Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. Read online

  All that talk went in one ear and out the other. What right did they have to moralize like that, when they themselves admitted to having done the same things? Someone from our group confronted one of those young guys once: “So you think that when college students smoke pot, it's okay, because they're smart. But when workers or interns smoke pot, then it's dangerous. That seems like kind of a double standard to me.” The guy didn't have a response for that. You could tell he felt uneasy.

  I didn't just smoke, either; I also drank wine and beer—especially when I didn't have any marijuana. I usually started drinking right after school, and sometimes had something in the mornings, too, if I was skipping classes. I always had to have something.

  I was constantly spaced out. I needed it to keep from dwelling on all the shit that was happening at school and back at home. I couldn't care less about school anyway. My grades started plummeting around then, going from B's to D's and F's.

  I started to look different, too. I got super skinny because I hardly ate anything anymore. All my pants were suddenly way too big for me. My face looked gaunt. I stood in front of the mirror a lot, and I liked what I saw, the changes I was seeing. I looked more and more like the others in my group of friends. The innocent look on my face had finally fallen away.

  I was totally obsessed with my appearance. I made my mom buy me high heels and skinny jeans. I parted my hair in the middle, grew long bangs, and combed them so they hung long across my face. I wanted to look mysterious so that nobody would see the real me. So that nobody would notice that I actually really wasn't as cool as I wanted to be.

  One evening at the club, Piet asked me if I'd ever dropped acid. I said, “Of course.” I'd heard a lot about LSD by that time. There was always a lot of talk about somebody's latest crazy trip. Piet grinned at me, and I could tell that he didn't believe me so I started making stuff up. I pieced together a story from what I'd heard other people say and concocted my own fantasy trip. But I could see that Piet still didn't buy any of it. He was pretty cynical. By the time I'd finished stumbling through my story, I was pretty embarrassed. Piet just said, “If you want to try, I'll have some really good stuff on Saturday. You can have some if you want.”

  I was looking forward to it. I thought that once I dropped acid, no one could doubt my belonging anymore. When I arrived at the Center House that Saturday, Kessi was already tripping. Piet said, “If you really want to, I'll give you half of one. That's enough for the first time.” He gave me a bit of crumpled cigarette paper with a crumb of acid wrapped in it. But I couldn't just toss it down like that in front of everyone! I was unbelievably excited. I was also kind of scared of being caught. Besides, I thought this occasion called for a more private, ceremonious place. So I went into a bathroom stall, locked myself inside, and swallowed the crumb.

  When I came back, Piet clearly thought that I'd just flushed the pill down the toilet. I waited impatiently for something to happen to me, to prove to the others that I'd swallowed the pill.

  When the club at the Center House closed at 10 p.m., I still didn't feel any different. I went to the subway station with Piet. At the station, we met up with two friends of his, named Frank and Pauli. They were dressed exactly alike, like twins. They were incredibly calm and serene. I liked them. Piet said, “They're on H.” That's what they called heroin. It didn't make an impression on me just then. I was at that very moment even more self-absorbed than usual because I was busy dealing with the effects of the acid, which had just started to kick in.

  After we got into the subway and started moving, I freaked out. It was totally insane. For some reason, I was convinced that I was inside a tin can, and that someone was stirring us around with a gigantic spoon. The banging and clanking of the subway going through the tunnel was terrifying. I didn't think I could take the noise for even one more second. The people in the subway all had horribly distorted faces, too, like masks, like pig faces. By which I mean, they looked exactly like they always did: like a bunch of losers. But now I could see so much more clearly how disgusting and ignorant these working stiffs really were. I could imagine them all having just left some fucking bar or some shitty job. All of these grotesque, porky faces finish their day and then it's back to bed, and then it's back to work again, and then they turn the TV on, and then that's it. I thought, Wow, you're lucky that you're not one of them. You're lucky that you have friends. That you're on acid and know what's important and can recognize how ridiculous and stupid these common people are. That's kind of what I was thinking. And I had the same sequence of thoughts on later acid trips, too. Then I started feeling terrified by those faces again. I looked at Piet. He was also somehow uglier than usual. His face was really small compared to the pig faces. But despite that, he still looked kind of normal.

  I was so glad when we got out in Rudow, because by that time I was really tripping. All the lights were insanely bright. One of the streetlights above us seemed to be even brighter than the sun. In the subway, I was freezing, but now I was boiling hot. I thought I was somewhere in Spain, instead of in Berlin. It was like in one of those beautiful posters in the travel agency office in Gropiusstadt. The trees were all palm trees, and the street was a beautiful beach. Everything was unbelievably bright. I didn't tell Piet that I was tripping. I kind of wanted to be alone on my crazy but awesome trip.

  Piet, who was also tripping, said that we could still go to his girlfriend's because her parents weren't there. He loved this girlfriend of his. We walked into the underground garage of his girlfriend's house. He wanted to see if her parents' car was there. But the garage was something out of a horror movie—at least in my eyes. The low-hanging ceiling seemed to crush us, bulging further and further downward. The concrete pillars swayed back and forth. The parents' car was there.

  Piet said, “Man, what a crazy fucking garage.” And then he must have suddenly felt self-conscious, thinking that he was the only one tripping and asked me, “So where did you throw that pill back there in the club?” He looked at me and said after a few seconds, “Whoa, baby girl, I shouldn't have said anything: Your pupils look like they've been sucked into your eyeballs!”

  Once outside, everything was beautiful again. I sat down on the grass. The wall of one house was so orange that it seemed to offer a reflection of the rising sun. The shadows all seemed to move away to make room for the light. The wall bulged out and suddenly seemed to be devoured by flames.

  We went to Piet's house. Piet was an incredible painter. In his room, he'd hung up one of his paintings. It was a picture of a skeleton riding a really fat horse, and wielding a scythe. I was obsessed with that picture. I'd seen it a couple of times before and thought it was just about death. But now the painting didn't scare me at all. My thoughts were all much simpler now, almost naïve. I thought, There's no way that that skeleton would be able to control such a big horse. It seemed like the horse was already in command. We talked a long time about that picture. Then Piet gave me a few records to listen to. He said, “This stuff is amazing when you're tripping.” I went home.

  My mom was still awake, of course. She started in with the usual questions: Where had I been, what had I been doing, and things could definitely not go on like this, etcetera, etcetera. My mom seemed completely ridiculous to me—all fat and dumpy in her white nightgown, her face distorted with rage. Just like all of the other losers in the subway.

  I didn't say a word. I wasn't talking to her anymore. Even when I did say something, it was only about the most necessary and trivial things. I didn't need any love or affection from her. Sometimes I even believed that I didn't need a mom or a family at all.

  My mom with her boyfriend lived in a completely different world from me. She didn't have the slightest clue as to what I was up to. She thought that I was a completely normal kid, just going through puberty. What could I have said to them anyway? There was no way they'd get it. They would've only told me to stop. That's what I thought at the time. The only thing I felt for my mom was pity. Pity for h
ow stressed out she always was when she'd come home from her job and then immediately throw herself into her housework. But it was her own fault for buying into that mundane, tedious lifestyle.

  Christiane's Mom

  I often ask myself why it took me so long to realize what was going on with Christiane. The answer's simple, but I couldn't really bring myself to admit it until I'd heard some other parents say the exact same thing. I was in denial. I couldn't bring myself to face up to reality. I just didn't want to believe that my daughter was a drug addict.

  My boyfriend, who'd been living with me since the divorce, started to suspect something was up way before I did. “What are you talking about?” I'd ask him. “She's only a child.” That was probably my biggest mistake, to believe that the kids were somehow “too young.” When Christiane began to isolate herself, when she avoided contact with family and would rather hang out with her friends on the weekends, that's when I should have paid closer attention and investigated what she was up to. I shrugged a lot of things off.

  When you have a full-time job, it's hard to pay close enough attention to your kids. You're glad when you get some quiet time to relax, and you don't really mind when they go off to do their own thing. Sure, sometimes Christiane came home too late. But she always had some excuse that I was eager to believe. I thought that her recklessness and defiant behavior were just part of a developmental phase that would eventually end.

  I didn't want to force her to do anything. I'd had enough of that kind of parenting myself already. My dad was extremely strict.

  In the Hessian14 village, where I grew up, he was the owner of a quarry, and everyone respected him. But his theory on child rearing consisted only of saying no. If I even talked about boys, he'd hit me.

  I still remember one particular Sunday afternoon like it was yesterday. I was out for a walk with a girlfriend of mine, and trailing more than a hundred yards behind us were two young men. My dad happened to pass by us, so he immediately pulled over and slapped me across the face, right there on the street. Then he threw me into his car and took me home. And all this just because there happened to be two high school guys walking behind us. That made me furious. I was sixteen at the time, and already I was wondering how I could eventually get away.

  My mom, who was kindness personified, didn't really have a say in any of this.

  I wasn't allowed to pursue my dream of becoming a midwife. Instead, my dad insisted that I get trained in business and office work so that I could do his bookkeeping. Around this time I met Richard, my future husband. He was a year older than me and was an apprentice farmer. He was supposed to become the manager of a farm or an estate (at his dad's insistence). At first we were just friends. But the more my dad tried to destroy our friendship, the more obstinate I became. I only saw one way out: I had to get pregnant. That way I'd have to get married, and then I'd have my freedom.

  It happened when I was eighteen. Richard interrupted his apprenticeship immediately, and we moved to northern Germany, to the town where his parents lived. The marriage was a fiasco right from the start. Even during the pregnancy, I couldn't depend on him. He wound up leaving me alone over and over again, night after night. All he could think about was his Porsche and his stupid, grandiose plans for the future. No job was good enough for him. He always wanted to be someone more powerful and more impressive than he actually was, so that people would finally respect him and look up to him. He loved to talk about how important his family was in the old days, before World War II, when his grandparents owned a daily paper, a jewelry store, and a butcher shop in East Germany. And they also owned land.

  That was the vision he had for himself. He desperately wanted to be an independent businessman like his dad and grandfather. Sometimes he dreamed about starting a mail-order company; other times he wanted to open up a car dealership, and then there was the time he wanted to open a landscaping business with his friend. He never got beyond the initial planning stages with any of these plans. And then he'd let out his anger and frustrations on the kids, and when I got in the middle, the fights got worse, and he'd turn on me.

  I was the breadwinner of the family. When Christiane was four years old, I landed a great job working for a dating service. When contracts needed to be closed on weekends, Richard would help me out. That worked pretty well for a couple of years. Then Richard started arguing with my boss, and I wound up losing my job. At that point Richard wanted to start his own dating service—but this time bigger, better, and more prestigious, of course. And he decided that Berlin would be the ideal location for his new business.

  So in 1968, we moved. I had hoped that the move to Berlin would mean a fresh start for our marriage, but instead of the elegant housing and offices we'd talked about, we ended up with two-and-a-half rooms in Gropiusstadt, on the outskirts of Berlin. Richard had failed to raise the necessary capital to start up the business. Everything was exactly the way it had been before. As a result, Richard vented his rage on the people around him: on me and the kids. The best job he could find was a temporary position as a salesman, and he hated himself for that. He just couldn't stand being another one of the lower-middle-class people that the housing projects were made for.

  I often thought about divorce but didn't have the courage. Whatever self-confidence I'd managed to salvage after my dad was done with me was crushed by my husband.

  Luckily I got a job in Berlin pretty quickly and netted one thousand marks weekly as a stenographer. Being appreciated again and having a real job gave me new sense of strength. I wasn't as willing to put up with the usual amount of grief from my husband. He and his grand plans started looking ridiculous to me. The arguments between us became less and less tolerable. We tried separating several times, but that never really worked, since I still felt attached to him. Maybe it was because he was my first love, or maybe it was because of the kids. I'm not sure. I couldn't manage to find spots in either preschool or kindergarten for the girls—but at the time, I couldn't have afforded it anyway. So I didn't mind that at least Richard was home every now and then. The divorce got postponed again and again, until in 1973 I was strong enough to correct my mistake and finally went to see a divorce attorney.

  I wanted to give Christiane a better life than I'd had up to that point. Right after Christiane was born, I swore that she'd never find herself in the kind of miserable marriage that I'd wound up in. Christiane would be allowed to develop her talents freely, and she wouldn't be forced to be a secretary or a bookkeeper like me; she would have the freedoms I never had and be raised like a modern child, according to modern practices. Based on that thinking, I probably let her get away with way too much later on.

  After the divorce, my top priority was finding a new apartment. (I couldn't just stay in our old place because Richard refused to leave.) Luckily I found one in a new tax-incentivized housing development. The rent was fairly reasonable, and I also got a spot in the garage, even though I didn't have a car. It was still way too expensive for me, when it really came down to it, but I didn't have a choice: I had to get out of that marriage, once and for all. I wanted a new beginning for myself and for the kids, whatever the cost.

  Richard wasn't even able to pay child support. So I told myself, There's only one thing you can do: You have to pull yourself together, work the occasional overtime shift, and find some way to provide for the family. The girls were now ten and eleven, and up to that point they'd only experienced the absolute minimum in terms of furnishings and comfort. We didn't even have a real couch—just a hulking thing to sit on, cobbled together from a lot of other discarded bits and pieces. I was deeply hurt by the realization that I couldn't even provide a decent home for my kids.

  I wanted to make it up to them after the divorce. I finally wanted to have a pretty apartment, where we could all feel at home. That was my dream. That's what I worked for. But I also wanted to be able to indulge them a little bit. I wanted to be able to buy them pretty clothes and go on weekend trips where we didn't have to wat
ch every penny.

  With that new goal in mind, I worked myself to the bone. I was able to finally provide a nice room with pretty furniture for my daughters, and I let them choose the wallpaper, too. In 1975, I was able to give Christiane a record player as a present. Those things made me happy. I was so glad to finally be able to afford something special for my girls.

  And when I got home from work in the evening, I'd often bring some treats back with me. Little things. But I had fun going to Wertheim or Karstadt15 to pick something up. Usually I'd just get whatever was on sale. Sometimes a new candy; sometimes a funny pencil sharpener or some other trinket. When I came back with things like that, they'd be so happy and give me these giant, heartfelt hugs. Those days felt like Christmas to me.

  Today I understand of course that I was hoping to compensate for my absence with money and gifts. I shouldn't have worried so much about money. I should've spent more time with the kids, instead of working so much. To this day I don't understand why I left the girls alone so often. As if money could make up for a mom's time. I should've taken advantage of the welfare money I could have received instead. But welfare was out of the question for me back then. My parents had always pounded it into me that one should never be a burden to society.

  Maybe I should've taken my ex-husband to court for his refusal to pay child support. I don't know. In any case, in my effort to create a pretty house, I totally lost sight of what was really important. I can spin it any way I want, but in the end, I always wind up with only myself to blame. I left the kids alone, and they had to take care of themselves. Christiane certainly needed much more support and guidance than I was able to provide. She's more sensitive, less stable, and more susceptible to peer pressure than her younger sister is. Back then, I never even considered the possibility that Christiane could end up going down the wrong track—despite the fact that I was able to see the daily struggles of so many other families in the suburb where we lived. There were constant domestic fights and beatings. Drunkenness was out of control, and it wasn't uncommon to see a man, woman, or teenager lying drunk in the gutter. But I lived with the delusional belief that if I set an example for my girls, and didn't mess around with a lot of guys, and didn't let myself go, then they would follow my example.