Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. (10 page)

I did, however, have a new goal: I wanted to get into The Sound. The Sound was a club on Genthiner Street in the Tiergarten
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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.
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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.

I had to go to The Sound by myself now. The next Friday afternoon, I went to a drugstore and bought a packet of ephedrine for 2.95 marks. You could get that without a prescription. I'd gotten to the point where I was no longer taking two, but four or five ephedrine pills. Then I made one more stop at Center House and bummed a joint from someone. I walked to the subway station feeling like I was on top of the world. I didn't think about Kessi; I didn't think about what was going on. I was simply there. I was just floating along in a beautiful, intoxicating, carefree world.

When I was in the subway, I could tell right away, at every stop, if the people who'd gotten on were going to The Sound. There was a kind of uniform we all shared: bold, fashion-forward clothes, long hair, and outrageous shoes with four-inch platform soles. These people were my idols; they were the stars of The Sound. I wasn't nervous at all anymore when I went out there, even when I was alone. I was really high, and I felt amazing. The weed I'd smoked earlier was obviously good stuff.

On the steps of The Sound, I bumped into a new boy, whom I hadn't met before, and he said something to me. He seemed really cool: tall; slim; long, blond hair; and incredibly calm. I managed to initiate a conversation with him while we were still on the stairs. Since, after all, I was feeling so awesome and super confident. From the very first sentence, we seemed to understand each other completely. We liked the same music, and we even tripped the same way. His name was Atze. He was the first boy who really made me stop in my tracks. I was crazy for him, right from the start. For the first time in my life, I was in love.

Once we were in The Sound, Atze introduced me to all of his friends, and they were all really cool. I had no problem jumping right into their conversation. The most popular topic was always drugs and the best ways to get high. And at that point in time, I'd had as much experience as anyone else I was likely to run into. Atze's friends also talked a lot about heroin, or “H,” as they called it. Everyone agreed that it was the end of the line, the ultimate low point. Once you started with H, they thought, you might as well put a bullet through your head and save yourself some money. I remember saying something around that time about people shooting up being “total loser assholes.” Then we talked about how to alter jeans so that they'd have a tighter fit.

Since I'd been losing so much weight recently, I'd become a kind of expert in the subject of tailoring. I had to alter my jeans almost weekly. Skintight pants were a kind of uniform for people who spent their nights at The Sound. I was able to give people sewing tips. But making jeans fit tighter was the only kind of sewing that I'd ever done.

I was accepted into Atze's clique almost immediately. I didn't even have to fight for it. I was on a lot of drugs, of course, and I had this new sense of serenity and self-confidence that was surprising even to me. There was another guy in this new clique who I felt an instant connection with. His name was Detlef. He was totally different from Atze. He was cute, kind of childlike, and soft. They called him “babyface.” He was sixteen. He was the one that I felt most at ease with. We could talk about anything. Then there was also this awesome girl, Astrid. She really had her shit together. She was always making these witty comments that would have everyone laughing hysterically. She always knew what to say, no matter what. I admired that. The only one you really had to watch out for was Ralph. He'd really tear into you whenever he saw any sign of weakness or insecurity. When I told
this story about the time I was tripping on the subway and started playing with a little kid—who seemed like an angel to me at the time—Ralph cut right in with something about how naïve I was and made my story seem ridiculous. So you had to really watch what you said. I also didn't think this other guy, named Stinger,
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was that cool. He thought he was God's gift to girls, but my experience earlier on with Kathi had made me really suspicious of that kind of character. But Stinger only sort of belonged to the clique; he wasn't a regular.