Scene opens with actor sitting on an institutional looking wooden chair in the middle of the stage.

I have no idea what made me not want to flip that switch.  I know my job. I’ve done it for fifteen years, so it’s not even shocking or distasteful to me anymore.  If I had to assign an adjective to my job, it would probably be “tedious” because we sit around doing the same thing day after day.   But it didn’t start out that way.  When I first started working on the “A” block I was fresh out of school, ready to prove myself.  Any responsibility no one else wanted to take fell to me, and I did it gratefully in order to gain the respect and trust of my fellow guards.  Before I had time to blink, ten years had passed, and I was second in command at the smallest, most lethal wing of Jonesboro State Prison.

During my fifteen years working as a guard on what most people have come to call “The Snuff Box” I participated in over twenty executions.  Most of the time I ended up with the lackluster duty of leading the inmate to the chair and strapping him down, wrists and ankles, to the unforgiving hickory grip of the electric chair.  After my duty was done I simply stepped back and watched the magic happen.  The smell of sizzling flesh never bothered me much because I spent most of my childhood living near a slaughterhouse in northeast Arkansas.  How can you compare the two you ask? Let me give you a small explanation. 

Get up from chair, place one foot on the seat, and begin speaking.

Imagine the scent your kitchen becomes filled with after you leave some chicken cuttings in your garbage can for a few days.  Multiply that smell by three thousand chickens.  Add heat, poor ventilation, the spray of hot water from cleaning hoses and the lack of wind that is so prominent in the Midwest and you might have some idea of the aroma that surrounds every single memory of my childhood.  After you smell the incredible reek of a slaughterhouse working at breakneck speed, the scent of smoldering tissue comes to resemble a vase of blooming gardenias.  You get the gist?

Move to the back of the chair and lean on the back.

Back to my story.  I never had to think about my job because I was the assistant.  The backup man.  I was just important enough to avoid the distasteful job of disposing of the smoking remains of the criminals we helped bring to justice, but I wasn’t ever essential enough to lead an execution.  I liked it that way.  I never had to make any snap decisions.  Like the time Mickey Thritch, this guy that was put into the Box for killing his wife and kids with his prized hunting rifle, was executed.  He was a big fucker. I mean like Beluga whale fat.  His legs looked like gravy crammed into a Ziploc bag.  Anyway, Mickey didn’t fit into the chair very comfortably.  The cap that we put on his head didn’t exactly fit where it should,  Motion the snug fit by cramming both hands onto the head.  So, all the juice didn’t shoot straight through his brain like it did with normal sized guys.  Instead, blue sparks shot out of the sides of the cap and delayed Mickey’s death by say, oh, I don’t know….twelve minutes.  Death by electrocution usually takes three minutes…max.  Needless to say, my boss had to make a decision to keep the juice pumping because stopping and starting again was not an option.  You couldn’t touch Mickey’s skin because his fat heated up rather quickly.  I don’t know if I could have made that call with all the witnesses watching. I was too busy trying to keep my stomach in check.

Walk to the far wall and lean against it.

I know what you’re thinking. “Why didn’t you quit? Find another job?”  I’ll tell you why.  I liked it, but not for the reasons you’re thinking.  I guarded men that knew they were going to die.  I watched them everyday.  Trying to get their affairs in order, calling and writing long lost relatives, begging them to come for a visit before they had to ride a streak of blue lightning straight into hell.  Some relatives came.  Some didn’t.  When relatives didn’t come the heartbreak was evident on the guy’s face.  Tough, tattooed bastards that didn’t give a shit about anyone or anything often broke down crying in the limited privacy of their own eight by six cells.  It was marvelous.  These guys had committed theft, murder, rape.   The path of ruined lives behind them was crowded.  Aside from Mickey’s murdering of his family, we had other notable murders on the block.  George Allen decided he hated faggots one night, so he determined that he would take a few of them off the planet.  One night, George got tanked at his favorite bar and drove around in his 1989 Pontiac Firebird looking for a few queers to carry on an intellectual discussion with.  Before long, he found two of them having a little conversation of their own in a back alley and he proceeded to beat both of them to death with a sawed-off pool cue he had liberated from the bar.  He didn’t even bother to separate them before he started.  I bet the cops had a ball at that crime scene the next day.  George turned himself in a few days later, said he had no idea what had come over him, but the law didn’t care.  That’s how he came to me. 

Flip chair around and straddle it. Look comfortable. 

Another winner had to be Deckland Dempsey.  Twenty-five years old, dark hair, looked a lot like Mel Gibson actually.  Fairly well educated.  He had a penchant for raping young women on college campuses and leaving them in bushes for other young women to find.  I sat down to talk to him one day and asked him why he did it.  He said that he enjoyed taking things from people.  Always had.  He would take toys from other kids just to watch the pain on their faces, but when puberty came on hot and heavy his attention shifted to something much more twisted.  He often picked up an inspecting woman by acting like he was stranded.  His good looks and charm disarmed them easily.  Before they knew it, he had a gun in their face and was telling them to slide over into the passenger seat.  He would drive to one of many hidden locations and begin what he called “exploring himself through his art.”  He would knock his victim out, bind her around the hands with electrical tape, stuff her underwear in her mouth, and proceed to rape her for all she was worth.  He said his highest of number of sessions in one night was thirteen.  He explained that this was a rarity. The victim was a true redhead, which he said inspired him to new heights.  He would often leave the women, dazed and bruised beyond recognition, under an overpass or near the side of a road with her hands still bound and her underwear back on----inside out.  I loved watching him die.  I was half tempted to put underwear in his mouth instead of the rubber piece we give them to bite down on.   Bastard deserved what he got.  I think someone should have raped him to death.  It’s not like we don’t have volunteers for the job walking around the prison yard.

I had it all figured out.  I was the dispenser of justice.  I was the Ironman, Superman, hell, I was Wonder Woman.  I took the evildoers and put them in their place.  All I needed to feel complete was a pair of red boots and a cape.  I never got close to any of the guys that I guarded.  I only learned about them in order to hate them more fully.  This was the scum of the earth.  No flower picking, body painting hippie was going to tell me that these losers only needed to share their feelings in group therapy.  Get up and shove chair away.  Speak more forcefully.  You couldn’t explain away their crimes by saying they weren’t hugged enough as a child.  These men were predators, pure and simple.  My job was to make sure that they were nice and comfortable up to the point where I helped ram thirty thousand volts of pure, unblemished electricity straight down their spines.  God bless you Benjamin Franklin.  Sit back down in chair. In fact, I think I actually slept better on the nights I helped execute someone.

Lean forward and brace elbows on knees. Rub eyes. Take a deep breath. Grave seriousness. Here is the revelation. 

I did have it all figured out until I met William McManus.  All the guys took to calling him “Gravedigger Bill” for some odd reason.  William earned his membership card to the Snuff Box by killing not one, not two, not even three---get ready, but five, count ‘em, five members of his nuclear family.  That’s right.  In one night this scrawny eighteen-year-old kid made short work of his mother, father, grandmother, and two younger sisters.  I won’t go into the details of the murders because they still sicken me to this day, but I will say that I wasn’t filled with the same loathing that I normally was when I met multi-murderers.  Something about this kid was different.  Something didn’t add up.

Begin to pace slowly…speed up gradually as the dialogue calls for it.

For one thing, this kid wrote all the time.  That’s not odd.  Lots of guys write diaries, letters, or notes as a way of absolving guilt.  But the urge to confess on paper usually stops during the first month of their limited stay.  Gravedigger Bill wrote all day, every day for three months.  Another factoid that struck me funny was the fact that this kid was not what you would refer to as a Rhodes Scholar.  He actually grew up in a town not too terribly far from mine.  I bet he experienced the same marvelous smells that I did when I was growing up---just in a more watered-down form.  I didn’t want to get to know this kid, but I was puzzled by him.  Finally, after about a month of watching him, when I felt like I couldn’t stand the questions that were threatening to come spilling out of my ears, I walked up to the cold, paint chipped bars of his cell and asked what was so important that it consumed his thoughts day and night.  Well, that little SOB looked up at me with red rimmed eyes and said, “You can read it when I’m finished.”  No explanation, back to his work.  This ritual of observing, questioning, and asking went right up until rehearsals for his execution began.  That was when I found out that I was going to be in charge.  My boss had to go out of town on the day of Graveyard Bill’s demise, so I was going to be the architect of the death sentence.  He actually called me over to his cell the morning of the day he was slated to die and handed me a dog eared spiral bound notebook with a purple cover.  He simply said two words, “Read it.”  I did.  And what I read in those one hundred blue lined pages was enough to make my skin want to crawl off my body.  He’d detailed it. Every moment in living, breathing, colored detail.  I felt like I was there watching him kill his unsuspecting family all over again.  I cannot tell you why I read every single word of it.  It was like driving by the scene of a horrible auto accident and slowing down to see if there are any sheet draped bodies lying on the ground.  I simply couldn’t stop myself.

Stop pacing.

I had secretly been hoping for a miracle.  I thought this kid had been writing something absolving himself of the crime.  Maybe he was insane, maybe guilt ridden.  I was praying that, for some unknown reason, that this kid might be innocent and that I could help him out of the Snuff Box.  But instead of giving me hope, this kid just reaffirmed my belief that the world was not a kind place.  I had been deluding myself.  I said I liked the execution of justice, but I didn’t like it near as much as the feeling I had waiting for Bill’s notebook.  I had been looking for a sort of salvation.  I got nothing.  But that still doesn’t explain why I couldn’t pull the switch on the bastard.

Begin pacing again.

The time for his death finally rolled around and eight that night.  We had rehearsed who was doing what.   We were ready…I had made sure of that.  He was wrapped in the machine’s embrace, strapped in tighter than one of Deckland’s rape victims, ready for his electrical enema.  I couldn’t see his face because I was behind a divider waiting for the call to turn on the juice.  I remember thinking about The Wizard of Oz.  Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! I actually had to stifle a laugh.  The speeches were made, the judgment read, and his time of death was upon us.  Him.  Me.  I put my hand on the lever that would send him, screaming, straight down into Satan’s embrace.  I thought I actually heard him screaming as the electrification ran through his body.  I tried to kindle up my old delight, but I was imagining the whole thing.  I had yet to pull the lever.  One of my assistants called again for the execution to begin.  I tried to pull the switch.  I couldn’t.  My arm was limp at my side.  I grabbed the dead appendage with my other arm and actually wrapped my hand around the handle.  Nothing.  I simply could not do it.  I won’t say I had a moment of pity.  I knew the little prick was guilty.  But this was the first time I was actually handing death to someone instead of simply escorting him to it.  Who in the hell did I think I was…handing out death at the flick of a switch? Was I playing God?  All I knew was that I couldn’t carry out the task I had seen done many times over.  How could I pass judgment? I wasn’t perfect.  Hell, it could have been me in that chair.  That kid probably had a lousy family. Lousy life.  I knew all about it because my family and my life had been that way.  One missed turn or one wrong choice and I could have been that kid with my ass strapped to the instrument of death and my bloody confession in a wide ruled notebook.  I didn’t know what to do.  Luckily, one of the other guards did.  He came back behind the divider with me and yanked down the switch. 

Stop pacing. Face the audience. Pick out a few people and talk directly to them.

Within two minutes it was over.  Graveyard Bill was gone….and yet, he wasn’t.  He was still in my head.  I was put on suspension until my actions (or lack thereof) could be reviewed by a prison board.  That’s how I got here.  Sitting, waiting, for a bunch of suits to tell me what I did was either inexcusable or cowardly…maybe both.  I don’t know what I will say or do, but I do know one thing.  There were two switches that were flipped that night.  One killed William McManus.  The other changed me.

Walk away from audience to the back of the room.

Fade out.