From time to time, one of the inmates would kill himself. On occasion, a guard would do the same. These deaths, and of course the scheduled ones for which the Polunsky Unit existed, knocked Stroman in the head every time. It never got easier.
“I believe death lies dormant in all of us, just waiting to bloom,” he said.
AFTER THE INITIAL shock of Polunsky, what got to Stroman was the solitude. Prison nibbles at a man, especially when twenty-three hours a day of it pass in total isolation. That nibbling can reveal unseen qualities—can show what kind of a man he really is, when his prior circumstances and lifelong relationships are stolen from him and he confronts the fact of having only himself. In Stroman’s case, prison revealed him to be, among other things, an avid and caring correspondent, dashing off letters every day, waiting on the replies, managing a complex weave of transactions by which he solicited and gathered money, received photographs from some for forwarding to others, enlisted support for his appeals, and attempted to burn off his sins with compensatory kindnesses.
From the moment of his arrest in 2001, he reached out with particular fervor to his buddy Bob Templeton and his parents. He had met Bob through another guy who had hired Stroman to do a marble job. Bob’s mother, Marge, said her son was easygoing and simple and wary of confrontation, especially compared to his new friend Mark. But Bob came home and glowed to his mother about Mark. “Even though Bobby was older by a year, Bobby looked at Mark as big brother, because Mark defended him and protected him whenever they went out,” Marge Templeton said. The first time Mark took Bob to the Texas Trap, for instance, Bob told his mother this story about an interaction with a stranger: “He sat on a stool and the guy said, ‘That’s my stool.’ Bobby said, ‘Oh, OK. I’ll move over.’ Bobby moved over. The guy said, ‘That’s my stool, too.’ Bobby said, ‘Oh, OK.’ About that time, Mark walked in and said, ‘Hey Bob!’ and the guy turned around, said, ‘Oh, you’re friends with Mark? Then you can have the stool,’ and moved all the way to the other end of the bar.”
Bob’s father, Billy, was a retired Dallas police officer who now was head of security for a company downtown. Marge worked for the same company, as an auditor in the accounting department. Bob worked underground in the company’s garage. His parents liked Stroman and felt grateful for his love of their son. Which is why they agreed to bail Mark out of jail and take him into their home when he was caught wielding that gun at the Trap in July 2001. He had been sleeping in their den during the nights of his Arab-hunting spree—he on the couch, Bob nearby on the bed.
Stroman was good to the Templetons, bringing leftover marble from his stone-cutting job to spruce up their kitchen. They were good to him, too, enough so that he’d taken to calling Bob’s parents Mom and Dad. It sure didn’t feel like cheating on anyone to do that. They trusted him with their house and their boy and their overgrown collection of guns—including Billy’s prized Dirty Harry gun, of the very kind used in the movie, which Mark eventually borrowed for his war. “That one was under the mattress in our room,” Marge Templeton said, “and we didn’t realize he’d figured that out.”
STROMAN BEGAN WRITING to the Templetons as soon as he got inside. Five days after the arrest, he confessed to Bob of being “in a world of shit and I caused it all.” He thanked Bob and his parents for their support. He was truly sorry for all he had done. The only recompense he could offer for the chaos he’d brought into their lives was his Chevy Suburban. Stroman told Bob that he’d confirmed with a police officer that the truck would be released to his buddy before long; he said he knew he owed more. He asked Bob to send him old photographs from his album, for some two-dimensional companionship. It wouldn’t hurt, he hastened to add, to have twenty or thirty bucks put into his commissary account. The letter ended with this bracketed plea: “[Please write back]”.
Two months later, on December 3, Stroman wrote to Bob of not knowing what to feel anymore. He was sure Bob wouldn’t understand what he was facing. Though he didn’t want to sound like some crybaby, he wrote that “when you didn’t show up for the visit last weekend, it broke me up inside.” But he did appreciate that Bob sent those three photographs. Bob had always been there no matter what, had never let him down before. Bob was his best friend of all time, and Stroman was determined to invest in him. He enclosed a tattoo pattern. He had gotten that particular tat already, and hoped Bob would join him so as to match. Of course, Stroman would understand if he didn’t.
Stroman swelled with gratitude when reply letters arrived—especially when they contained money: “You just don’t realize how much you help me by showing me so much love & compassion—I even bought a pint of ice cream & and a ‘cold’ Coca Cola—I was in heaven for a few moments.” He asked for various other things, too—photos, of course, but also addresses of his friends and death penalty opponents, a Xerox of some handkerchief of his, a picture of his old cat.
When replies from the Templetons were slower in coming, Stroman was filled with despair. To Bob’s mother, he wrote: “I know you are busy, and have a million things to do, but I am pleadin with you to please send those pictures I have been asking you this for a full year now, and all of you keep ignoring my request! ?? Why mom ??” He didn’t have stamps or paper to waste on a one-way correspondence. On another occasion, he begged again for photographs: “Stop ignoring me Mom. Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please.” Bob’s silence, in particular, kicked Stroman in the gut: “Your exact words were you’d be my Bro til the bitter end—Bob everyone who counts in my life has turned and walked away from me and thats the coldest and lonliest feeling I have ever encountered.” Why had Bob pulled away? He pleaded to his old friend to stop treating him like a “nobody.”
“A DAY WITHOUT human contact,” Stroman wrote in one letter to the family, “makes the mind wander and run scenerio after scenerio through the mind.” Because in his case those scenarios were universally unpleasant, letters formed a bridge to an isle of sanity. In that new place, he could leave his life behind and lose himself in mastering the conventions of the form. Thank you for your last letter. Did you receive my last letter? I hope your health is well and your spirits, too. Did you look for the photos I asked about? Maybe look in the other album. How is the cat doing? Have you gotten the picture I sent of me with the big-breasted lady, back in the good ol’ days—and, more pressingly, could you send it back, please? Please.
Stroman’s letters to the Templetons often came adorned with stickers. He loved stickers. Stickers of the American flag (regularly proportioned in some cases, in others heart-shaped), of the Dallas Cowboys, of Harley-Davidsons. A lot of kitten stickers. A Garfield sticker here and there. A run-of-the-mill green smiley face, presumably when his correspondents—the Templetons and a handful of others—had sent him nothing better in a while.
At times, he sounded in his letters like a little boy begging for attention. The letters also showed him to be obtuse—unable or unwilling to come to grips with his deeds, ever focused on the failures of others.
The correspondence revealed how prison challenged Stroman’s deepest nature. If he had believed anything on the outside, it was that he needed no one and owed the world nothing. But at Polunsky the open sweeping prairies of time, the intense solitude, the floor-pacing waits for something as simple as a two-line letter from another being, who could choose to write it or choose not to—these things left it plainer than ever to Stroman that his fate in this world was inextricably bound up with others’. Altered circumstances made it harder to sustain the fantasy of his self-containment. The evidence to the contrary was overwhelming and growing. The letters made his position very clear: he now—let’s just say it—depended. Depended on kindnesses for which he had little to offer in exchange. Depended on people electing, out of sheer goodness, to devote five minutes of their lives to jotting a letter that, with the leverage of solitude, would furnish hours’ worth of reading, rereading, and remembering on Stroman’s end.
> With time, he learned what those who knew him recognized as a new style of talk, the barest hint of a new way of being—asking for what he needed, admitting when he lacked, urging others to imagine being him.
“Sure do wish you’d write me back little brother,” he wrote to Bob. “This is a lonely freaking hell hole and I need a bro—Bob, put your self in my shoes or sandles :)—I wait every single day at my door praying, I get a letter and pictures from you or Mom. That’s a bad feeling when the mail man just passes my cell by.”
The Templetons could be excused for their hesitation, because at times it seemed that their old friend was making amends and advancing as a man, and at times not. “There is not a single day or minute that passes by that I don’t regret my actions or wish it was over,” Stroman wrote on one occasion. On another occasion he might descend into complaints about being surrounded by “child molestors, niga’s and sicko’s,” or asides like “How is the Wetback across the street doing?” or gimmicks like encasing a letter in an envelope decorated with an image of the Pink Panther penetrating a panty-less Pink Pantherette. He sent Tena and his daughters old pictures of himself that others had sent him: Mark in the mid-1990s, strung out late at night and staring at a camera as though it were a freshly landed alien ship; Mark at home in front of a Confederate flag on his wall; Mark wearing a skull-graced “I’m proud to be white” hat; Mark holding one gun while wearing another in his waistband, pointed toward his genitals; Mark sporting a “Rebel to the End” T-shirt. To some of the pictures he added special Nazi stickers; he scribbled messages on the back of others, like “Fuck them Arabs. Your bro on the Row, Mark.”
He was particularly proud of his connection to some VIPs on the Row—the men who had gotten to Polunsky by dragging a black man named James Byrd Jr., chained to the back of their truck, over asphalt until his body hit a culvert and his head, shoulder, and arm separated from the rest of him. Stroman sent the Templetons pictures and other paraphernalia related to the “Jasper dudes,” as he called them, projecting that they might soon be “worth something.” He helpfully captioned one of the photos: “This one drove the truck when the monkey was on the chain—niga was hitchhiking :)” And he added to the pictures’ bona fides by including on the back of one a note from an actual Jasper dude: “Welcome to the Row, Slayer! It’s not that I don’t care for coloreds—fact is, I simply love white folk better.” It was made out to “Slayer” because Stroman had introduced himself as the “Arab Slayer.” The envelope containing one of the Jasper photos featured Mark’s own artwork: a sketch of him in a big black convertible, bald and with a goatee, an unheld gun floating above him, and the Templetons’ address ringed by chains.
Then the very next day he might be in a wholly different state, wanting to know how his little cat was doing or confessing to Bob that he would be “lost and so suicidle with out you and Mom/Pop.” Or he might send a mildly misquoted Bible verse that he hoped would soothe the recipient as it had him: “For God did not send His Son into the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.” Or a Monet still-life postcard, or the lyrics to a Johnny Cash song, or an image of a fetching woman: “I’m sending a picture of a big tit bombshell—wow—look at them jugs :). Send back with next letter—I wanted to share that with you :) Sluts are cool.”
In December 2003, Mark tucked in a legal update. One of his appeals had been turned down, and the news reminded him that he wanted the Templetons in the room if and when the execution came. In the spring of 2004, one of Stroman’s neighbors was executed, and he wrote of the man’s eyes catching his as he walked past for the last time, said it truly had an effect on his soul. Though an execution date had yet to be set and there was still the possibility of further appeals, he felt the ticking grow louder and louder. He asked Bob and his brother to carry the casket at his funeral: “You know I want both of you assholes as pallbearers when I’m buried—if not I’ll fucking haunt y’all both!”
In the middle of 2004, Stroman posted to the Templetons a printout from the Web of the room where he expected to die: the very same gurney, same beige straps, same buckles, same lily-white pillow, same little viewing window, same green-painted brick walls, same protruding rod for his right arm. He sent Bob that particular photo, which someone else had presumably mailed to him, because he wanted him to imagine his old Bro on the gurney and to picture himself loyally bearing witness through that window.
Around that time, Stroman also mentioned that an Israeli filmmaker named Ilan was making some kind of documentary about him, and that he would love the Templetons to contribute: “Its safe to say Id be honored to have y’all do the enterview—I need some good words from yall—because they will probably portray me as a evil racist pig :) and not show the human side of me—the compassion Mark that y’all know.” He wrote shortly thereafter to inform them that he’d confirmed with the filmmaker that the movie would humanize, not villainize, him. He was excited about his upcoming meeting with the guy.
Bob Templeton, young as he was, had long suffered from heart trouble, and his health updates filled Mark with gloom: “Say, Bob, I’m so sorry to here about you being so sick and if I could give you my heart and body parts—I’d do it today to save your life—I’d do it for anyone in the Templeton family.” In the fall of 2004, Stroman received word that Bob’s dad now had health troubles of his own—his kidneys. The compassionate Mark he’d written of seemed to surge forward at this news, inspired as well by the anxiety of awaiting an execution date that seemed never to come. He made Mr. Templeton an offer: “I swear this on all my children souls—if Id be able to and the state would allow it—I would give you my kidneys and take my execution ASAP. And I mean that and the offer stands—I’m not sure what the laws are—but I am more than willing to do this for you—if it’s possible—I am serious Pops—I love you that much and owe you more than that.”
WEEK AFTER WEEK, Stroman wondered if Tena, his ex-wife, would visit. He occasionally wrote her letters or sent pictures: “Tena,” he scribbled on a Polaroid once. “Happy Birthday … I wish I could spank ya.” Sometimes Tena wished that, too. Sometimes not.
By the time Mark launched his war, they’d been separated for many years, but the way Tena talked about him you’d think she was still his woman. “Man, I loved me some Mark Stroman,” she said many years later. “I loved me some Mark Stroman. I’d lay down in a mud puddle just to keep his Tony Lama boots from getting wet. I loved me some Mark Stroman.”
She was fourteen when it happened. She was living with her parents in Pleasant Grove, where Mark’s grandparents also lived. The first time she met him, he nearly ran her over with a riding mower just for fun. She was together at the time with a slightly built Mexican boy named Pablo. She was part Mexican herself, into the whole low-rider thing, and drawn to a boy whose Mexican blood came even more purely distilled than her own.
All she knew about Mark was that his grandparents lived at the end of their street and that they were people with “money and horses.” Their five-acre property was surrounded by quarter-acre plots like her own. Mark, who didn’t live with these grandparents all the time, “didn’t know nobody and nobody talked to him,” Tena said. The little rat—and she called him that with love—always wanted attention, though. Tena, Pablo, and Mark would sit together eating pizza and talking. “When that little boy I called myself going with would go home, Mark would start coming over, and we would talk,” Tena said. “I was fourteen, and we just talked and talked. He would let me brag on my clothes, he’d bring me over rings and jewelry, and paper dominos, and he made me feel really important—you know, pretty. He made me feel like I was the shit. I know that’s hard to understand being fifteen and me fourteen, and if you would have told me that I would have had his three kids and his grandbaby in the end, I would have said you’re nuts.”
She had liked the Mexican, but now she fell for contrast. Mark was a rambunctious but silent redhead cowboy of what she figured to be good breeding; she was a simple girl from a working fam
ily. She felt herself falling for him. A few months after he almost ran her over with that mower, they got together. She would sneak over to the main road from her quiet, leafy street and into his grandparents’ house, and they would talk and talk, and do that thing, “and then, you know, I got pregnant with Amber.”
Mark responded in the way that boys of that age will: by professing to be too young for the effect of a cause for which he seemed altogether ready. Tena fired back, “Well, you weren’t too young to turn off the security code to let me in!” He disappeared for the duration of her pregnancy. She had Amber, by cesarean, on a Monday, and came home that Friday. Mark called that night, as Tena remembered it:
“I was fixing Amber a bottle, and I was walking through the kitchen, and the phone rang, and I said hello, and he said, ‘Tena?’ and I said, ‘Who’s this?’ and he said, ‘It’s me. I heard you had the baby, and blah blah blah,’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Is she pretty?’ I was trying to act tough, this bitch mode, and I said, ‘Yeah, she’s pretty—she’s mine.’ And he said, ‘Well, can I come and see her?’ ” Tena invited him to come over on the following Monday. Though it was only a moment’s walk from his grandparents’ place, the redheaded cowboy showed up two hours early.
The fleshy reality of that baby affected Mark. Two weeks after the birth, he came around to Tena’s house full of mission: “It was outside, and I was sitting on a swing, and he got down on his knees and asked me to marry him.” At first, she swatted him away like the housefly he was. “I told him he was just trying to get in my pants again: ‘I already found out who you were.’ ” Not for the last time, Mark would convince her that the bad him wasn’t the real him. They married less than four months later—on January 8, 1986.
The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas Page 15
