Running with Raven

by Laura Lee Huttenbach

Soon after, Raven met an exotic dancer and went back for a romp at the Sun Ray Apartments, at 728 Ocean Drive (now, Johnny Rockets). When the Astrologer found out, she didn’t really care, and Raven didn’t think much about the exotic dancer until 1983, when he saw Scarface. In the scene where Tony Montana’s friend Angel gets chopped into pieces with a chainsaw in the bathtub, Raven was thinking, That bathroom looks awfully familiar. Then he realized: Oh, right! That’s the room where I had the one-night stand with the exotic dancer.

  * * *

  THE STREAK TURNED FIVE in 1980 and five days later, on a swim, Raven bumped into a Portuguese man-o’-war. Its long blue tentacles embraced his body, tangling up his arms, chest, back, neck, and legs. Sticking to him like a cobweb, it felt like someone whipped him all over with an electrical wire. As his skin absorbed the venom, Raven became short of breath. His mind flashed back to a scene from years before, when a paramedic was zipping up two yellow body bags. “Man-o’-wars,” the paramedic had told him. “Two brothers; they were allergic.” Fortunately Raven wasn’t allergic, and the pain subsided after an hour. Over the next thirty-five years, however, he’d endure fifty-six more run-ins with man-o’-wars.

  The next day he had red welts all over. Gunny the lifeguard told him it was the worst attack he’d ever seen. Another lifeguard suggested meat tenderizer to neutralize the venom, so Raven filled an old black-and-gray film canister with the white powder. When he went swimming, he kept the canister on top of his folded clothes on the beach. One evening, he came back to find his clothes strewn about, covered in sand, and the film canister was missing. Just then a homeless man shuffled out from behind the lifeguard stand. “Hey, man,” he said, brushing white powder from his upper lip. “What was that stuff in the container? It was awful salty.” He had snorted Raven’s meat tenderizer thinking it was cocaine. Raven was upset by the violation of privacy but figured the man had suffered enough.

  This incident was the extent of Raven’s participation in Miami’s cocaine wars, but his city was entering the era of the Cocaine Cowboys, the Mariel Boatlift, and the McDuffie Riots. Over the next several years, residents scrambled to get out of the crossfire as Miami shattered every record in crime and homicide, earning the highest murder rate in the nation.

  With all the dead bodies, Dade County ran out of storage space at the morgue, so the medical examiner rented a refrigerated van from Burger King headquarters to store the spillover, resulting in a mobile mortuary. Miami became known as Dodge City, St. Valentine’s, Murder Capital. “The Beach was a war zone,” says Raven. “My friends kept telling me, ‘You’re gonna get killed, man. The Beach is getting too dangerous.’ ”

  But Raven never gave up on his home. “I just kept thinking it couldn’t get any worse,” he says. “Eventually I was right.”

  * * *

  ON MY THIRD RUN WITH RAVEN in June 2011, we were heading south when he turned to me and said, “Today I’m going to tell you about the time a ton of chickens washed ashore.” This was a typical preface to a Raven story.

  Around Thanksgiving in 1980, he told me, a cargo ship was leaving the port of Miami, being tugged through Government Cut, when a container of frozen Perdue chickens tipped off the boat. As water filled the container, the chickens bubbled out and bobbed toward the beach. Before the first chicken leg touched land, news of free brined chicken had spread in Miami Beach and hundreds of people gathered at the shoreline. “So there’s like thousands of frozen chickens—one ship container is about two stories high—and there’s all these hungry Marielitos, like wolves, wanting to get the chickens.” The police and the lifeguards were ordered to guard the chickens until Perdue made a decision. A few hungry residents broke through the barricade and made off with chickens while an older cop yelled, “Put them back! They belong to somebody!”

  After a couple hours, Perdue called and said they were going to lose all the chicken, so the lifeguards could open up the beach. So long as people collected the chickens in an orderly fashion, they were welcome to take as many as they could carry. Raven helped himself to a crate of a dozen. Dragging his poultry treasure to the lifeguard stand at 3rd Street, he realized he could never use twelve chickens. “So I took three, and I gave nine to this crazy lady named Poodle Patty,” said Raven. “She had these mangy, dirty poodles. She said she was going to cook the chicken up for the dogs.” Raven ran home with three frozen chickens in a plastic bag. “They were like bricks,” he said, rubbing his bicep. “My arms were sore the next day.”

  For the next month, Raven had to run through Perdue’s aftermath as rotting chickens littered the beach. Pointing toward the coastline, Raven said to me, “All the way up to Fourteenth Street, you could see pieces of chicken on the sand—a wing, a leg. For months they were out there, and it was stinking so bad.”

  I was trying to picture this scene from 1980 playing out today at Government Cut, where a sidewalk promenade leads to outdoor seating at Smith & Wollensky steakhouse. I couldn’t see diners taking a break from a hundred-dollar cut of filet mignon to fetch free chickens in the Atlantic. “I’m sorry—who did you say was lined up like wolves?” I asked.

  “The Marielitos,” he said. “This was right after the Boatlift.” I’d only lived in Miami for a couple months when I heard this story, and I knew little about the Mariel Boatlift, which happened two years before I was born. Raven explained it to me like this: “In 1980, Castro basically opened up his prisons and put all his criminals on boats to South Beach. These were bad guys—murderers, rapists, thieves—and there were physically and mentally disabled people, too.”

  Raven’s summary sounded suspect. “What was the idea behind it?” I asked. “That these people were political prisoners?”

  “I guess,” said Raven. “That was all done by Jimmy Carter. What a mess. Castro cleaned house. He was like, ‘Great, I don’t have to take care of these hundreds of thousands of people anymore.’ ”

  “So Castro had the last laugh?”

  Raven squeezed his black glove. “Castro is still laughing.”

  Before I could ask my next question, an older lifeguard with white hair poked his head out of the stand at 30th Street. “Hey, Raven,” he shouted, “Dodgers are looking pretty good this season, huh?”

  “So far!” Raven responded, waving. He turned again to me. “That’s Bert,” he said. “His first day on the job was February 1, 1983, at Third Street. Some Marielitos started harassing his wife, who was sitting by the stand, and Bert told them to cool it, but they started getting rough.” Bert, Raven told me, ducked inside the lifeguard stand to call for backup, and the guys followed him inside. “They had these old phones with the receiver and the cord,” continued Raven. “The guys took the phone and beat his face in.” It took 112 stitches to sew Bert back together. “Nobody thought he was going to come back, but he did. Been here ever since. See White Lightning? Bad times.”

  * * *

  SINCE THIS CONVERSATION, I have learned that Raven’s impression of Mariel is representative of Miami Beach residents. Often the worst discrimination comes from the exiliados—wealthy Cuban professionals that got here first—who complain that the Marielitos stained their good reputation. Most people my age who have heard of the Mariel Boatlift know it from Scarface, whose main character, Tony Montana, is a Marielito. Some people think the movie is based on a true story, but everyone in Miami can agree that Al Pacino does a horrible Cuban accent.

  Between April and October 1980, 125,000 refugees crowded on boats leaving the Port of Mariel in Cuba for American shores in Key West. The majority settled in Miami—with local relatives, or in tent cities pitched at the Orange Bowl Stadium or by the Miami River under I-95. While the statistics are all over the map, what is certain is that among the many thousands of good, hardworking Cuban refugees seeking freedom, Castro had tucked in undesirable or useless members of his society, including thieves, killers, rapists, and the insane. Escoria—scum, Castro called them—came from Cuban prisons and asylums to Key West and on to Miami Beach.
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br />   Many of Raven’s memories of “the Mariel time” feed the criminal stereotype. He chased down purse snatchers and helped the lifeguards catch bad guys. “If I saw something wrong, I didn’t think twice,” Raven told me. “I was strong and fast and hated to see injustice.” He has nicknames for the prominent criminals. There was one with bright red hair and freckles— Howdy Doody—who, one day in 1980, snuck up behind a grandmother shopping on Washington Avenue and snatched her purse, leaving the old woman shaking on the sidewalk.

  Raven took off after him, sprinting down an alleyway off 7th Street. He cornered Howdy Doody at the dead end. “I don’t know if he has a gun or a knife,” recalled Raven. “So I walk in slowly.” Howdy Doody had the same worry about the long-haired runner with the black glove. Dropping the purse, the man ran away without taking anything. Raven picked it up and unceremoniously delivered it to the old lady, still frozen on the sidewalk. “She just said, ‘Uh thank you,’ ” said Raven. “She didn’t speak much English, and it scared her.”

  Another criminal tried to eke out a living fashioning cowboy hats from palm fronds and selling them to tourists. A middle-aged man with a hard face and long hair, the Hatmaker “had a nasty comment for every girl that passed,” said Raven. One time, Romer the lifeguard went to lock the public bathroom at the end of his shift. Within seconds, the Hatmaker was advancing toward Romer’s unattended belongings at the stand. Just before he reached the wallet, the Walrus, another lifeguard, came out of nowhere and tackled the Hatmaker. When Romer came back from the bathroom, the Walrus had the Hatmaker pinned in the sand.

  Police arrested the Hatmaker but by the end of the week he was out of jail, making hats on the beach, which was also an illegal business. “You weren’t supposed to sell stuff without a license, so the cops would bother him,” explained Raven regretfully. “It’s a shame because he made really good hats, and he probably could’ve survived that way.”

  On top of refugees from Cuba, Haitians were pouring into Miami. One day, a lifeguard was standing over a lumpy white sheet next to his stand when Raven ran by. “What’s that?” Raven asked.

  “Another dead Haitian,” he said. “We got him by the rocks. Somebody saw him floating and called the rescue.” Raven couldn’t understand how all these people were drowning when they were so close to land. “They can’t swim,” explained the lifeguard. “They’ll get rides in boats, and the captain will drop them off a hundred feet off shore. They can’t make it that far. If they don’t have an inner tube, they drown.” Often, their makeshift boats would fall apart or capsize in the high seas.

  President Carter’s promise to welcome refugees with open arms didn’t apply to those coming from Haiti. Though Cubans were allowed to become permanent U.S. residents after a year in the country, Haitians—if they made the six-hundred-mile journey to U.S. sand or soil alive—were held at Krome Detention Center in west Miami, next to the Everglades. When the Reagan administration took office in 1981, the United States Coast Guard had orders to rescue Cubans at sea and bring them to American shores. Haitian boats were to be interdicted and escorted back to Haiti. Though they were fleeing the brutal dictatorship of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the United States considered them economic refugees—not political, like the Cubans—and that wasn’t enough to gain entry.

  Pictures of Haitian corpses washing up on shore and Marielitos sleeping under highway overpasses spilled onto the front cover of Time magazine in November 1981, in an article entitled “Paradise Lost.” One afternoon, by 4th Street, a policeman was circling around a group of twenty Haitians—men and women of all ages in a line—crouching on their heels with their heads down. The cop was yelling at them when Raven ran by. “What are you doing?” he asked the officer.

  “They all washed up,” said the cop. Raven studied their faces. As usual, he was rooting for the underdog. The Haitians were wide-eyed, looking scared and innocent. They spoke no English to defend themselves, and they were covered in sand. “I was thinking, How are these people treated like criminals when we give the real criminals from Mariel papers?” says Raven. Just before he turned to finish the run, the cop added a friendly warning: “Don’t get too close. They could have diseases.”

  * * *

  THE BEACH NOURISHMENT PLAN had worked its way south from Haulover by then, and pipes pumped out piles of sand fifteen feet high on South Beach, which Raven climbed over or ran around. Silt clouded the sea, changing the Atlantic from crystal blue to an opaque brown. “If you opened your mouth under water, you’d get sand between your teeth,” says Raven, who was still swimming after every run. “I couldn’t pull a comb through my hair, it was so caked with silt.” From crime and construction, beaches were mostly deserted.

  Running one afternoon, Raven passed three different men masturbating in the sand within three blocks. He reported the incidents to Bob Romer. “What do you want me to do?” asked Romer, throwing up his hands. “We can’t arrest them all.”

  Raven looked at Romer. “But how are tourists going to come back if they see that? No girl is ever gonna come to South Beach.” To get out of the crime zone, old people had been offering to Raven their condos for ten or twenty thousand dollars.

  People were telling Raven to stop running and take cover, but he kept going, saving people on land and in the water. Running by the Delano Hotel around 17th Street—in the same spot where he had pulled out the girls from the Bahamas—Raven saw waving hands caught in a rip current. The lifeguards had packed up for the day, so Raven took off.

  As soon as he reached the woman, he offered a disclaimer. “I will get you in, but this may take a while.” She panicked and climbed on top of him, holding him under water. Raven recalls, “The lifeguards had told me some people do that, so I was careful.” He swam free, but the woman soon dunked him again. Surfacing out of reach, he said calmly, “Look, if you do this, I won’t be able to get you in. Don’t push me down. Let me hold you.” She relaxed, and Raven brought her to shore.

  A few months after rescuing the woman, Raven saw a father and son caught in another rip current in the same spot. Instead of making the rescue himself, he sprinted to the stand on 21st Street, a couple blocks away, to alert a lifeguard named Tim McHale. On Raven’s way back south, the father and son were getting oxygen from the rescue squad and everyone was fine. Pointing to Raven, McHale told the family, “That’s the man who saved your lives. He came and got me.”

  After three rescues in the same block, Raven campaigned for the city to put a lifeguard stand at 17th. He even wrote an op-ed in the Miami Herald. “From Fourteenth to Thirty-Fifth, there was only one lifeguard stand, at Twenty-First,” says Raven. “Can you imagine? That’s almost two miles.” He said they needed one at 17th and another around 29th. It took two more fatalities to convince the city, but now there are lifeguard stands every couple of blocks in mid-beach. At a lifeguard’s suggestion, Raven tried out to be on Beach Patrol, but he failed the swim test by fifteen seconds.

  * * *

  EIGHTY-TWO WAS A YEAR to test the streak. At the dentist one day, Raven got thirteen cavities filled in the same appointment. “You’re not going to run after this, are you?” asked the dentist. Raven said nothing. “Eh, you probably are,” the dentist concluded. He was right. For eight miles, Raven’s head rattled every step.

  On July 1, 1982, two Doberman pinschers—one red and one black—were chasing each other around a trashcan on the beach at 1st Street. Raven ran toward the water, giving the Dobermans a wide berth, but still the black one chased him down and chomped his leg. The dog’s teeth sank in, ripping open a hole in his upper left calf. “It was like someone hitting you with all their might with a baseball bat,” says Raven.

  The dog’s owner apologized and promised to take care of medical bills. With five miles left, Raven kept going until the rescue squad, who’d heard about the attack from witnesses, showed up and cleaned the wound with peroxide. A piece of white tissue, Raven recalls, was poking out of the hole in his calf. They told him to get
to a hospital for a tetanus shot, which he did—after finishing eight miles and going for a “short” swim. The doctor didn’t stitch up the wound but told him to keep an eye on it. “If you start getting sick, it could be rabies,” he said. When Raven called the dog’s owner, the number he’d been given was disconnected.

  His leg ached for weeks. Limping threw off his hip and other knee. Just as he was starting to feel better on July 20, he got the worst bout of food poisoning he’d had since 1975. “You want to die, but you can’t,” says Raven. “My legs felt like rubber. After the run, I just fell in the sand.”

  By the first of August, he was running strong again. That was the Sunday he cracked his head open on the pier piling, giving himself a concussion and requiring eighteen stitches. At the hospital, he reviewed his last month—dog bite, food poisoning, and a concussion—and thought, Maybe now is a good time to quit.

  Then the Novocain kicked in.

  That night the Astrologer followed him with a flashlight for the last five miles, before he went to his security job in his blood-soaked bandage.

  The next day, Romer stuck his head out of the stand. “What’s going to happen next?” he shouted. “Who’s going to die first—me or you?” Raven thought it was an odd question.

  On February 9, 1983, Raven was doing pull-ups when the beach patrol truck stopped in front of him. Gunny, Romer’s best friend, was sitting in the passenger seat with tears running down his face. Romer had killed himself.

  “That was one of the toughest runs I ever did,” says Raven. “My body was shaking from shock. I just wish I could’ve talked to him. I wish I could’ve told him that I was there for him.” The funeral was two days later, but it was during the run time. “It poured rain,” he says. “It almost never rains in February, and I remember thinking, God is crying for Romer.”

  * * *

  COYOTE, RAVEN’S FIRST RUNNER, disappeared sometime after Mariel, when his bike kept getting stolen and his girlfriend kept getting harassed. “When he decided to leave town, he said to me, ‘I want to do a poem or story every week about one of the characters,’ ” Raven recalled. “I said, ‘What a great idea.’ Then I never heard from him again.”