Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. Read online

  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.11 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.

  Not long after I got drunk at the club, I cut class again with Kessi. Just the last two classes. Kessi had a date with Milan in the Wutzkyallee subway station. As we were hanging out at the subway station waiting for Milan, we also kept an eye out for teachers because sometimes they'd show up around this time, too.

  Kessi was just lighting a cigarette when I saw Piet and his friend Kathi, another guy from their group. It was the moment I'd been hoping for and fantasizing about. I'd always wanted to run into these guys during school hours. And then, in my daydreams, I'd ask Piet if he'd come home with me. Honestly, I didn't have any lecherous thoughts at the time. I wasn't interested in fooling around with guys yet. After all, I was only twelve years old, and my period hadn't even started yet. All I wanted was to be able to say that Piet had been to my house. Then the others would've thought that he and I were an item, or at least that I was definitely a solid member of their group.

  So here were Piet and Kathi. I knew for a fact that nobody would be at my apartment right then, since both my mom and her boyfriend had daytime jobs. So I said to Kessi, “Let's go say hi to these guys.” My heart was pounding. But after only a few minutes, I got my bearings (sort of), and confidently asked Piet,“Hey, you guys wanna come over to my place? Nobody else is there. And my mom's boyfriend has some awesome records —Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Ten Years After, Deep Purple, and the Woodstock Festival album.”

  I'd already come a long way. Not only did I know the music that they were into, I'd also learned to talk like them. Their language was different; everything with them was different. I'd paid close attention to the new slang that I'd heard them use. This was much more important to me than memorizing English vocabulary at school, or math formulas.

  Piet and Kathi were both really into my idea. And I was ecstatic. Their enthusiasm made me that much more self-assured. So once we'd made it back to my place I said: “Shit, guys, I don't have anything to drink.” So we pooled all our change and Kathi and I went off on a mission to the supermarket. Beer was too expensive. You needed more than a few marks12 to get enough beer for a buzz. So instead we bought a liter of red wine for 1.98 marks. “Hobo wine” they called it. We sucked down the whole bottle of wine, and then we just talked—mostly about the police. Piet said that he had to be really careful and keep an eye out for the cops because of the pot. They called hashish pot, because that's what they'd heard the Americans call it. They were convinced that we lived in a police state and kept piling insults on all the local cops.

  This was all totally new to me. Up to that point, the only authority figures I'd really hated were our buildings' caretakers, who were always hounding you just when you started to have fun and just because you were having fun. But the police still represented an unassailable authority to me. My new friends told me that the housing project caretakers were actually just a part of the police state, but that cops were much more dangerous than caretakers. For me, whatever Piet and Kathi said was the be-all and end-all, and I accepted it as the truth.

  When we'd finished the wine, Piet said that he could go back to his place to grab some hash if people wanted to smoke. Everyone was really into that idea.

  Piet left via the balcony. Since we'd moved to our new apartment on the ground floor, I had also started to go out that way. I loved it after living on the eleventh floor for all those years. Piet came back in a bit with a disc of pressed hashish about the size of his hand, which was divided into gram pieces of t
en marks each. He took out a chillum, which is a wooden tube, like a pipe, about eight inches long. He stuffed tobacco into the top so that you didn't have to smoke down to the wood. Then he mixed some tobacco in with the hash and put the mixture on top. To smoke it, you had to tilt your head back and keep the tube in a vertical position so that none of the hot ashes fell out.

  I watched the others very carefully to see how they did it. There was obviously no way I could say no, now that Piet and Kathi were here in my house. So I played it cool and talked about how much I wanted to smoke some hash that day. And I pretended that I was already an expert when it came to chillums.

  We'd let down the blinds. Thick clouds of smoke were visible in the dim light that still filtered through. I'd put on a David Bowie record and took a drag on the chillum and held the smoke in my lungs until it made me cough. Everybody had grown quiet. They were all dozing off, drifting away into their own worlds, listening to the music.

  I waited for something to happen to me. I thought, Now that you've taken drugs, something really crazy, something totally outrageous should be happening. But I didn't actually feel anything. I just felt a little tipsy—but that was from the wine.

  I didn't realize that most people don't feel a thing the first time they smoke pot. You actually need to “practice” smoking pot before you start getting a high. Alcohol has a much stronger, more immediate punch.

  I saw Piet and Kessi move closer together on the sofa. Piet was stroking Kessi's arms. After a while, they got up, went into my room, and shut the door.

  Now Kathi and I were alone. He sat down next to me on the side of the armchair and put his arm around my shoulders. Right away, I liked Kathi much better than Piet. And I was so happy that Kathi came over to me and showed me that he was interested in me. I'd always been afraid that it would be obvious to guys that I was only twelve and that they'd dismiss me as just a little child.

  Kathi started stroking me. I didn't know anymore whether I was okay with this or not. I started feeling incredibly hot. I think because of fear. I sat there frozen like a stone and tried to make small talk about the record that was playing. When Kathi put his hand on my breast (or at least on the little bump that was growing there), I stood up, walked over to the record player, and started fiddling around with it.

  Then Piet and Kessi came back into the living room. They had weird looks on their faces. They were upset and somehow sad. Kessi was really red in the face, and the two of them were completely ignoring one another. Neither one of them said a word. It seemed to me that Kessi had had a bad experience—one that she didn't get anything out of, one that wasn't satisfying for either of them.

  Piet finally asked me if I'd come with them to the Center House that night. That cheered me up again. I'd accomplished a lot that day. Things had turned out exactly as I'd hoped they would. Piet and Kathi had come to my house—in real life!—and I'd become a part of their group.

  Piet and Kessi left over the balcony. Kathi was still wandering around the living room. I felt something like fear rise up again. I told him pretty bluntly that I needed to pick up around the apartment and then do some homework. Suddenly I didn't care what he thought. He left after that. I lay down in my room, stared at the ceiling, and tried to make sense of it all.

  Kathi was good-looking, definitely, but I'd somehow lost interest in him. After an hour-and-a-half the doorbell rang. Through the peephole in the door, I could tell it was Kathi. I didn't open up, and instead I tiptoed back to my room. I was really afraid to be alone with him. He was freaking me out, and yet somehow I also felt guilty. I didn't know why. It could have been the pot. But nothing ever happened with him anyway.

  As I thought about this, I started feeling kind of depressed. Even though I was part of the clique now, I didn't really fit in. I was still way too young to fool around with the guys. I knew for sure that I just couldn't do that yet. And whatever they said about the police and the government was way over my head—not that it mattered to me, anyway.

  Even so, at 5 p.m. I was back at the Center House. This time, however, we didn't go to the club; instead we went to the movies. I wanted to sit next to Kessi and a stranger, but Kathi squeezed himself in between us. Then, during the movie, he started touching me again. At some point, his hand slipped between my legs. I didn't resist. It was like I was paralyzed. I was scared to death of something, but I wasn't sure what. Once, I thought about running out of there. But then I reminded myself, Christiane, this is the price you have to pay for being part of this clique. So I let him do whatever he wanted, and I didn't say a word. After all, I had incredible respect for this guy. But when he said that I should touch him too, and when he tried to pull my hand toward him, I clamped my hands together tightly in my lap and ended things.

  I let out a huge sigh of relief when the movie was finally over. I broke immediately away from Kathi and went over to Kessi. I told her everything, and I also said that I didn't want any part of Kathi anymore. I'm sure Kessi told him what I thought later on because a little later I found out that she'd had a huge crush on Kathi herself. She started crying right there in the club because Kathi didn't pay any special attention to her. Eventually she did finally confess to me how crazy she was about Kathi; she said that she always felt like crying whenever he was around.

  Despite the thing with Kathi, I was now a solid member of the group—despite the fact that they all referred to me as “the baby.” But that didn't matter; I belonged to them. None of the guys tried to touch me. Word had gotten around, and everyone was fine with the fact that I was still too young for fooling around with. That was totally different with the drunks—the teenagers who spent all their time drinking beer and schnapps. If any of their girlfriends didn't want to fool around or drink with them, they treated them horribly, almost brutally. They made fun of them, insulted them, and ostracized them. In our group, there was none of that emotional brutality. We accepted each other just the way we were. After all, we were all on the same journey—or at least all on the same drug trip. We understood one another without a lot of talking. Nobody was ever loud or obscene. We didn't pay much attention to what the others were gossiping about—we felt like we were above all that.

  With the exceptions of Piet, Kessi, and me, everyone else already had jobs. And they all had a similar outlook on things: They hated life at home and they hated their jobs. Unlike the drunks, who were always worked up about something, carried their stress into the club with them, and let their aggression out on others, the people in our group could kick back and chill out. After work, they'd put on different clothes, smoke pot, put on some hot new music, and make a perfect little world for themselves. When we were together, it was love and peace all around us, and we forgot about all the shit that happened in the real world that existed outside of our little clique.

  But I didn't quite feel everything the others felt; I didn't “get it” completely. For that, I think, I was still too young. Still, they were my idols. I wanted to be exactly like them. I wanted to learn from them because they knew how to make their own rules; they knew how to live a life that was actually cool. They didn't let all the assholes out there get them down. Reality hardly mattered anymore. Parents and teachers couldn't tell me what to do; I was through with them. The only thing that mattered to me now was my group of friends—well, that and my pets.

  The reason I was so obsessed with my friends at the time was partly due to what was happening at home. I couldn't take it anymore. The worst part was that Klaus, my mom's boyfriend, hated our animals. At least that's what it seemed like to me at the time. It started with him constantly complaining about how our apartment was too small for so many animals. And then he wouldn't let my new dog—the one my dad had given me—lie down in the living room.

  That's when I lost it. The dogs had always been a part of our family. They were treated like any other family member. And now this jerk comes along and says my dog isn't even allowed in the living room? But worse was still to come. He tried to prevent my dog
from sleeping beside my bed. What was I supposed to do? Klaus seriously wanted me to build a dog crate for my big dog, in my tiny room. Of course I didn't do it.

  Then Klaus had his final meltdown: He exclaimed that the animals absolutely had to get out of the house. My mom took his side and said that I didn't take care of the animals anymore anyway. I thought that was the last straw. Sure, I wasn't home much at night, and so one of them had to always take the dog out one more time. But otherwise, I thought, I took care of the dog and the other animals with every free minute that I had.

  I could threaten, yell, and howl all I wanted—there was nothing I could do. They gave my dog away. At first to a woman whom I thought was okay because she really liked the dog. But the woman got cancer soon afterward and had to give the dog away again. I heard that it ended up in a bar somewhere. My dog was an extremely sensitive animal, and she was terrified by loud noises. I knew that in a bar she would be completely traumatized, and I blamed Klaus and my mom for this. That's when I decided that I was done with people who hated animals.

  THIS WAS ALL GOING on around the time when I started going to the Center House a lot, and started smoking pot. The only pets I had left now were two cats, and they didn't need me during the day. At night, they slept with me on my bed. With the dog gone, there was no reason, no purpose for me to be at home. Without the dog, I didn't even enjoy going for walks anymore. So now I just waited for 5 p.m. to roll around, when I could go back to the club at Center House. And even then, I'd often have already spent the early afternoon with Kessi and some of the others from our group.

  I smoked pot every night. The people who had enough money for drugs would share it with the others. I didn't think twice about smoking pot anymore. After all, we were able to do it right out in the open at the club. The social workers from the church, the ones who supervised the club, would occasionally try to say something when they saw us smoking. They didn't all feel the same about pot, but most of them would admit that they used to smoke, too. Most of them were recent college and university graduates and had been part of the student movement,13 where smoking pot and hashish had become normal. So they generally just told us not to overdo it and not to use it as an escape, etcetera. More than anything else, they were worried that it would be a gateway drug and lead straight to harder stuff.