Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. (42 page)

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 who 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.”

“Will you please get off my back?” he whined. “I'm putting extra dope into each packet. People will notice it. And then word will get around that I'm the man they need to see.”

”Whose dope is this, anyway?” I finally asked. It belonged to Piko of course, that slimy little crook. He used to survive on office burglaries. He'd recently gotten out of jail, on probation, and now he wanted to make a quick buck off of Detlef. Detlef, who was always too sweet for his own good. Piko had gotten the dope from some pimps on Potsdamer Street. They were his friends from jail. He got the stuff at dealer rates, but he didn't want to have to deal himself; instead, he wanted Detlef to take
care of it. Piko didn't know the first thing about the heroin scene. He was a drinker.

When Detlef was finished up with his packets, we counted and added up the quarters, halves, and full grams for him. Math was never my strong suit, but I realized before Detlef did that we only had eight grams to sell, all told. He'd put too much in each of the packets, and if he'd sold them like this, he would've had to pay for two grams out of his own pocket.

So we had to go back and redistribute the dope. (I made sure to pocket any scraps that stuck to the papers for my own use later on.) Detlef made bigger foil packets and rolled out the dope with a beer bottle to make it look like a bigger supply. He only packaged halves and actually ended up with twenty-five packets. Not bad.

We shot up two packets to test the supply. It was good shit.

That same night, we took to the entire supply to Treibhaus, but for the moment, we decided to stash most of it. We buried it next to the dumpsters in the back. We never had more than three packets on us at any time. If there'd been a raid, they couldn't have nailed us as dealers. And in the end, it went pretty well. We sold five grams that first night. Word got around that the dope was good and that our portions were decent. Stella was the only one who complained about us. But in the end, even she got on board and asked if she could broker some deals for us. Like an idiot, I let her. For five halves that she sold for us, she got a quarter. But for us, there was nothing left. We didn't get one single penny from Piko for our dealing. If we sold ten grams, we could keep one and a half. And out of that, we still had to pay our own agents. That meant our earnings from dealing only amounted to our own daily requirement of H.

Piko came by every morning to collect his take. On most nights, we managed to bring in about two thousand marks. That
was one thousand marks net profit for Piko because the profit margin from the middleman to the dealer is 100 percent. What we got was our one-and-a-half grams. In the meantime, Piko also didn't have to run hardly any of the risk, unless we ratted him out.

But that had already occurred to Piko, so he'd planned ahead. He threatened that if we ever got arrested and even so much as breathed one word to the police, we might as well go ahead and pick out a coffin that we liked. His buddies from Potsdamer Street would take care of us. And he said that he wouldn't even have to wait until we were out of jail. He had friends everywhere. He also threatened to set his pimps on us if we tried to cheat him of any of his money. We believed every word he said. The pimps had me legitimately terrified. I knew all about what they'd done to Babsi.

But Detlef refused to acknowledge that Piko was ripping us off. He said, “What do you want? The main thing is that you don't have to work as a prostitute anymore. I don't want you to do that ever again. And I don't want to do it either! And what other options do we have?”

Most of the small street dealers didn't fare any better than we did. They could never even get enough cash together to buy ten grams and start their own careers as middlemen. Besides, they didn't have the connections. How could we have gotten access to the pimps and other big-time dealers on Potsdamer Street? The small street dealers—who were all addicts themselves—needed a middleman who could pay them in dope. And the small-timers were always the ones who wound up in jail. Guys like Piko hardly ever got tangled up with the cops. They had an almost endless supply of street dealers to do their dirty work. Almost any junkie was willing to risk some prison time for two shots a day.

After a couple of days spent dealing at Treibhaus, things were already getting too hot for us. There were always undercover cops lurking around. I was having a hard time dealing with the
stress. So we reorganized the whole thing: I kept negotiating at Treibhaus, and Detlef hung around Steglitz Station. Then, when I found a buyer, I'd send him over to Detlef at Steglitz Station.

The next week, when Detlef was back at Treibhaus and had some dope on him, a guy pulled over next to him and asked how to get to Zoo Station. Detlef freaked out and just started running. He threw the dope into the bushes somewhere.

When we met up again later that night, Detlef said he was sure the guy was a cop because nobody in Berlin would have to ask where Zoo Station was.

It was bad. It was like everywhere we turned, we saw a cop— in every car and around every corner at the Ku'damm. We didn't even dare look for the dope that Detlef had thrown away. We thought that the cops would be waiting for us.

We went into the Athener Grill to discuss our next move. We couldn't settle up with Piko the next morning because the dope was gone. And he would never believe our story. Then I got the idea to tell him that we'd been ripped off by some foreigners. We would say that a bunch of them had mugged us and taken all the dope and all our money. I said, “Weird shit's gonna happen with Piko anyway. So we should just spend the rest of the money. It's crazy that we haven't made a single cent while Piko is able to pull in a thousand marks every day. At the very least, I need to buy myself some clothes. I don't have anything for the winter right now. I can't run around all winter in the same clothes that I wore when I escaped from the hospital.”

We weren't born to be dealers. And although Detlef wasn't ready to admit that yet, he did finally agree that it didn't matter whether we gave Piko two hundred marks or nothing at all.

Very early the next morning we went to the flea market. If I liked something, Detlef would try it on first, and then me. We only wanted to buy what we could both wear, so that we
could swap clothes occasionally. I ended up buying a used fur coat that looked really cute on Detlef. Then we bought some perfume, a music box, and other junk. But we just couldn't manage to spend all the cash because we couldn't bring ourselves to buy stuff that was expensive and useless. So we just stashed the rest of the money.

As soon as we walked through the door of Rolf's apartment, Piko showed up. Detlef said that he hadn't had his fix yet and needed to shoot up before cashing out. That wasn't true, of course, since as usual we'd had our fix as soon as we gotten up. But Detlef just wasn't ready to deal with this shit with Piko.

Piko said, “Okay,” and sat down to read a thriller that I had on me. Detlef rammed another quarter into his veins and then passed out without even pulling out the spike first.

It wasn't too surprising that he'd passed out like that because he already had another quarter in his system. I pulled the syringe out of his arm for him because if you just left it in then the blood would clot in the needle, and it would be hard to flush it out again. And this was our last syringe and needle, so that was pretty thoughtless of him, I thought. As I was dabbing the puncture in his arm with a cotton ball, I noticed that he wasn't really resisting me at all. I lifted his arm, and when I let go it just flopped back down, completely limp. I shook him and tried to wake him up, but he just slid out of the armchair. His face was ashen and his lips were blue. I tore open his shirt and tried to find a heartbeat. I couldn't.

I ran out of the apartment and into the hallway, still in just my underwear, but Piko was right behind me: “Don't do anything stupid!” he yelled. I rang the doorbell of a neighbor who had a phone, and told her I had to call the police immediately. I called 911 and said, “My boyfriend's not breathing. He's overdosing.” I had just given the cop the address when Piko came running back and yelled, “Stop, stop, he's conscious again!”