Running with Raven
Page 9
Though I’ve never met Coyote, I have heard him sing on a CD that Raven made for me, labeled RAVEN ORIGINAL SONGS, 1975–1988. Coyote plays guitar on the first track, a song titled “I May Be Leavin’ (But I Sure Ain’t Gone),” which, Raven says, is about the Astrologer. “I woke up from a dream that a guy in her apartment building who looked like a Cuban Nixon took her away from me,” explained Raven. “The irony is that both really disliked each other.”
Coyote’s signature song was track 6, “Broadway Butterfly,” and to my ear, he sings and plays harmonica like Bob Dylan. In the recording, the Astrologer is doing backup vocals. (Other titles include: “The Drifting Kind,” “Just as Lonesome as a Train,” and “Quote the Raven.”)
Raven’s third runner was a five-foot-six arm-wrestling aficionado from Springfield, Massachusetts, who went by the name Yul, because he resembled the bald actor, Yul Brynner. I’ve met Yul, now in his 60s, several times on the beach during our runs and at the Raven Run picnics. He usually carries his artwork or a cane umbrella.
His real name is Wilbur, but due to a speech impediment he says Wibbluh. His r is a w and his th is just t, and this used to make for interesting arm-wrestling challenges. “He’d walk into biker bars and say, ‘You a pwetty tough guy, I can tell you pwetty big—you wanna awm wessle?’ ” recalled Raven. Then he went to cement walls by the old pier, trashcans, and bar counters for the competition. Yul also dabbled in amateur strength contests—who could move a giant rock or throw a brick the farthest—and organized running contests, swimming contests, and sword-throwing contests. When Yul attempted the eight miles with Raven in 1982, he wore a thick black rubber space suit; he was trying to lose weight to get into a lower weight class—that he’d created—for arm wrestling. “I thought he was going to die of heatstroke,” says Raven. “But he finished, Raven Runner number three.”
Yul has only one run on the books and lives in the Rebecca Towers Retirement Home with his wife, Dottie, who wears a tinfoil hat. Yul calls Raven “Jesus.” Many evenings, while Yul is strolling along the beach, he intercepts Raven during his eight miles. “You suffuh so much evwy day, being out heah,” says Yul. “What a buhden you have.” Then Yul extends his hand for a firm shake with Raven, remarking, “What a gwip you got!”
Raven told me, “All I do is brace myself, and he puts the vice grip on me. My arthritis throbs for a day.”
* * *
TWO THINGS HAPPENED IN 1984 that made Raven think South Beach had turned a corner. On Independence Day, the Beach Boys performed on the newly dredged beach, drawing crowds of 200,000 that Raven and another runner called Zero weaved through. To attract that many people, Raven thought, the city had to be getting safer. (Zero incidentally was the first runner to get banned: “One time, Zero is running close to the shoreline, and an old man named No Eyes is standing in his way, and Zero just hauls off and punches him,” explained Raven. “Then he punches another guy because his dog was barking, and I said, ‘That’s just too weird.’ He’s banned.”)
After the Beach Boys, Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas came to town wearing pastel suits and loafers without socks to film season one of Miami Vice as undercover detectives Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs. Since a preservationist named Barbara Capitman had gotten the neighborhood on the National Registry of Historic Places, buildings were getting facelifts. Capitman’s right-hand man was Leonard Horowitz, the designer behind the pastel color palette that now makes South Beach pop. He painted storefronts with the colors of the sun and sky and beach—teal greens, periwinkle blues, peachy pinks. Horowitz’s designs matched his eclectic wardrobe; he often dressed in Hawaiian shirts, baggy pants from thrift stores, and big glasses.
Miami Vice producers loved the quirky, bright architecture—the curves and ziggurats—and even paid for some buildings to be repainted. Horowitz’s friends joked that he should get credit for the set design. As Crockett and Tubbs cruised along Ocean Drive in a Daytona Spyder, sexy bikini-clad women laid on the white-sand beach while ripped men worked out; in this town, beauty has a history of covering up deeper problems. Miami was still a center of the drug trade, but Miami Vice made it look cool. All the fun, sex, drugs, and guns came with a pulsating musical score by Jan Hammer and Phil Collins. Gianni Versace designed the clothes.
At first local leaders resisted the show, worrying the title alone would ruin whatever was left of Miami’s reputation. Instead, Miami Vice had the opposite effect, becoming a megahit—a weekly, fifty-minute commercial for South Beach. “When they started filming Miami Vice, everything changed,” observes Raven. “They fixed up buildings. They brought in models. That, more than anything else, changed South Beach.”
IV
FITNESS
The last three generations in my family never lived to be sixty. If it was not for the Raven Run, I don’t think I would be alive.
—Chapter 11, age 80, over 1,000 Raven Runs
Chemo, that’s something else. Ugh. It’s just pure poison to our bodies. It tries to do everything to you, and you just fight everything it’s trying to do. When I got my first dose, I started to lie down, and I thought, God, I’m not sleepy, what am I lying down for? That’s the trick. Get up. I went out and ran with Raven.
—Gringo, cancer survivor, over 1,641 Raven Runs
At the time I saw Raven on TV, I had stopped running because of back problems. A doctor told me I couldn’t run anymore. I had put on weight, feeling dreadful and depressed over my physical condition. Now here was this guy who loves Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, is a huge baseball fan, and has back problems just like me. I was so inspired. I put on my shoes and hit the sidewalk.
—Hot Furnace, 2 Runs
The mental benefits outweigh the physical. The physical is a bonus.
—Raven
EIGHT
NOT A RACE
The top Raven Runner of all time is a 63-year-old accountant named Taxman. From when he started running in 1994 until now, he has racked up over 1,940 eight-mile runs. I’ve run with Taxman at least seventy-five times, and we usually talk about our favorite food, ice cream—how much we ate the night before, new flavors, sales at Publix, or how much we’re planning to eat later. Taxman is six-foot-three with white-blond hair and light eyes peering out of wire-rimmed glasses. He has a goofy, lighthearted presence. He smiles in a bashful way, like he just said something a little inappropriate. When he runs, he leans to the right but politically he is a socialist.
Taxman was the forty-seventh runner to make Raven’s list, which now has more than 2,540 people. He didn’t make it on the first attempt. “It was a very hot and humid day,” he told me on a run twenty years later. “Raven was going fast then. After four or five miles I saw purple spots and was near fainting.” Though he had to quit that time, he was persistent.
He’d heard about Raven from his then girlfriend—now wife—a talkative, well-read woman known as Lasagna Lady. Lasagna Lady had actually gone on a date with Raven before meeting Taxman, but it didn’t work out. (Sitting across from me at a Raven Run banquet, she explained it this way: “We went to dinner—Raven was good looking—and he told me he didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t have a car, and he didn’t ever travel. Well I liked to do all those things. He said he just liked to run every day. I was like, Hmm, this is not the man for me.”) When Taxman said he wanted to start running, she said, “Oh, you have to meet my friend, Raven.”
“Running with others, particularly Raven, helped me overcome my mental limitations to running longer distances,” Taxman told me. Soon he was a regular. He met fellow runners like Vulcan Pilot, an emotionless man who flew planes for American Airlines. Vulcan Pilot, a radical conservative, was on the opposite end of the political spectrum. “He used to call me Comrade Tax,” said Taxman.
It’s common with Raven to run next to someone who is in some way your opposite.
“Then you had Springman,” continued Taxman, “who was the skinniest guy you’ve ever seen who piled his long stringy hair on the top
of his head in a Russian bun to cover up a bald spot.” Back then, Springman was a 33-year-old drummer who drove from Hialeah to the beach in his “Death Trap,” a 1975 Volkswagen Bug, which he painted himself, that had over 300,000 miles. The floorboard was a stop sign. The steering wheel was a fence post. The door was tied on with rope, and the crank windows didn’t roll down.
Springman was obsessed with how much people weighed. “Ask Plantain Lady about it,” advised Taxman. “She’d just hold her arms out to the side and say, ‘How many pounds did I put on, Springman?’ because she knew he was going to tell her. Springman was hilarious.”
Springman started running in 1985. He was number seven. When I met Springman in 2014, on Raven’s 64th birthday run, Springman told me, “My friends all thought Raven was a drug dealer. I remember one friend goes, ‘We could probably score some good dope off that guy. Go ask him for some pot.’ ” Instead, Springman asked Raven if he could run with him. “He was pretty much the only one out here,” continued Springman, who has 735 runs with Raven. “The beaches were empty.”
Nowadays, the Raven Run is like an institution. Taxman, I learned, was responsible for the Awards banquet. On a run back in 1995, he brought up the idea to Raven, “where we could all get together with wives, husbands, and significant others and get a chance to meet other runners we generally don’t run with,” recalled Taxman. Raven loved the idea and to this day, Taxman prints out all the certificates and a few copies of the Raven Run list. In an email, Taxman summed up his Raven Run experience this way: “Our runners come from many nationalities with varied backgrounds, careers, hobbies, and personalities. I love the many stories behind the Raven nicknames. We make an incredible family, and it’s all because of one man . . . Raven.”
* * *
FOR THE FIRST DECADE of the streak, Raven was still trying to get over the song in Nashville. Every day he hated that man who stole it. Additionally, he hated the chaos and crime in his city, and hated that his good-for-nothing stepfather, the Eagle, was still ordering his mother around. He hated that his real father had rejected him. Beginning in 1985, he was still running for himself, focusing on the only thing he could control—eight miles, every day.
That next decade would bring Raven fifty new runners including Springman and Taxman and more consistent company. His life started to stabilize. When people told Raven, “I wish I could do what you’re doing,” he’d tell them, “You can. If I can do it, you can do it.” He both inspired and was inspired by the diverse people who shared the sand next to him. They expanded his horizon, and, hearing about his unusually stringent lifestyle, people reconsidered their priorities, making time for exercise and for company. In the beginning, running was his own therapy. It healed him. But in the second decade he saw he was helping other people get healthy and solve problems. He liked making connections between people. As he motivated others, they motivated him to keep up the streak.
“I went from running with one or two people making a couple friends here or there to a big flock,” said Raven. “But it wasn’t easy, and it didn’t happen overnight.”
* * *
WITH CROCKETT AND TUBBS patrolling the set, tourists and young people came back to Miami Beach. Even better, the women came back topless. One day in 1985, Raven was standing at the 3rd Street stand when he heard an old lady complain to the lifeguard. “Excuse me, I have my grandson here, and he’s only four years old,” she said. “Can you please do something about this topless woman swimming over there?”
The lifeguard shook his head. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “We’re not going to arrest them. If you don’t like it, you should probably go somewhere else.”
Miami Vice and breasts were improving Raven’s scenery and the city’s crime rates, but they weren’t silver bullets. One night in early 1985, Raven and the Astrologer were leaving Mary’s apartment when, from the balcony, he saw someone inside the Astrologer’s car. “Call the police,” said Raven, chasing the thief.
He cornered the sweaty young man in an alley and brought him back to the scene of the crime, where Mary and the Astrologer were talking to a cop named Bruce. “You got Fat Boy,” Bruce told Raven. “We’ve been looking for him. He’s robbed twenty-three old ladies, and they’re all too afraid to testify. But I’ll bet you’re not.”
A few days later, Raven answered a call from Florida State Attorney Janet Reno. “She asked me to come and give a deposition on Fat Boy,” recalled Raven. “I told her as long as it wasn’t during the time of my run, I’d be glad to testify.” The Astrologer drove him to the courthouse—Mary came along for the ride—and Fat Boy was found guilty.
On the way home, they stopped by the Baltimore Orioles spring training camp at Miami Stadium, where Raven took a picture of Cal Ripken, going into the third year of his baseball streak. Ripken’s streak would span 2,632 games over a sixteen-year period from May 30, 1982, to September 19, 1998. He holds the record for the number of consecutive games played, having surpassed Lou Gehrig’s 2,130 games, completed in 1939. “When I think of a streak, I think of Cal Ripken,” Raven told me. “That’s a guy I’d like to meet.”
* * *
IN JUNE 1985, early one morning, Raven was sitting in the guardhouse at the entrance to Sunset Island, where he controlled the security gate. With an hour left of his shift, Raven was swatting away insects when a heavy bug flew straight into his right ear. “It was like zzzzzz, and I could feel the legs crawling, trying to get out,” recalls Raven.
He didn’t know what else to do, so he stuck a pencil in his ear. The pencil extraction didn’t work. The bug was lodged deep in his ear canal and every movement flicked his nerves. Trying to dial the Astrologer’s number, Raven dropped the phone three times. “The pain was so intense,” says Raven. “It felt like electrical shocks. I tell you, if I’d had a gun, I would’ve killed myself.”
The Astrologer drove him to South Shore Hospital, where a doctor who looked like Frankenstein squirted medicine from a syringe into Raven’s ear and slowly the bug started dying. “Then it was just like a little lump in there,” says Raven. “Meanwhile they tell me they don’t have an instrument to take out the dead bug.”
He stumbled back to Astrologer’s car, and a doctor at Jackson Memorial Hospital eventually removed the bug—a big round beetle, the size of a nickel. “The nurse in the room almost flipped over,” says Raven. Raven went home with the bug in a little glass jar, which he believes is still in his apartment. The doctor knew Raven would run, but he gave specific instructions not to swim.
“Well, that afternoon it was hot as hell after the run and I went swimming,” says Raven. For weeks, he would wake up on top of a soaking-wet pillow, and he didn’t know why. When he was running, it felt like wind was going through his head.
Back at the hospital a month later, the doctor asked if he had gone swimming.
Raven reminded him it was the middle of summer. The last day of July, in fact, was the hottest day he had ever run. The thermometer on the bank’s clock registered 103 degrees in the shade with 100 percent humidity. It felt like he was running in an oven. At the end, what choice did he have?
“So did you go swimming?” the doctor asked again. Raven said yes, and the doctor prescribed antibiotics. Eventually water stopped dripping from his ear, and the Sunset Island security office covered the medical bills, which Raven considers a happy ending.
* * *
RAVEN HADN’T SPOKEN to his real father since Father’s Day in 1977, but the longer streak of silence was for two decades with the Eagle. Knowing that Raven visited his mother, I wondered how that scene played out. “Oh, we’d watch baseball games together, and she sat between us,” explained Raven. “If I said to my mom that a player was good, the Eagle would be like, ‘Eh, tell him he stinks.’ And whenever I said anything about Johnny Cash, he’d say, ‘Eh, that guy should be driving a truck.’ If I opened the fridge, he’d say, ‘Tell him to close the fridge—what’s he trying to do, cool down the place?’ He was a nasty guy.”
“I think so,” said Mary. As she picked up the phone to call 9-1-1, the Eagle grunted. “No, wait a little.”
He wanted to finish the game.
In the closing minute, Miami scored a touchdown to take the lead 45 to 41. After two drives with six seconds left at the Miami 48, the ball was snapped to Boston College quarterback Doug Flutie, who launched a Hail Mary straight to the hands of his teammate, Gerard Phelan. The Eagle fell out of his chair. “Oh, my God,” he said. “Okay, call the ambulance.”
When the paramedics arrived, they told Raven, “We’ve been responding to calls all afternoon because of that game.”
As part of his recovery, the Eagle started going for swims in the ocean. While on the beach, he saw Raven running, getting attention from lifeguards and respect from senior citizens. One afternoon the Eagle marched home and remarked to Mary, “Robert actually has friends! People like him. And he’s really fast.”
It was too little, too late.
Nineteen days into 1987, Raven stopped by his mom’s apartment to get the paper. The Eagle was in his usual perch, hunched over, sleeping in the armchair. Sometimes the Eagle would lift his head up when Robert came in, but this time he didn’t. A half-hour later, Mary was banging on Raven’s door. “Robert, I think he’s dead,” she said.