Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. Read online

  All of a sudden, the apartment seemed to kind of lighten up. Detlef proclaimed that the apartment could use some housecleaning for a change. The rest of us immediately agreed. I started by tearing open every single window in the apartment. When some fresh air started to come in, I realized once again what a horrible stench we'd been living in. Any normal person would have been knocked out by the stink of blood, ashes, and moldy sardine cans before he even set one foot inside.

  Two hours later, the apartment was in a state of utter chaos. We gathered up these huge piles of trash—each one a kind of garbage dump unto itself—and stuffed everything into plastic bags. At the end, I even started up the vacuum cleaner and cleaned out the birdcage. A sleepy parakeet looked down from his perch at all this activity. Axel's mom had given the bird to him along with the TV, since her boyfriend didn't like birds. But the thing was, Axel hated it, too. When it was lonely and started to chatter and tweet, Axel banged his fist against its cage, which made the poor creature start thrashing all around in there. None of the guys did anything for the bird. But Axel's mom brought it some food once a week, and I gave it enough birdseed on Saturdays to last through the whole week. I also bought a little glass water dispenser for the bird, which was able to hold enough clean water for six days.

  That night, when we went to bed, everything was different. Detlef didn't give me a good-night kiss and he didn't turn around. He started talking to me. Softly, and lovingly. I felt his hands on me, easy and gentle. I wasn't anxious at all. I touched him, too. We caressed each other for a long time without saying a word. It was wonderful.

  Probably an hour went by before Detlef said something again. He asked, “Will you sleep with me next Saturday?”

  I just said okay. I'd always been afraid of this question. But now, when Detlef asked, it made me happy.

  After a while I added, “Under one condition. We have to both be sober. I don't want any H involved. I mean, otherwise I might not like it. Or I might love it and think it's incredible but only because of the dope, and then maybe I won't be able to appreciate it when I'm sober. I want to be totally sober. And I want you to know what it's like when you're sober with me.”

  Detlef said okay, and then he gave me my good-night kiss. We turned around and fell asleep, like always, with our backs pressed against each other.

  We really did stay sober that next Saturday. The apartment was dirty and stinking again, but our bed had fresh white linens on it. As we were taking our clothes off, I started feeling a little anxious. At first we just lay side by side without moving. I thought of the girls in my class who told stories about when the boys got on top of them for the first time. How they'd forcefully rammed their thing inside them and wouldn't stop until they were finished. The girls said that it hurt like hell the first time. And a few of them didn't even keep dating the guy who took away their virginity.

  I told Detlef that I wanted to have a different experience from the girls in my class. He said he understood.

  We stroked and caressed each other for a long time. He entered me a little bit, and I almost didn't notice. Detlef could sense when it hurt without me having to say anything.

  I thought, If it winds up hurting a little, that's all right. After all, he's already waited for half-a-year.

  But Detlef didn't want to hurt me. After a while, it was like we were one person. I loved him intensely right then. But still, for some reason I couldn't do much more than just lie there, completely motionless and stiff. Detlef didn't move either. He must have sensed what I myself couldn't think or express just then. I was totally consumed by the conflicting emotions of fear and happiness.

  Detlef pulled away and put his arms around me. I felt almost high, with this intensely warm and magical feeling. I thought, How did you ever find such a great guy? He only thinks about you and never himself. Even when you sleep together, he only cares about making you feel good—he doesn't even finish. I thought of Kathi, how he'd just grabbed me between the legs in the movie theater. I was so glad that I'd waited for Detlef—that he was the one I belonged to. I loved this guy so much that I suddenly got scared: scared of dying.

  I kept thinking the same thing over and over: I don't want Detlef to die. So while he was caressing me I said to him, “Detlef, we should stop shooting up.”

  He said, “I agree. You should never become a junkie.”

  He kissed me. Then we slowly turned around, and with our butts pressed against one another, we fell asleep.

  I woke up because I felt Detlef's hands on me again. It was still very early, but there was some gray light coming through the curtains. We started making out, and then we made love for real. It had more to do with what was going on in my head than what was going on with my body. But now I knew how really good it was to sleep with Detlef.

  On Monday after school, I went straight to Zoo Station. Detlef was already there. I gave him my lunch sandwich and my apple. He was hungry. I was hungry, too, but in a different way. After having gone clean for three days, I really needed a hit. I asked Detlef if he had a shot for me.

  He said, “Nope. And you also won't get any more from me, either. I don't want that. I love you too much. I don't want you to turn into a junkie.”

  I flipped out. I had a real craving, and I ripped right into him: “Oh, please, don't put on this holier-than-thou act. Your pupils are like pinpoints. You're totally doped up. And meanwhile you've got the nerve to tell me that I should stay clean. If you quit, I'll quit, but don't act like you're doing me any favors when you're just hogging all the dope for yourself!”

  I really let him have it. And didn't have any reply because of course I was right: he'd been high for days already at that point. He finally gave in and promised me that later on we'd quit together. Then he serviced another customer for my next shot.

  Having slept with Detlef changed a lot of things for me. I didn't feel that comfortable at the station anymore. I suddenly had a much better idea of what Detlef and his friends did to earn their money. Now I knew exactly what those scumbags wanted when they hit on me. They wanted to do with me what I had done with Detlef. They wanted sex.

  That wasn't news to me, of course, but up to that point, it had all been very abstract to me. Now it was something real and wonderful and intimate. It was something that Detlef and I shared. The customers disgusted me. What went on at this station was almost unimaginable. How could I ever think of going to bed with one of those desperate foreigners or let some drunk asshole, or some bald, sweaty fat guy actually have sex with me? How could anyone? The thought turned my stomach. It wasn't funny anymore when the johns used their stupid pickup lines on me. I didn't want to return fire with any clever replies anymore. I just turned away, repulsed; sometimes I even went after them with kicks. I also felt a completely new hatred for the guys who went after Detlef. I could've killed them. And in order to just keep my cool, I had to keep suppressing the thought that Detlef was acting affectionate toward them.

  But despite all that, I kept on returning to the station after school every day. I went because that's where Detlef was. When he'd finished with a customer, we'd go to the Zoo Station café, and I'd have a hot chocolate. Sometimes business was pretty bad, though, and even Detlef had a hard time making enough cash for dope for the both of us.

  By hanging out in the Zoo Station's café, I got to know some of the other prostitutes through Detlef, although he'd always tried to keep me away from them. They were much more fucked up than we were, and had a much harder time attracting customers. They were older, the kind of experienced street veterans that I used to admire for some reason, not so long ago.

  Detlef said that they were all friends of his. And he warned me to watch my back around them because after all they were longtime addicts and would do just about anything for a little extra cash or another fix. They were always craving a hit, but they never had any money. As a result, you could never let on that you had any money or dope on you. Otherwise you risked getting knocked out and waking up with empty
pockets. Not only did they rip off their customers; they also robbed each other.

  I began to see what this “glamorous” drug scene was really like. I was almost in it now. Once upon a time, the only thing that I wanted was to be a part of this world.

  Friends of Detlef would occasionally tell me, “Girl, you gotta quit. You're too young. You can still do it. You just have to get away from Detlef. He'll never get off the stuff at this point. Don't be stupid. Break up with him.”

  I gave them all the finger. Breaking up with Detlef—that was the last thing I wanted. If he was going to die, then I would, too. I didn't say that though. Instead I just told them that they were crazy. “We're not addicted,” I'd say. “We can quit whenever we want.”

  NOTHING CHANGED MUCH FROM one day to the next in the month of November. From two until eight, I was at the station. Then we'd go to the Hot House, a club at the top of the Kurfürstendamm. The Hot House was the place where Detlef liked to hang out. It was even trashier than The Sound, and the people who went there were worse off, too. I often stayed till the last bus left, at 12:20 a.m. I basically just lived for the Saturdays when I slept with Detlef. Sleeping with him got to be more and more amazing—as long as we didn't do too much dope.

  Then December came. It kept getting colder. I was freezing. I never used to feel the cold before. And now I was always freezing. I was a wreck, and I knew it. I'd known ever since one Sunday ealier in the month when I woke up next to Detlef at Axel's apartment.

  When I woke up, I was freezing. Across the room there was a box and when I looked at it, the writing suddenly jumped out at me. The colors were glowing, and they were so bright that they were hurting my eyes. That was especially true of this one shade of red, which was scaring me. I'd always been afraid of red when I was tripping. But when I was on H, red became a soft, gentle color. Like all colors, red was beautiful when you were on H, as if it was coming at you through a soft veil.

  And now the old red was back. My mouth was full of saliva. I swallowed, but right away it was back. It kept coming back up somehow. When it did finally stop, I had a really dry, sticky mouth. I tried to drink something but couldn't manage it. I shivered from the cold for a while, but then I got so hot that the sweat was literally pouring down my body. I woke Detlef up and told him that there was something wrong with me.

  Detlef looked at my face and said, “You've got pupils as big as saucers.” He paused for a minute, and then he said quietly, “Well, it's finally happened to you.”

  I was shivering again. “What?” I asked him. “What's happened?”

  Detlef said, “You're having withdrawal symptoms. You're at the point now where you have to have it.”

  I thought to myself, That's it, then. That's what it's like. You've got the hunger now for real.

  But they're really not so bad, the withdrawal symptoms. Everyone was always making such a big deal about them, but at least I wasn't in any actual pain. In the end, it just turned out to be some nausea, some shivering, and some weird experiences with colors.

  Detlef didn't say anything else after that though. He picked a small packet out of his jeans pocket and then grabbed some ascorbic acid and a spoon and cooked the stuff over a candle. Then he gave me the syringe, ready to go. I was shaking so much that I had trouble hitting the vein. But I managed it after a second. Then I felt fine again. The colors turned soft and gentle, and the saliva in my mouth was gone. All my problems had vanished, and I fell back asleep next to Detlef, who'd also shot up while he was at it. When we got up around noon, I asked Detlef how much dope he still had.

  He said, “Of course you'll still get a shot before you go home tonight.”

  “But I need something for tomorrow morning, too.”

  “I don't have that much anymore,” he replied. “And I'm really not in the mood to go to the station today. It's Sunday and there's nothing going on there, anyway.”

  I was furious, and in a panic I yelled at him: “Don't you get it?! If I don't have a fix tomorrow morning, then I'll go into withdrawal again and won't be able to make it to school.”

  “It was always going to happen like this,” he said, “and now it has.”

  We went to the station in the afternoon. I had a lot of time to think things over. My first withdrawal symptoms. I was now physically dependent on H, and I was financially dependent on Detlef. In all honesty, it was my dependence on Detlef that was more worrying. What kind of love was that, when one person was totally dependent on the other? What if I have to beg and plead with Detlef to give me dope some night? I knew how junkies could get when they were going into withdrawal. I had seen how they humiliated themselves and how they let other people humiliate them, too. How they shrank down to nothing. I couldn't beg. And I definitely couldn't beg Detlef. If he allowed me to beg, then it was over with us. I'd never been able to beg anyone for anything.

  Detlef finally found a customer, and I had to wait a really long time for him to get back. From then on, I'd have to wait for Detlef to get my morning hit.

  I was in a dark mood that afternoon. Without thinking about it, I'd started a long conversation with myself—a kind of self-examination—which went more or less like this: “So, Christiane, now you've done it. You got what you've always wanted. Is this what you imagined? (No, it wasn't.) But this is what you wanted, right? For some reason, you always admired those old heroin fiends. Now you're one yourself. You're not a little girl anymore, and nobody can make you feel like one ever again. You don't have to wonder what it's like to go into withdrawal anymore. You know enough now to stay away from cons. Now you can be the one doing the conning.”

  I wasn't very good at making myself feel better. I kept thinking about the craving, the withdrawal. I remembered how I'd always laughed at the junkies in withdrawal. I never really understood what was going on with them. All I knew was that they seemed helpless, so easily hurt; they had no strength. Junkies in withdrawal would never talk back to anyone, so everyone walked all over them. They were almost subhuman.

  Sometimes I'd use them as an aid to my own ego or to release some pent-up anger or frustration. If you knew how to do it, you could reduce them to absolutely nothing, give them a real wake-up call. You just had to tease out their weaknesses, their sore spot, and keep hammering away at it, until they collapsed. After all, when they were in the pain of withdrawal, that's when they had the insight to see what miserable losers they really were. These were the same people who generally acted like they'd been everywhere, done everything, and were over it. But when they were in withdrawal, the act was over. They didn't feel superior to anyone anymore.

  And now that's exactly what they'll do to you, I thought. They'll tear you to pieces. They'll see how pathetic you really are. But you knew this all already, didn't you? Funny how it only occurred to you today.

  These little talks with myself didn't really help much though. I should've talked to someone else. I could've simply gone up to one of those junkies at the station. But instead I crawled into a dark corner near the train station's post office. I already knew what other people would say to me. Detlef, too. Detlef could only come up with clichés when it came to our drug habit.

  “Don't take it so hard,” they'd say. “Just pull yourself together. It'll all work out in the end. If you really want to, you can quit. There's methadone25 available if you need it.”

  The only one I could maybe talk to was my mom. But that wouldn't work, either. I couldn't do that to her. I thought, She loves you and you love her, too, in a way. She would freak out if you told her all this. And she couldn't help you anyway. Maybe she'd put you into an institution. And that wouldn't really accomplish much. Nobody can quit if they don't want to. And least of all you. You'd really dig your heels in then; maybe you'd even break out and run away. That would only make things worse.

  I found myself talking under my breath again: “Just stop it. This is something you can handle with your hands tied behind your back. When Detlef comes back, you'll tell him: ‘I don't want an
y dope. I'm quitting. And either you quit right now also, or it's over between us. You've got two halves in your pocket? Okay then: We'll shoot up one more time and tomorrow we're done.’” I noticed how, while I was talking to myself, I was working myself into a craving again. Then I whispered as if I was revealing a big secret to myself: “Detlef isn't going to buy it. He won't do it. And you—would you really break up with Detlef? Come on, stop telling fairy tales. Be real for a minute and tell the truth. This is the last station. The end. It's over. Really the end. You didn't get much out of it, did you? But this is the life you wanted.”

  Detlef came back. Without saying a word, we went to the Kurfürstenstrasse and found our regular dealer. I bought a quarter, took the subway home, and holed up in my room.

  TWO SUNDAYS LATER, DETLEF and I were alone at Axel's apartment. It was the afternoon. We were both incredibly, incredibly sick. We hadn't found our regular dealer on Saturday and were ripped off by somebody new. The dope he'd sold us was so bad that we had to shoot up twice as much as usual just to get by. So that was all we had, and it was still only the morning. Detlef had already started sweating, and I noticed that I wasn't that far behind.

  We looked everywhere in the apartment for something that we could turn into cash. But we already knew there was nothing left. From the coffee machine to the radio, everything was gone, everything had been used to pay for dope. Only the vacuum cleaner was left. But that thing was so old that there was no way we'd get even a single mark for it.

  “We've got to get some cash,” Detlef said, “and we've got to get it now. In a couple hours we'll be sober and have the itch, and we'll be worthless. There's no way I can get enough money on a Sunday night all by myself. You've got to help. Best thing to do is for you to go to The Sound and hit some people up for cash. You've got to get forty marks. If I do a customer for another forty or fifty marks, then we'll still have some left over for tomorrow morning. Can you do it?”