked. But when it came to girls, Heinz didn't care. He would risk everything.

I had to appear as a witness at his trial, and I told the truth. Honestly, Heinz didn't matter to me anymore than any other customer. But despite that, it wasn't easy for me to testify against him; I felt sorry for him. He wasn't any worse than my other customers. I just felt bad for him because he was literally addicted to girls. If anything, he should've been put in a psychiatric ward rather than in a jail.
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Heinz's dope just about lasted for the couple of days that my dad kept me locked up. Then, when he left the front door unlocked one day, I took off. I managed to bum around on people's couches for an entire week before my dad found me and took me home again. I was sure that he was going to give me a serious beating. But instead, he just seemed to sink deeper into his own brand of despair.

I told him that I couldn't do this by myself. There was no way anyone could if she was completely alone all day. Babsi was dead. Detlef was in jail. Stella was in jail.

I told him about how Stella was already rotting away in jail, at only fourteen. I'd heard all about it from a girl who used to share a cell with her and had since been set free. Stella was consumed with suicidal thoughts. The only support she was getting was from some female terrorists who were being held in the same jail. Stella had talked to Monika Berberich from the RAF
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a couple of times and had become a fan of hers. A lot of the addicts thought the terrorists were awesome. Some of them had even attempted to join a terrorist group themselves before they washed out on H. When the Schleyer
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kidnapping happened, even I thought it seemed pretty cool. That being said, I was still opposed to any kind of violence; I could never have hurt anyone myself. But all the people in the RAF seemed like they knew what was going on behind the scenes. And maybe they were right. Maybe you needed to resort to violence if you wanted to make a difference in a society like this that was already so totally fucked up.

Stella's story had a profound effect on my dad. He wanted to get her out of jail and adopt her. I had convinced him that together with Stella I could make it. I could quit heroin and stay clean. That's what he was hoping for, too. It was idiotic, but how could he have known any better? My dad didn't always do the right thing during the time that I lived with him, I'm sure. But still, he did what he could. Just like my mom.

So my dad barged through the doors of the youth welfare office like a bull chasing red. He finally wore them down and managed to pry Stella out of jail. She was a complete and utter wreck—both physically and emotionally. She was even worse off now than she was before she went to jail. I was still using when she came to live with us—even though I'd planned on getting clean—and I got her to shoot up again with me on the very first day. She would've started using again anyway. We only talked seriously about withdrawing during the first few days. Between the two of us, we figured out a way to get around my dad's rules. We divided up all the chores and then went out and worked the streets in shifts—sticking to the Kurfürstenstrasse, waiting for cars to pull over.

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 säule
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) 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.