First Comes Love, Then Comes Pills

Chapter Two:

I was eleven years old, playing in my grandparents’ basement—my favorite place in the whole world. It was a wonderland down there, dusty and cluttered, full of possibilities. I spent hours playing store, making up dance routines to Jock Jams, and sneaking my cousins’ Barbies into elaborate soap opera storylines. You know, all the normal things little boys did.

That day, though, I took a break from being a super queen and started snooping.

That’s when I found it—a plain, unmarked cassette tape.

Curious, I popped it into the radio, half-expecting music. Instead, a woman’s voice filled the basement, familiar yet completely out of place. My Aunt Carolyn.

She was talking to a man, and the conversation felt strange. Flirty. The man kept asking if “Cindy was available,” and Carolyn—cool as ever—kept saying, “No, Cindy’s off tonight.” It went on like that, back and forth, an odd rhythm I didn’t understand.

I yanked the tape out, confused but intrigued. Later, I casually mentioned it to my mom. That was a mistake.

She was upset, first because I had been snooping, but mostly because now she had to explain something she never intended to. That was the day I learned that my Aunt Carolyn—my effortlessly cool, endlessly mysterious aunt—used to be a sex worker.

She had told everyone she was making good money “cleaning houses” in St. Louis. But it wasn’t houses she was cleaning.

I didn’t know it then, but she was also addicted to pills.

Carolyn lived with my grandparents, her bedroom a mess of cigarette smoke and secrets. A bag full of pills sat beside her bed, always within reach. At dinner, she would sometimes nod off, fork halfway to her mouth. My grandma would look mortified, whispering sharp reprimands under her breath, while my brother and I struggled not to giggle.

But I loved Aunt Carolyn.

She was the cool aunt. The one who told me ghost stories and let me stay up late. The one who saw me for exactly who I was before I even knew myself.

“Why do you have to make your bed if you’re just gonna get back in it?” She’d say with a lazy smirk, cigarette clenched between her fingers. I still love it when people smoke and talk, the dramatics of it all.

She burned through boyfriends, husbands, and mistakes. Had a baby at thirteen. My grandparents adopted her daughter and raised her as their own—Carolyn’s sister on paper, her child in reality. It was a complicated kind of love, but that was Carolyn. Messy, but full of heart.

She always had a nice car. Always wanted to drive.

One day, she picked me up from school with a grand idea.

“We’re making a video for Oprah,” she announced like it was the most natural thing in the world. Carolyn loved some daytime TV, especially Oprah.

“Oprah is doing an interior design makeover, hun, for some lucky viewers and your Aunt Carolyn is feeling lucky!!” She took a hit of her cig as the wind blew her long hair back.

I was ecstatic. Oprah! This was my chance. I was going to be famous!

She held the camera, directing me like some drugged-up Hollywood producer, coaching me to be dramatic as I complained about my grandma’s mismatched couch and curtains.

“As you can see my grandma's curtains and couch do not match”, I said into the camera with a smile.

Looking back, she was probably high out of her mind.

But she always meant well.

That’s the thing about Carolyn. Yeah, she was an addict. Yeah, she made a lot of bad choices. But she let me be myself, fully, without question or shame. When I played with Barbies in the basement, she never told me to stop. She never made me feel like I was wrong.

“Who cares what people think?” she’d say, exhaling smoke, the two of us wrapped in a little cocoon of understanding.

She was the first person to teach me how to stand up for myself. She never hesitated to say exactly what she thought. I think I got that from her.

In our family, we called the women “Sis.” My mom called Carolyn “Sis,” and eventually, I did too.

“Did you talk to Sis today?” I’d ask my mom.

“Yeah,” she’d say, voice heavy. “She’s been sick.”

Sis was always sick. Pills will do that.

She died the way she loved—on a couch, high on pills. I was nineteen.

Some people would say she was a bad influence on me. I should have learned what not to do from her. That I should have looked at her life and taken away a lesson about addiction, about recklessness.

But that’s not what I took from Sis.

I took her kindness. I took her fearlessness. I took her ability to say fuck it to what people think and just be.

I miss her. I wish she could’ve seen me grow into my full self, an out gay man. I wish we could have talked about boys. Hell, we probably would’ve done drugs together, or at least I would have hit her up for a Xanax now and then.

If she were alive today, my friends would love her. She would be a gay icon.

Sis was my first introduction to addiction, but she was also my first introduction to unconditional love.

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The Hay Bales to Halsted series consists of stories and experiences from the perspective of Nico Sansegraw. These narratives are solely his own and do not reflect the views or opinions of GRAB Magazine. This series is intended as a work of storytelling and in no way seeks to glorify, endorse, or promote any specific subject matter. It is simply a story—nothing more, nothing less.