Running with Raven

by Laura Lee Huttenbach

  “You’re the Miracle,” said Raven. They went on their first date after the swim, to dinner at Puerto Sagua, where she did set the hook deep. The next month, on a cold and dark night after the run, Raven heard a voice beckoning him from the ocean. It was Miracle, waiting for him to swim. Raven thought, That’s the girl for me.

  * * *

  WHEN MIRACLE AND RAVEN are getting along, they act like teenagers with displays of affection that can turn heads even in South Beach. “When she’s good, she’s the best,” says Raven. But sometimes Miracle will be out of touch for weeks. She loses her phone, or turns it off, and Raven can’t talk to her. It drives him crazy to have no control. Yet it is his need for control that drives her away in the first place.

  “He’s got this thing about hair, okay?” she said one day, as the three of us were sitting and talking in Raven’s living room. “He’ll never let me touch his hair in the back, in all these years.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Raven.

  “It’s true!” she said. “Oh, come on—it’s absolutely true!”

  “I comb it,” said Raven. “I don’t want her to mess it up. She likes to mess it up.”

  “It can never be messed up,” she said. “You have to have the roll. Every time you swim, the last thing you do before you get out of the water is to do the roll.”

  “Then the wind comes,” said Raven. “Like today, it’s going to be all messed up. I like to comb my hair when I go out.”

  “But why would it matter at one o’clock in the morning—we’re both in bed—if it gets messed up or not?”

  “I want to go to sleep looking right, in case I die or something.”

  “You have no leg to stand on there,” said Miracle. “You just have to have it your way. You can never forget about yourself enough to let your hair go. In any situation where it’s possible to control it, it is one hundred percent controlled.”

  I was watching their dialogue like a Ping-Pong game. Perhaps with all the time apart, they have reflected on their relationship to the extent that they can speak about it almost as if neither is a participant. “Everything has to be precisely in the same place,” continued Miracle. “If we move something, he’ll know.”

  “Like if I need scissors, they should be right here,” said Raven, leaning forward and reaching under a pile of letters to extract scissors. “The stapler is always right there,” he said, pointing toward the answering machine, buried under newspaper clippings.

  “But every night on the bed, he has the radio, the CD player, a couple CDs, and some reading material, and sometimes the newspaper, on my side, and I can’t go to bed until he moves it. Now of course I can get in bed and just do this,” she said, pushing her arms out front, “but he’ll freak out.”

  “One time you knocked the radio on the floor.”

  “One time,” repeated Miracle. “Something got knocked on the floor—did anything bad happen? It was no big deal. If I broke the radio, I would replace it. How many times can I tell him that? Logic cannot suffice in this situation. Anything falling is a big deal, papers falling—but you see how precarious everything is. Gravity is my personal enemy. If I haven’t been here for a week, things tend to migrate, ’cause it only needs to accommodate the width of his hips. He’s Mr. Swivel Hips.”

  “I’m just sliding right through,” he said with his hand bending and swimming along like a fish.

  “I asked him not long ago, ‘Has it ever occurred to you that it might take a lot of patience to deal with you?’ He said no. How much patience do I need to deal with that?”

  “Sometimes I’m clueless,” said Raven.

  “Yeah, thank you—I needed that,” said Miracle. “Fucking A.”

  When Miracle is ready to leave, she is out the door (even if it is without her keys). Raven, on the other hand, checks things so many times an ordinal number doesn’t exist. It’s not double-checking or triple-checking. It’s checking things twenty-something times. “I move real slow,” said Raven. “I talk slow.”

  “We run at different speeds,” added Miracle. “It’s a gift and a challenge. Perceptual doors will open. I’ll see things I never would’ve seen because I’m moving at Raven’s speed. But God.” At the end of every run, Raven puts five items in a plastic black grocery bag: two socks, a headband, his glove, and Raven Run promotional postcards. “Everything’s very precisely done,” said Raven. “I check the lock about twenty-one times at least. If I start talking to somebody, she’s like, ‘I’m getting out of here, I gotta go, I’m cold.’ ”

  In our conversation, Miracle would launch into monologues—mostly profound, occasionally incomprehensible—and Raven would listen silently and then say something at the end like, “That’s good, White Lightning, you’re getting a little Miracle talk.” Miracle has the most extensive vocabulary of anyone I know in South Beach, though she relies heavily on the F-word. In class at FIU, she tells her students, “The beginning of wisdom is the proper naming of things.” Outside of Raven time, she runs in an intellectual crowd. “I’m not near as smart as her,” says Raven. “She tells me, ‘Don’t pronounce it that way, Raven—it’s supposedly, not supposebly.’ ”

  Miracle was nodding. “There are many times I’d like to talk with you about ideas, but you’re not interested at all.”

  “I sometimes don’t know things, and I shut myself off,” said Raven.

  When she requires intellectual fulfillment, she seeks other outlets. “Why have the expectation that you’re going to get all the things you need from one person?” she said. She doesn’t bring Raven to art openings because he is uncomfortable. Plus, she hates how her associates speak about him. “They make these dismissive judgments about Raven, on account of his haircut. Or love of Johnny Cash,” she said. She feels the need to defend him, even when Raven isn’t offended.

  In Miracle’s reckoning, the meanest thing a woman has ever said to her about Raven was contained in a three-word question: “How’s the ‘The’?” Recalling the incident, she raised her voice and narrowed her eyes as she repeated the question, How’s the The? “It was breathtakingly mean,” she said. Raven had no reaction. She explained, “It meant, ‘Who is this crazy arrogant motherfucker who refers to himself with an article in front of his name?’ ” As she retold the incident, Miracle wiped a tear from her eye.

  Raven remained unmoved. “A lot of people think it’s The Raven, but it’s just Raven,” he said.

  These days Miracle tires easily of the company of artists. She finds their elitism and self-importance tedious. She’d rather just talk about the run with Raven. “Artists can just be so nasty and cutting and close-minded, which is precisely the opposite of what they fancy themselves to be,” said Miracle. “In their world the worst sin you can commit is to not be on the cutting edge . . . and you can’t be on the cutting edge if you have too much respect for the past.”

  “Well, I am stuck in the past,” said Raven.

  “But you know that’s who you are. You have completely owned it,” said Miracle. “I’m not convinced having your ass sliding on the cutting edge is the best place to be.” Before going off on the problem with art today, she announced, “I’m not going to go off about the problem with art today,” then continued. “The problem is it lacks heart. It’s absurd, and they take it so seriously. They don’t find any irony in how they worship the prices. A guy sold a stuffed shark for twelve million dollars and of course you were totally uncool if you even mention he didn’t catch it or stuff it himself. That’s not the point. They’re just such hypocrites. With that kind of milieu, how are they ever going to recognize somebody that’s as authentic and true as Raven?

  “They think they’re doing a superb post-modern analysis of the hegemony of style, and its effects on the praxis of culture and reification of daily practice of inauthentic individuals—you know, some other bullshit. So yeah, I really want to defend Raven against elitists who coldly excise their own hearts so they can’t recognize the heartlessness in their own work, and they pr
oject that on the guy whose got the biggest heart of anybody I have ever known. How dare they think they’re so fucking important they can make a judgment about Raven like that? How dare they?! And I’ve lost so much interest in the art world because of shit like that. I’m just so over it.” Wiping another tear from her eye, she concluded, “Fuck them,” and asked me for another question.

  * * *

  RAVEN IS OBSESSED with anniversaries and birthdays and dates in general, yet Miracle considers a date “something off in the near future or distant future—who gives a shit?”

  “She didn’t know my birthday for the first five years we were together,” said Raven.

  “I knew,” she said. “I would be planning for his birthday on a Thursday for two weeks and then three days before—this is typical—I show up Tuesday [and think], Oh, fuck, it’s Thursday. Then between Tuesday and Thursday, I’ll forget the birthday altogether. I’ve done that shit all my life.” She turned to Raven. “You think I don’t care, but I actually get so anxious about it that I overcompensate and show up to stuff early.”

  One of their biggest fights started over a plate: Miracle served Raven dinner on a white plate, but Raven eats on black plates. “I went crazy,” Raven told me before a run the day after it had happened. (Though I don’t ask, Raven volunteers stories when things are bad.)

  “Raven,” I said in a tone to scold a child.

  “I know,” he said, putting his head down. “It’s the pain. I just can’t think about anything else.” After this, the two didn’t talk for months.

  I have tried to understand the relationship of Raven and Miracle, but I don’t think someone from the outside can ever understand the chemistry between two people who conduct most of their lives when you are not around. (Furthermore, when Miracle told me their relationship sprung from carnal desire, I did not ask for specifics.) Raven forces himself to give Miracle a life outside his regimen. And Miracle understands that he is who is he, in every situation. When that gets to be too much, she checks out.

  There is rarely hope for reform. There’s no trying to make the other person into something he or she is not. Their relationship is a beautiful, if not impossible, acceptance of incompatibility, for which they both put forth a great effort to enrich each other’s lives in the ways they can, when they are together.

  FOURTEEN

  THE BIG WAVE

  The third decade of the streak brought Raven 308 new runners—a big jump from the first decade (6) and the second decade (53). The stories from this era are unbelievable. For instance, on the way home from a run, Raven thought he recognized a runner called Answer Man. “Hey,” said Raven, realizing at the last moment that in fact it wasn’t Answer Man. “Sorry, you look just like a guy called Answer Man.”

  “Really?” said the stranger. “He must be a good-looking guy if he looks like me.”

  Chuckling, Raven said, “That’s actually something Answer Man would say.”

  The following afternoon, Raven passed the same guy again. “It’s the Answer Man lookalike,” announced Raven.

  “Do I really look like this guy?” he asked. Raven said yes. “Who’s his best friend on the run?” It was Taxman. “When does Taxman run?” asked the impostor.

  “He’s supposed to come tomorrow,” said Raven.

  “Then so am I.”

  The next day it was raining when the impostor showed up. Taxman came fifteen minutes late. Without Raven saying anything, Taxman turned to the new runner. “Answer Man, what are you doing here?” he asked. “I didn’t know you were coming to run.”

  “I can run with Raven any time I want,” he responded.

  “How’s your girlfriend?” asked Taxman.

  “She’s fine.”

  “And work?”

  “Everything’s good.” At this point, when Raven started giggling, Taxman got suspicious. “There’s something different about you. Didn’t you have a mustache or something?”

  “I’m not him,” said the impostor.

  Taxman’s mouth hung open. He turned to Raven. “What year was Answer Man born?”

  “1945,” said Raven.

  “I was born in 1945,” said the impostor.

  “He’s from New Jersey,” said Taxman.

  “So am I.”

  “There’s something you don’t know, Raven,” said Taxman. “Answer Man was adopted.”

  And the guy said, “So was I.”

  Not long after, when Raven introduced Answer Man and the Impostor, they were like long, lost brothers who hung out all the time. They went on vacation to each other’s summer homes in New Jersey. “Last I heard, they were feuding a little, as brothers do,” says Raven. “But I think they’re making up.” Raven Runners offered to pay for a DNA test, but the men refused. Raven has a picture of the two together. The only difference is that Impostor has blue eyes, and Answer Man has brown. “But same height, same voice, same hair, same mannerisms,” says Raven. “Crazy, huh?”

  * * *

  SPANKY WAS A HALF-COLOMBIAN, HALF-GERMAN who’ d grown up in Miami Beach, where he was known as Marathon George—a self-appointed nickname—that came from running several marathons. In the seventies, he was tall, skinny, and fast. He disappeared in the eighties and when Raven saw him in 1996, he was 40 and weighed 250 pounds. “Yeah I got fat,” Spanky told Raven. “I was in California.”

  “You’re an athlete, man,” said Raven. “You should be running with us.”

  So Spanky started training and in November 1996 made all eight, becoming the ninety-first runner. Spanky had a personal vendetta against yuppies and hated that South Beach—in particular, the establishment of the News Café—was attracting so many. Often, Spanky used the eight miles with Raven to vent about yuppies. Running with Raven, he dropped fifty pounds and landed a job as a greeter at Williamson Cadillac on Bal Harbour. “He wanted to be a Cadillac salesman,” explained Raven.

  One day in February 1997, Spanky came to run straight from work dressed in a suit and tie and polished shoes and announced to Raven that he was conducting a one-man, anti-yuppie rally. That afternoon, he ran eight in his suit carrying a gin and tonic martini in hand, squealing, “Hey now! Oh, my! Look at me, I’m a yuppie runner!” By mile six, he’d finished the drink, hardly spilling a drop.

  On the same run, a guy from New York called Cargo Man was attempting his first eight miles. When I ran with Cargo Man in 2012, he told me, “I thought I couldn’t do eight if my life depended on it, but I looked at Spanky and thought, If this guy can do the run, I can do it. So I just stayed in his shadow and got my nickname.” Cargo Man was runner 102, and since then he’s gotten in some thirty runs as a commuter. (When I met him, Cargo Man was in town for Art Basel to set up the “Untitled” tent on the Beach, and he arranged for Raven to get exhibit credentials. At six o’clock, as the city’s movers and shakers sipped martinis and discussed art, Raven busted through the front door with three runners in tow, including Cargo Man. They wove through the tent, then out the back door, leaving attendees to wonder, Was that a live installation?)

  While some running groups might shy away from antics like Spanky’s Yuppie Run, in 1997, it won “Event of the Year.”

  * * *

  GRINGO’S FIRST RUN was also in 1997. Until 2015, when Taxman overtook him, Gringo was the top Raven Runner with over 1,600 runs and 650 swims. I’ve probably run with Gringo fifty times, and he is one of my favorites. He was born the same year as my father, in 1938, and has the kindest eyes. Gringo senses your best quality and brings it out. After five minutes of conversation with anyone, I think he could give the eulogy at that person’s funeral. (When I mentioned this to Raven, he said, “Oh, I know at least one person Gringo hated, and that’s Headlock Dreadlock Harold. But there’s a very good reason for it.”)

  In 1997 before a run, Gringo was standing by the 5th Street stand. He was 59 with striking blue eyes and an all-American look that Raven thought resembled Tommy Smothers. Gringo had seen Raven hanging out with Placard Man. “I’ve tried
to give him food,” said Gringo, “but he won’t take it. Is he okay?”

  “Oh, Placard Man? He’s fine,” said Raven. “He’s scared of germs. Anyway, you should run with us.”

  So he followed. The nickname came from when Gringo was a kid, playing ice hockey with some rough kids from Point Place in Toledo, Ohio. He didn’t want them to know his name or the affluent neighborhood he came from, so one boy named him Gringo. Before Miami, Gringo had been a land baron in Spain until he lost everything in a pyramid scheme. Penniless, he moved his wife and kids to western Colorado, where he’d gone to college, but his family hated it, so they tried Miami Beach. “I was never a beach person,” Gringo told me. He’d spent his life around mountains, a terrain that makes it easy for a person to identify goals. Any time he needed a challenge, he just looked up. “When you climb mountains, it can be extremely hot and every foot forward is a struggle, but you got the peak at the end. You make great sacrifices for the journey,” said Gringo.

  In the flat sands of Miami Beach, he saw no destination until he met Raven. “Here he is climbing a peak every day, getting those eight miles in, doing such a stressful activity on a flat beach. After every run, we’d get back to the barnyard and Raven would raise his arms—we made it! It was a thrill. We’d climbed a peak.” Then they swam, which Gringo used to fear. “I’d tell him, ‘There’s just so much liquid out there, Raven. I’m not used to all that liquid.’ ” But with Raven by his side, in 1998, Gringo became the second Raven Runner to get one hundred runs and one hundred swims. (Miracle was first.) “So I wasn’t let down,” concluded Gringo. “He fulfilled a real personal and emotional need that I have for mountains, and it was a lot of fun.”

  From the early days, Gringo paints this scene: “Raven used to move along that beach, and it was like he owned it. Nice Day Phil [a retired bodybuilder] would be riding his bicycle, setting our pace, and reciting Shakespeare. Then Raven would let loose with that voice of his, and we’d start singing. Then he’d holler out to someone that was going through a [waste] basket. Then a lifeguard was hollering at Raven about some baseball game. There began a feeling of envelopment—that Raven is owning this place, that the ocean isn’t winning, that it’s just out there on the edge. The big wave on that beach is Raven. He’s moving out or moving down, he’s going north or going south. He took his runners with him—that brotherhood that he kept so united, because back then everybody ran together.”