Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. (6 page)

I responded pretty badly to the situation—with a lot of anger (and a lot of yelling). My sister, however, got more and more quiet and was clearly hurting inside. She probably didn't know why she felt so bad herself. But she started to talk more and more often about moving back in with my dad. I thought that idea was totally crazy after all that we'd been through with him. But he actually offered to let us stay with him. It was as if he'd become a different person after we left. He had a young girlfriend. And he always seemed to be in a good mood when we saw him. He was really nice to us, and, for the first time, I hoped he might actually live up to the image I'd always had of him as a nice person. He gave me another Great Dane—a female this time.

I turned twelve, and my breasts started growing. I started to get weirdly interested in boys and men. They were like these strange creatures, and they were hard for me to figure out. They were also all so brutal: the older boys on the street, and my dad, and, Klaus, too, in his own way—they all were. I was afraid of them, but they also fascinated me. They were strong and they had power. They were just like I would've liked to be. Their power, their strength, drew me in like a magnet.

I began to use a blow-dryer on my hair. I used the nail scissors to cut my bangs a little shorter and then combed them to the side. I spent a lot of time on my hair because people had started to tell me how beautiful and long it was. I also didn't want to wear kids' pants anymore; instead, I wanted jeans. Then, when I got jeans, I absolutely had to have high-heeled shoes. My mom gave me one of her old pairs.

With my new jeans and high-heeled shoes I'd go parading through the streets until 10 p.m. almost every night. I felt like the new me was being rejected back at home. But even though that hurt, their rejection gave me a kind of freedom, too, which I loved. I also kind of enjoyed my fights with Klaus. It made me feel powerful to fight with an adult.

My sister couldn't stand it though, and as a result, she did what was for me the unthinkable: She moved back in with my dad. In so doing, she deserted my mom and left me behind as well. So I became even lonelier, and our mom was totally distraught. She started crying again. She was torn between her kids and her boyfriend and she didn't have any idea what to do or who to choose.

I thought that it wouldn't take long for my sister to come back. But she liked it at my dad's. She got an allowance. He paid for her riding lessons and bought her a pair of real riding pants. That was pretty tough for me to see. I had to keep on earning my riding lessons by mucking out the stalls. But that didn't always pan out, and before long, my sister, with her fancy riding pants, was a way better rider than I was.

But my dad made it up to me by inviting me on a trip to Spain. I'd done really well in sixth grade, and as a result, I'd been recommended for the Gymnasium—the college preparatory track.
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I was registered for the comprehensive school
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in Gropiusstadt.

So before the start of this new chapter of my life, which would culminate in the college entrance exams,
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I flew to Torremolinos, Spain, with my dad and his girlfriend. It was an amazing vacation. My dad was great, and I was able to see that, in a way, he did love me. He treated me now almost like an adult. He even let me go out with him and his girlfriend at night.

He finally seemed to have his head screwed on right. He had friends that were his own age, and now he managed to actually tell them that he'd been married once before. I didn't have to call him Uncle Richard anymore. I was his daughter. And he seemed to be really proud of the fact that I was his daughter. However, as was typical for him, he'd planned his vacation according to what was most convenient for him and his friends. At the end of my school break. Which meant I started my new school two weeks late. So I began my college prep years as a truant.

Coming in late made me feel like an outsider in the new school. New friendships and new cliques had already been established. I sat by myself. But the biggest issue was that, during the first two weeks, while I was in Spain, they'd explained to the newcomers how the comprehensive school system worked—how you can pick classes, how difficulty levels vary, etcetera—and it's actually really complicated, especially when you've just arrived from elementary school. Everyone else had gotten help with selecting their courses and setting their schedules. Meanwhile, I was lost and alone. I had absolutely no idea how the school functioned. And I never figured it out either. It wasn't like elementary school, where each grade would have a designated teacher who would look out for his or her own group of students. Here, every teacher taught a couple hundred students, all in different grades and courses. If you wanted to successfully complete your college entrance exams in comprehensive school, you really had to know what you were doing: You had to be self-motivated and make the conscious decision to study and work your way up into the advanced courses. And to do that, you had to have parents who would tell you exactly what you needed to do and who got on your case if you started to fall behind. I just had no idea what was going on; I was totally lost.

I didn't feel accepted there either. Everyone else had had a two-week head start—and that's a huge advantage at a new school. I reverted to my old elementary school tactics and started annoying the teachers with interruptions and contradictions. Sometimes I'd do it because I actually knew something, and other times, just because I felt like it. I was fighting again, against the teachers and against the school as a whole. But I just wanted to be accepted.

The coolest kid in our class was a girl named Kessi. She already had boobs. She looked at least two years older than the rest of us, and she acted more mature, too. Everyone liked having her around. I admired her, and more than anything else, I just wanted her to be my friend.

Kessi also had an awesome boyfriend. He was in the same grade as us (in a different class) but was also a year older already. His name was Milan. He was at least 5'7” tall and had long, black, curly hair down to his shoulders. He wore jeans and these badass boots. All the girls at school liked Milan. Kessi wasn't just popular because she had boobs and acted so mature, but also because Milan was her boyfriend.

Back in those days, we had very specific ideas about what a “hot” boyfriend should be like. He couldn't ever be seen in baggy pants. Skintight jeans were a requirement. Guys with sneakers also looked stupid. Instead, they had to wear really dramatic, decked-out boots. We thought that the guys who still played immature pranks—like shooting spitballs or chucking apple cores around—were ridiculous. They were usually the same kids who still drank milk and played soccer during recess. The cool guys, the ones we all had crushes on, disappeared into the smoking corner every recess. And if a guy wanted to be really cool, he also had to be comfortable with drinking beer. I still remember how impressed I was when Kessi told me a story about how drunk Milan had been at some point.

I kept wondering about how I could transform myself into the kind of girl that would matter to someone like Milan—into someone that he would want to talk to or ask out. Or—and this was actually one and the same thing—how I could become accepted and respected by someone like Kessi. I already thought her nickname, Kessi,
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was super cool. I wanted to be the kind of person who had a cool nickname.

After a while, I started to ask myself why I was so worried about my teachers, when I only saw each of them for an hour or so each day. Why was I so worried about getting their approval? It's way more important to be accepted by the people who you actually spend your time with. So from that point on, all bets were off: I was the teachers' worst nightmare. I didn't have personal relationships with any of them. And most of them didn't seem to really care anyway. They didn't have any real authority over us, and as a result, they tried to intimidate us with their insults and threats. But whatever they dished out to us, I gave back to them with both barrels. Before long, I'd become an expert in wreaking havoc in the classroom; without hardly even trying, I could mess up the teacher's entire lesson plan, and the more destructive I was, the more recognition and respect I got from the other students.

I used every extra cent to buy cigarettes so that I'd have something to smoke in the smokers' corner. And once I started smoking regularly over there, Kessi warmed up to me. We started talking and hanging out after school as well. Eventually she even invited me to her house, where we shared a couple of beers (until I felt kind of giddy and woozy). We talked about our home lives. We were both stuck in pretty similar situations, but Kessi's home life was even more fucked up than mine.

Kessi's father wasn't part of her life, and her mom went through a lot of different boyfriends (who obviously didn't accept Kessi as part of the deal). She'd just gone through a rough time with one of these boyfriends who went ballistic on her. He beat up on Kessi and her mom and one day wrecked all the furniture in the apartment. Then, when he was done, he threw the TV set out of the window, as a kind of exclamation point to the episode. Kessi's mom was different from mine in one crucial respect though: She was strict, or tried to be. Kessi had to be home by 8 p.m. almost every night.

So I'd finally made it in school: I'd earned the respect of my classmates. But keeping it up was tough—it was a constant struggle, and it left hardly any time for studying. My triumphant new social status was written in stone the day Kessi finally invited me to sit next to her.

Kessi was the one who taught me how to cut class. If she didn't feel like being at school, she just left for an hour or two and met up with Milan or did whatever she felt like. At first I was scared. But then I caught on quickly that it was hardly ever discovered if you missed single classes in the middle of the day. Attendance was only taken at the beginning of the first class of the day. During the following classes, the teachers had way too many students to keep track of who was there and who wasn't. And most of them didn't care anyway.

At that point, Kessi had already made out with a few different boys. And she was already going to the Center House, which was a meeting place for young people, affiliated with the Protestant church. It had a kind of disco club in the basement known simply as “the club.” You had to be at least fourteen to get into the club. But Kessi already looked a lot older than thirteen.

I begged and begged my mom until she bought me a bra, even though I didn't really need one yet. I just wanted one because it would make my boobs look bigger. I started to use makeup, too. And then Kessi took me along to the basement club, which opened at 5 p.m.

The first thing that I noticed once I was inside the club was a boy from our school. He was in ninth grade, and he was, I thought, the coolest guy in school. Even cooler than Milan (and better-looking, too). And more than anything else, he was just so overwhelmingly self-confident. He acted like a rock star. It was obvious that he thought he was superior to everybody else. His name was Piet. Piet belonged to a group that always sat or stood
at the edge of things. They gave the impression that they were different from the other teenagers who hung out at the club. The whole group was super cool. All the guys looked hot. They wore skin-tight jeans, big, crazy boots, and their jackets were all either denim or else these crazy things that were scrapped together from a lot of discarded old materials—but they looked amazing. Kessi knew these guys and brought me over. I couldn't believe that she was introducing me to these guys, considering that everyone else was in awe of this group. They seemed to be cool with Kessi though, and let us sit with them. When I came to the club the next night, that same group had brought a huge hookah with them. At first I had no clue what it was. Kessi explained that they were smoking hashish and told me that it was okay for me to go join them. I didn't know exactly what hashish was supposed to be. I only knew that it was a drug and totally illegal.

They lit the stuff in the pipe and passed it around. Everybody took a drag. Kessi did, too, but I passed on it. I didn't really want to say no, since I wanted so badly to fit in. But I couldn't get myself to do it yet—to smoke hash. The idea of doing drugs still scared the shit out of me.

I felt really insecure. I wanted to just sink into a hole in the ground and disappear. But I couldn't leave the table because then it would've looked like I didn't want anything to do with these guys, just because they smoked hashish. So I told them that what I really wanted was a beer and not hash. I got up and collected the empty bottles that were lying around. For four empties I could get eighty pfennigs, or one beer. That night I got drunk for the first time in my life while everyone else sucked on the hookah. They talked about music, too—music that I didn't know about yet. I was into all the teenybopper bands. I liked to listen to Sweet.
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I couldn't hold up my end in their conversation anyway, so it was just as well that I was drunk and relaxed and didn't get too worried about it.

It quickly became clear what kind of music they thought was cool, and I decided right away that I agreed with them. They loved David Bowie and that sort of stuff.

These guys in the club seemed like rock stars to me all by themselves. From behind, they all looked like David Bowie, even though they were all only sixteen or so.

The people in this clique were cool in a way that was completely new to me. They weren't loud, they didn't get into fights, and they didn't show off. They were pretty quiet. They just kind of exuded superiority. And it was the same whether they were out at the club or just hanging out amongst themselves: They were always just effortlessly cool. They never argued with each other. And when they greeted each other, they did it with little kisses on the mouth. And although the guys always set the tone, the girls were treated as equals. Unlike other groups, they never had those stupid immature fights between guys and girls.