Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. (46 page)

My revulsion against guys went so far that I wouldn't let anyone touch me. Their “rules” were disgusting. According to them, a boy had the right to start kissing and feeling up a girl after their second date. And the girls went along with it, even if they didn't have the slightest interest in the guy who had asked them out. They went along with it because those were the rules. And because if they didn't, they were afraid that the guy would dump them, and then the guys would all talk about what a frigid bitch she was.

I just couldn't do that. I didn't want to. Even if I really liked a boy and started going on some dates with him, I made it very clear right from the start, “Don't ever try any funny stuff with me. Don't touch me. If something's going to happen between us, then I will be the one to start it.”

In the six months since I'd first left Berlin, I hadn't had one serious boyfriend. Up to that point, every friendship had ended abruptly—as soon as the boy tried to sleep with me. As soon as I said no.

Even though I'd gotten away from drugs and my old life, my past was still with me. Even though I imagined that the business of prostitution didn't have any real connection to me anymore, that it was only an unavoidable side effect of my heroin addiction, it still played a major role in the way I dealt with boys. The way they usually behaved just reinforced my impression that men just wanted to use me and take advantage of me.

I tried to communicate something of my past experiences to the girls in my class without being too explicit. But I never got my message through to them. The only thing that changed was that now I became a sort of “Dear Abby” type in my class and had to listen to all kinds of problems and offer my advice because they did pick up on the fact that I was, somehow, a little more experienced than they were. But still, they never understood what I was really trying to tell them.

Most of the girls were obsessed with boys. They didn't think there was anything wrong with all the cruelty and even violence that was part and parcel of their relationships. When a guy stood up his girlfriend to go out with a different girl, she didn't get pissed at the guy; instead, they developed a grudge against the new girlfriend. That new girl was immediately transformed into a cow, a bitch, a fucking whore, and God knows what else. And the darker and more distant a guy was, the more the girls wanted him.

I only really understood this when our class went on a trip to the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Not far from where we were staying was a dance club. Most of the girls were obsessed with going over there on the first night. When they got back, they raved about all the awesome guys that were there. They told me all about their motorcycles, too.

I took a walk over to the club, and it didn't take me long to figure out what was going on there. Guys from all over the neighborhood came there on their mopeds, motorcycles, and cars in order to seduce schoolgirls who were there visiting on their class trips. I tried to explain that to the girls in my class— that in a place like this, the guys were literally only interested in sex—but they didn't have much interest in my warnings or experience. An hour before the club opened, these chicks were all in front of the mirrors, putting on makeup and fussing with their hair. Then they refused to move because they didn't want to mess up their hairdos.

It seemed like they were losing an essential part of themselves when they stood in front of the mirror like that. All that remained of them was a mask, which was only supposed to look appealing to the guys on the motorcycles. It really pissed me off to see that. In a way, of course, it also reminded me of myself. I'd also hidden behind makeup and costumes in order to look good to the guys who had the drugs—first pot and then dope. And I'd also given up my own self, only to become a slave to heroin.

The whole class trip now revolved entirely around these cocky bikers, even though most of the girls already had steady boyfriends at home. Elke, my roommate, wrote a letter to her boyfriend on the first night. But on the second night, she went to the club and came back totally depressed. She said that she'd been making out with someone. I think she only did that so that she could prove to the other girls that she could get one of the
bikers interested in her. She felt really guilty because of her boyfriend and even started to cry. She actually believed, though, that she'd fallen in love with the motorcycle guy. Her boyfriend, of course, didn't have a motorcycle. The next night she returned, totally devastated, and cried her eyes out. Her biker friend had, apparently, asked another girl in our class: “So, what's up: Is your friend ready for a ride yet or what?”

There was another girl, Rosi, who was even worse. A teacher caught her with one of those guys in a car, just as the two of them were getting busy. Rosi was so drunk she could barely walk. That guy knew what he was doing, and all night long he kept ordering her more rum and Cokes.

Rosi had been a virgin, but now she was a wreck. The other girls were calling a meeting to discuss what to do about her. They didn't get all upset about the guy who'd gotten Rosi drunk and then more or less raped her. No, they actually demanded that Rosi be sent home. I was the only one who objected. They were furious because our teachers had put a new rule in place that prohibited anyone from going back to the club. They were all upset over the fact that Rosi's little party had put an end to all the make-out sessions that they were looking forward to themselves.

It really sucked to see how no one cared at all about anyone else in this group: There was absolutely no sense of solidarity among the girls. Whenever a guy arrived on the scene, friendships were bound to break up. In a way, it really wasn't any different with heroin, which ruined the relationships among Stella, Babsi, and me over and over again.

Although I wasn't directly involved, the drama made me feel hopeless and emotionally drained. The last two days of the class trip, I had a relapse. I was absolutely gone the whole time.

In the meantime, however, I had resolved to cope with this world just the way it was. I didn't think about running
away anymore. It was clear to me that “escaping” was really just another way of boxing myself into a life on drugs. And I kept pointing out to myself, as bluntly as I could, that it never amounted to anything good.

I thought that there had to be another way. There had to be a kind of compromise available, that would allow me to cope with the world, with society, without giving in and giving up completely.

Then I got a boyfriend, and he definitely had a calming effect on me. I could really talk to him. And despite everything, he always seemed to be able to keep his priorities in order; he knew what mattered. He could dream, yet he could also find a practical solution for everything. And at the same time, he wasn't blind to all the real problems that surrounded us. But he believed that if you could achieve some success yourself, then you could make your own, better world—no matter how small. That would make a difference. His plan was to become a businessman and make a bunch of money and then afterward buy a log cabin in the Canadian woods and live there. Canada was his big dream, just like for Detlef.

He was a student in the Gymnasium, the college preparatory track, and he got me excited about learning again. I realized that even the Hauptschule could offer me something as long as my goal was to actually learn—and not just get through the ridiculous, useless, moronic requirements for the Hauptschule diploma.

I read a lot. I picked up books almost at random. Goethe's
The Sorrows of Young Werther,
Hermann Hesse, and especially Erich Fromm.
⁵²
His book
The Art of Loving
became like a bible to me. I learned whole pages by heart, simply because I felt that I had to read them over and over again. I also copied passages from the book and taped them above my bed. Fromm really had the right perspective on things. He understood what really mattered. If you listened to his advice and actually followed it, then your life would be meaningful because then you'd be able to make it into what you wanted it to be. At the same time though, it's so difficult to live by his rules because no one else has to follow them with you; most people don't even know about them! I wish I could have a conversation with Erich Fromm about how he lives in this world while also following his principles. But in any event, I realized that the real world sometimes escapes the grasp of his essential principles.

I thought that Fromm's book ought to have been the single most important book in our curriculum. But I never dared to bring it up in class because the others would've probably just turned it—and me—into a joke. Sometimes I took the book to school with me. Once, I was reading it during class because I thought I could find an answer in it to a question that had come up in class. The teacher saw that, looked at the title, and immediately took the book away from me. When I wanted to have it back at the end of class, he said, “So, the little miss likes to read pornography in class, does she? No, I'm sorry, this book will remain confiscated for the time being.” He actually said that to me. The name Fromm didn't mean anything to him. And the title just sounded like porn to his ignorant ears, I guess. What else could love be for these frustrated men, anyway? So he came to the natural conclusion that Christiane just wanted to corrupt the kids in his class after spending time in Berlin as a drug-addicted hooker.

The next day, he gave me the book back and said it was okay. Still, he advised me not to bring it to school anymore because the title was misleading.

There were a lot of things like that, and this thing with the Fromm book was really only the tip of the iceberg. Other things made me way more upset. Like once, I got in trouble with the principal. He was another one of those totally frustrated, insecure guys. He was completely incapable of taking control of anything, even though he was the principal. He tried to compensate for that with yelling and a lot of senseless exercises. When we had class with him in the morning, we had to sing a song and do some exercises before we did anything else. He said it was meant to help us wake up. You only got good grades in his class if you did exactly what he said.

He was also our music teacher. And one time, he wanted to do us a favor (that at least was something new) and talk the about music that we cared about. He started by talking about “today's jazz music.” I had no idea what he meant by that. I thought that maybe he was referring to pop, and so I said, “What do you actually mean when you say, ‘today's jazz music’? If you're talking about pop and rock, that's not the word we use.” Maybe I said it in the wrong tone of voice again or something. I'm sure I probably started spouting off without first thinking about what I really wanted to convey. In any case, the principal went ballistic. He screamed like a lunatic and sent me out of the class.

At the door, I turned around and tried to calm things down a bit. I said to him, “I think we must have misunderstood each other.” So he called me back in. But in the end, I couldn't go back, so I spent the rest of the class out in the hall. At least I was under control enough to stick around the building and not just take off for home.

After class was over, I had to go to the principal's office. As soon as I walked in, I could see that he had my folder in his hand. He thumbed through the file and pretended to read it. Then he said that I wasn't in Berlin anymore. And incidentally,
I was only a guest at his school anyway. And under these circumstances, he could kick me out at any time. So I better start appreciating his hospitality.

I could feel myself losing it. I didn't want to go back to school at all. Even little things were still setting me off back then, and this was big. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't just shrug it off and tell myself that this idiot didn't really have any influence over my life. He did. But if he can only fight you with some paper files, then in a way he knows that he's already lost.

I managed to keep my big mouth shut in his office, and after that incident I tried my best to be inconspicuous. Before this, my boyfriend had encouraged me to try and do well on my finals at the Hauptschule and then to try to get into a comprehensive school after that.

But I knew how hard that would be, in real terms, as a student from the Hauptschule. And as things stood now, I didn't want to hear another word about school. I was sure that I wouldn't be able to hack it. The psychological fitness tests, the special permission from the superintendent, and all the other stuff you had to do if you wanted to get out of the Hauptschule were just too much. And I knew that my file from Berlin was always going to be one step ahead of me.

But at least I had my sensible boyfriend, and I was developing some friendships with the teenagers in the town who in their own way really appealed to me. They were pretty different from what I was used to, but they were way better than all the assholes from the club and the other town nearby. There was a real community spirit among them. There weren't any alpha males or hotshots among them. Everything had a sort of old-fashioned order, even if the boys did get drunk every now and then. And most of them accepted me, despite how unusual I must have seemed to them.

For a while, I thought I could be like them. I thought I could
live a life like my boyfriend had. But I couldn't make it last. I broke up with my boyfriend as soon as he started pushing for sex. I just couldn't do it. I simply couldn't imagine sleeping with anyone besides Detlef.

So I guess I still loved Detlef. I thought a lot about him, even though I didn't want to. Sometimes I wrote him letters, which I intended to send to Rolf—the last person he'd lived with. But at least I still had enough sense left not to send the letters.

I heard that Detlef had wound up in jail again. Stella was there, too. I thought a lot about both of them. I missed them. But there were a lot of people around me now who I really liked, too. I felt much closer to them than I ever had to the kids in the village where I first grew up. They were easy to talk to, and we could talk about anything—including my problems. I felt accepted by them and didn't have to worry that they'd find out about my past. They saw the world like I saw it. I didn't have to pretend or adapt. We were on the same wavelength. Despite that, I was worried about getting any closer with them. Because at the time, they were all experimenting with drugs.