Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. Read online

  I really believed that we were on our way up. In the morning, the kids would go to school. They made their own lunches back then. And in the afternoons, they'd often go to the riding rink and head over to the stables in Rudow. They were always crazy about animals.

  Apart from some jealousy issues between the kids and Klaus (my boyfriend, who had moved in with us), things were going really well. When I wasn't working, or tending to the house, or managing the kids, I still wanted to have some time to take care of him, too. He was a source of real calm for me. But because I wanted to have more time with Klaus, I made a serious mistake: I let Christiane's sister move in with her dad—who was lonely at the time and had managed to win her allegiance with all sorts of promises.

  So now Christiane was alone when she got home from school. And at this point, she got mixed up with some much more dangerous kids. But I wasn't able to notice. Kessi, her girlfriend who lived nearby, and who hung out with her in the afternoons, seemed to be really sensible and mature. And Kessi's mom kept an eye on them off and on. Sometimes Christiane was at Kessi's, and sometimes Kessi was at our house.

  They were both about twelve or thirteen years old, the age where you get curious and want to try everything once. And it didn't bother me when they went to the youth club at the Center House, which was set up and run by the church community in Gropiusstadt. I was sure that Christiane was in good hands with those church people. I never could have imagined that the teens in Center House would be allowed to do things like smoke pot.

  I was envisioning something totally different. I was comforted that Christiane was growing into a happy teenager and not just missing her sister all the time. Since she'd made friends with Kessi, she'd started laughing again. Sometimes those two were so ridiculously silly that they made me laugh, too. How was I supposed to know that they were giggling so much because they'd been smoking pot—or even something worse? It never would've occurred to me.

  THE CLIQUE WE HAD THEN was like my family. We had friendship, affection, and love, too, I think. Even the way we said hello to one another had something magical to it. We kissed each other on the cheek, and it was tender and affectionate. My father had never kissed me like that.

  In our clique, problems didn't exist; we didn't talk about them. No one wanted to weigh anyone else down with whatever shit was going on in their life. When we were together, the nightmare of the “real world” completely disappeared, and we were like our own little island of peacefulness and friendliness surrounded by a world of people living unhappy, miserable lives.

  We talked about music and pot. Sometimes about clothes, and sometimes about people who rebelled against what we viewed as a police state. We liked people who took instead of being taken— people who stole cars and robbed banks. And after I dropped acid that first time, I felt like I was finally one of them—especially since it had been such an awesome trip, and I felt as though I'd handled it like a cool pro. I felt like I had proved myself.

  Suddenly I had a new outlook on things. I went out into the country again. When I was younger, I'd go there with my dog, and somehow I experienced the countryside through him. Now, I would never go out there without either getting high or tripping. I started experiencing nature in a totally different way. It dissolved into colors, forms, and sounds that were reflective of my moods. I thought I'd finally gotten a handle on things. And for a few months, I was generally happy with myself.

  But eventually things started to get old. Pot and acid didn't give a proper kick anymore. We'd gotten used to them. We were used to getting high like that. There wasn't anything new or exciting about it.

  Then one day somebody came into the club and said, “I've got something really new: ephedrine. This stuff is awesome.” I took two ephedrine pills without knowing exactly what I was swallowing, but obviously (or as I know now) they're a kind of upper. I washed them down with a beer because that's what everyone else was doing. But even that wasn't easy for me at the time because I hated beer, and I hated all the drunks I saw every day around the city, always drinking, and always totally shitfaced.

  All of a sudden, it seemed like there were tons of pills floating around in the club. That same night I took a Mandrax, which is a kind of a high-octane sleeping pill. Once I'd done that, I was convinced again that everything was perfect, and I loved everyone in our little group.

  In the weeks that followed, we took a prolonged cruise through the entire pharmaceutical industry.

  Things were starting to deteriorate at school. I didn't do any homework anymore and always woke up tired. Despite that, I did manage to advance to eighth grade. I sometimes still got decent grades in language arts or social studies because the topics interested me—sometimes, at least—and because I was just naturally good at them.

  But especially in those classes in which I didn't totally space out, I got into trouble more and more often. Sometimes I'd get into arguments with the teachers, and sometimes with the other students. I just thought it was horrible the way people treated each other there. I hated the way the teachers were so hypocritical, since the high morals and ideals they were teaching were in such stark contrast to the way they treated the students, and also the way they turned a blind eye to the students who were treating each other so horribly.

  I still remember a big fight I had with a teacher who wanted to talk to us about environmental conservation. The whole class was totally apathetic. They weren't interested in anything. Still, that wasn't really their fault, since there was nothing to take notes on and nothing to learn. The teacher's self-righteous ramblings and the way he paid no attention to any of his students really got on my nerves. So at one point I lost it. “What sort of shit are you talking about?” I yelled at him. “What the hell do you even mean by ‘environmental conservation’ and ‘respect for the environment’? I mean, that has to start with us, with human beings learning how to treat one another. That's what this shit-for-school should teach us first—that as a human being you should show interest in and care for others. The goal shouldn't just be to be louder and stronger than everyone else, or to lie and cheat and rip people off just to wind up on top, with the best grades! It's about time the teachers finally got a clue, and addressed the real problems in this school, and started treating the students fairly!” And so on. I actually kind of liked that teacher—at least compared to the others. That's why I got so furious at him for ignoring us and thought it would make a difference to let him know how I felt—loudly and clearly.

  So in a word, the school sucked, and I hated it. We didn't have any contact with the teachers outside of the classroom. And because everyone's class schedule was always changing, it was hard to make and maintain friends. Here again it was dog-eatdog. Nobody helped anybody, and everybody wanted to be better than everybody else. In this meat grinder, the teachers took it out on the students because they had the power to hand out grades. The students knew that if they pissed off a teacher, that teacher could retaliate by slapping them with a bad grade. And the students, in turn, took advantage of any of the teachers who were too good-natured to assert themselves.

  I realized how profoundly unfair everything was, but I kept trying to fight back—sometimes because what I had to say really mattered to me, and sometimes just to disrupt class. By now, most of my classmates only paid attention to me when I was screaming about something or other; they didn't have any interest in hearing my thoughts about how shitty everything was.

  That didn't really bother me though—not like it used to— because the only people I wanted to accept me were the people in my clique. When I was with them, there wasn't any of that stress or fighting. But even then, when I was hanging out with my group, I often sat by myself. I participated less and less in the conversations. But it didn't really matter, since our conversations were always about the same things: pot, music, the events of the previous night, and, more often now, the street prices for things like acid and pills. I was usually so stoned that I wanted to be just alone and not have to talk about
anything

  I did, however, have a new goal: I wanted to get into The Sound. The Sound was a club on Genthiner Street in the Tiergarten16 neighborhood. All over the city there were posters about how The Sound was Europe's hottest club. A lot of the people in our group were regulars there, but it was only for people sixteen or older—and I'd just barely turned thirteen. So I was always afraid that they wouldn't let me in, even though I'd already changed the birth date on my student ID.

  The Sound was the place to be. You could buy anything there—from pot to quaaludes to Valium and even heroin. Also, I'd heard about a bunch of really cool people who hung out there and seemed almost magical to me. It sounded like heaven to a young girl like me, who divided most of her time between dreary places like Rudow and Gropiusstadt. I imagined The Sound to be a kind of palace—with lights and glitter and crazy effects and music that was so incredible I couldn't even imagine it yet. And of course, I also thought about the guys that I'd meet there.

  I'd planned to go along with the others on a few previous occasions, but it had never quite worked out before. So Kessi and I drew up a detailed plan of action that was guaranteed to work. One Saturday, I told my mom that I was sleeping over at Kessi's, and Kessi told her mom she was staying at my house. Both of our moms fell for it (luckily). A girlfriend of Kessi's was also supposed to come along, named Peggy. She was a bit older than us. We also had to wait for Peggy's boyfriend, Micha. Kessi told me some important news: Micha was shooting heroin. I was excited to meet him because up to that point I'd never personally met a junkie.

  When Micha arrived, I was very impressed. Somehow he was even cooler than the guys from our group of friends. Immediately my old inferiority complex surfaced again. Micha treated us very condescendingly, as if he was a step above us. I was reminded again of the fact that I was only thirteen, and that this heroin fiend was much too worldly, much too grown up for me. I felt like a loser again. Incidentally, Micha died just a few months later.

  We got into the subway and went to Kurfürstenstrasse station.17 That was a pretty long ride for me back then. I felt like I was very far away from home. The street corner nearest the station, the corner of Kurfürstenstrasse and Potsdamer Street, looked pretty grungy. There were some girls milling around. At the time, I didn't realize that they were hookers looking to get picked up by passing cars. There were some guys there, too. Peggy said that they were the dealers.

  If someone had told me then that one day I'd be like them, hanging around a dismal place like this every day, I'd have said they were totally crazy.

  The next thing I knew, we were finally doing it: We were going into The Sound. As soon as I walked inside, I stopped dead in my tracks. This was nothing like I had imagined. “Europe's hottest club” was a basement with a low ceiling. It was loud and filthy. On the dance floor, everyone was dancing by themselves, just doing their own thing. Strangely enough, nobody was touching anyone else. There was no physical contact. The air was unbelievably stale and gross. An oscillating fan pushed the nauseating odor lazily around the room.

  I sat down on a bench, afraid to even move. I had the feeling that people were staring at me because they'd somehow noticed that I didn't belong. I was a complete outsider. But Kessi was into it right away. Right away she started hustling around the room, looking for hot guys. She told me that she'd never seen so many hot guys all in one bunch. Meanwhile, I was glued to the bench. The others had brought some kind of pills and were drinking beer. I didn't want anything. All through the night I hung onto two glasses of juice. What I really wanted to do was go home. But that was out of the question because my mom thought I was at Kessi's. I was just waiting for 5 a.m. to come around, when the club would finally close. For a moment, I even wished that my mom would figure out what I'd been up to and suddenly show up and take me home. Then I fell asleep.

  The others woke me up at five. Kessi said that she was going home with Peggy. I had a really bad stomachache, but nobody cared about what was going on with me. I walked alone to the Kurfürstenstrasse subway station at five in the morning. There were drunks everywhere in the subway. I felt like puking.

  It'd been a long time since I'd been this glad to unlock our front door and see my mom come out of her bedroom. I told her that Kessi had woken up so early, and I'd decided to come home and sleep in where it was quiet. I grabbed my two cats and carried them into my bed with me and snuggled down under the blankets. Right before I drifted off to sleep I thought to myself, Christiane, that is not your world. It's wrong, so just let it go.

  When I woke up around noon, I still felt awful. I needed to talk to someone about what I had experienced, but I knew that no one from my group of friends would understand. So I could only talk about it with my mom.

  I didn't know how to begin. “Hey, mom,” I began, awkwardly. “So last night Kessi and I went to The Sound.” My mom looked shocked. “Actually,” I said, “it was kind of fun. It's such a big place. They even have a movie theater in there.”

  My mom immediately started in with her usual reprimands. In the meantime, I kept waiting for some questions. But my mom didn't really ask any. Between cleaning and dinner and Klaus, she was completely stressed out that afternoon. She probably didn't want to suffer anymore stress by having a long mother-daughter talk with me. Maybe she didn't even want to know all the details, anyway.

  I didn't have the courage to speak up on my own. I wasn't even really aware that I wanted and needed to talk. I wasn't really that conscious about anything at that time in my life. I lived according to my subconscious thoughts and moods. I never thought about consequences. I had no plans. What did I know about planning? No one in my house ever talked about the future.

  The next weekend, Kessi had to stay with me because that's the way we'd sold our story of alternating sleepovers to my mom. I actually had to drag her to our house because she was already tripping so hard. She'd dropped acid earlier. I'd also taken half a pill of something, but I could still think pretty clearly. Kessi stood on the street in front of our house, hypnotized like a deer by the two headlights that were coming toward her. I had to yank her off the road so that she wouldn't get hit by a car.

  I pushed her into my room right away. But my mom followed us in, of course. As she stood in the doorframe, Kessi and I somehow shared the same crazy, distorted vision: For some reason, we were convinced that my mom was too fat to fit through the door. We started to giggle and pretty soon were convulsing with laughter. I thought my mom looked like a fat, kindhearted dragon with a bone in her hair. We laughed, and my mom naïvely laughed with us. She must have thought we were just a couple of silly teenage girls.

  FROM THAT POINT ON, Kessi took me with her to The Sound almost every Saturday. I went along because I didn't know what else to do on a Saturday night. I gradually got used to everything there. I was honest with my mom and told her where we were going on the weekends. She told me I could stay out until the last subway train.

  Everything went well for a few weeks, until one Saturday in the summer of 1975. We wanted to stay out all night and once again told our mothers that we were staying with friends. That still worked because back then my mom still didn't have a phone. So the moms couldn't check on us or spy on us. First we went to the Center House and guzzled two bottles of wine. Then we loaded a killer bong. Kessi tossed down a couple of ephedrine pills, and at some point after that she started to bawl. I saw that one coming. After ephedrine you sometimes get hyper-emotional, and fall apart.

  When Kessi suddenly disappeared, I started to worry. I had an idea about where she'd gone, so I headed over to the subway station. There she was, hanging off the side of a bench, totally passed out, with a pile of French fries in front of her. Before I could wake her up, a subway train pulled in and Kessi's mom got out. She worked at a sauna and was just now at 10 p.m. getting out of work. She recognized her daughter (whom she thought was safe in bed at my place) right away. She grabbed Kessi, still asleep, and slapped her, hard, across the face several times. You could
hear the sound of her hand smacking her daughter's face echoing off the walls of the station. Then Kessi puked. Her mom grabbed her, just like a police officer would, and hauled her off.

  That little beating that Kessi received from her mom at the Wutzkyallee subway station probably saved her a lot of grief. Without that bit of corporal punishment, she might have ended up in the drug scene, on the streets, selling herself, even before me—which means she wouldn't be finishing her college entrance exams now either.

  After that, Kessi wasn't allowed to hang out with me anymore; she wasn't allowed out in the evenings at all. That made me feel pretty lonely at first. I didn't really like hanging out at Center House anymore. I saw everyone from that scene during the school week. But I couldn't imagine weekends without The Sound anymore. Everyone there, and everything that was happening there, seemed to incredibly cool to me. They were real rock stars in my mind. The guys from Gropiusstadt just couldn't compare—and besides, they never really made it out of Gropiusstadt anyway. But it meant that I was constantly short on cash now. Before she was grounded, Kessi had always received an allowance of one hundred marks a month, which we spent on pot and pills. Now I had to find my cash somewhere else, borrowing from friends, or stealing.