The cell block was winding down. It was 3 hours before midnight and the block guard was making his rounds. A voice broke through the clamor.

"Richard, Richie! I got a favor to ask."

Richard made his way over to cell 33. "What do you want Green?"

"I need you to give this to Warden McKenzie. Tell him it's my story, and that I'd like for him to read it. Please Rich, he's got to read it before they pull the lever. Twelve o'clock, can you handle that? I really need you to do this. Call it a last wish if you want."

"I'll see what I can do Green, get some rest."

"Hey Richard, could ya call me Drew."

"No problem Drew, I'll take it to him right now."

"Thanks."



My name is Andrew Green. I'm here in the lock down at the Jersey Pen. I'm here for murder, they say that it was a random murder, a robbery, but that journal Richard just took to McKenzie says otherwise. I knew em, I knew both of em. It was planned, but that doesn't really matter much. I'm gonna fry in three hours. What can I say, I screwed up. It was just one of those crazy moments when you get really friggin hot and you don't know what ya don till ya don it. I recognized them both right away. It would have been alright if they wouldn't have recognized me. But they had to call me Porky. That was their mistake.

Warden McKenzie got the journal just as Richard had promised. He gave it a thought to toss it on his desk and save it for later, but something told him that Drew Green had something important to say. So, he sat down and flipped on his desk light and started at the beginning.

JOURNAL:

I guess ya could say that my troubles started in the third grade. I was your typical fat boy. I had the high pitched giggle wheeze laugh. I loved my Little Debbies and my Twinkies. My favorite super hero was the Pillsbury Dough-Boy. And my whole world revolved around a goddess. Her name was Gretchen Hidlebrook. I would just say that name to give me chills. Gretchen. It made me feel things that a third grader shouldn't feel. Then again, I started school a year late, and was held back in first grade. So, technically I was supposed to be a fifth grader. I was a stupid fat boy.

By the looks of it I was doomed to fail. Porky was my first and worst nickname. Ya don't know how hard it was to have kids two years younger and twice as smart make fun of you. The pain, the anguish, the hunger it caused me. After a while, I gave in. I would have Snickers and Gummy Worms in my desk, Whoppers and Jelly Belly in my pockets, donuts and soda in my backpack. I was ten and a half years old, in the third grade, and I weighed just over two hundred pounds. Then one day I gave up.

It was never clear to me why God would be so mean to me. I never used his name in vain, or swore. First off he made me dumb, second he made me fat. So, why would he make me the object of ridicule too? All of my childhood was spent crying into my pillow. No person should have to feel as bad as I did. No one should be the point of degradation like I was. No one should have to go through the crap that I went through. No one should want to commit suicide at the age of ten and a half. Unfortunately that was me, that was the way that Andrew Porky Green was, for a long time. It takes almost more than I have to write this down, to share my pain. I had it locked up for too long. Now it's your turn to feel what I felt. Your turn to go through the hell that I lived. Your turn to look back on the pricks I had to deal with. Hey, what can I say besides screw them. Screw them for treating me like their little push around fat play toy. Screw them for pushing me down on the playground and shoving rocks in my mouth and forcing me to swallow, telling me that rocks won't make me such a fat ass. Screw them for calling my mom a pig farmer and my dad a dead beat. These words can't even begin to relate what I went through. The only idea you could gather is from the tear stains on the paper. Even then ya probably can't see the pain in each drop. But, like I said earlier, I gave up.