Running with Raven

by Laura Lee Huttenbach

  When Killer listened, the left corner of his mouth curled up and the right corner went the other way, making it look like he doubted everyone. He shadowboxed mid-conversation and interrupted frequently. His smile was intimidating and bright; every other tooth was covered in gold. The nail on his ring finger was black. On a guy whose hand gestures would put an Italian to shame, the loose nail was noticeable. His ears curved out from his head like cauliflower and his nose spread across his face. Maybe it’s because he loves himself so much you think you’d be crazy not to, but Killer is extremely likable.

  Grunting as his hands dropped to the sand, Raven tried to relieve the pressure on the pinched nerve in his lower back. Killer looked at his friend and shook his head in an ain’t-it-sad way. “The guy can’t walk, but he can run,” said Killer. “Man, you gotta rest one day.”

  “I rest every day for twenty-two hours,” said Raven.

  “Everything changes but you, Raven,” he said, turning to me. “If he misses a day, he thinks he’s gonna die. If he keeps going, he’s gonna die. So I guess you got two ways to go. You’re gonna die, or you’re gonna die.”

  It was time for roll call. “On my far left,” began Raven, “he’s been known to put the pedal to the medal, changing gears—Hot Rod!” We clapped. “In the pink, she’s an endangered species—the Seaside Sparrow!” Raven pointed at me. “She’s not Moonshine, she’s—White Lightning!” He nodded to the white-haired man, smiling broadly, in white glasses. “He never runs barefoot, but he will run with Moccasin [his girlfriend]—Shoe Guy!” Next was the shirtless man with more than a six-pack chiseled into his abs. “Eighty-five consecutive runs, out of the slaughterhouse, not afraid to get his hands bloody—the Butcher!

  “Right here,” said Raven, pointing to the man six months older than him, Rookie of the Year in 2004, “I’m sure he’s on his way to Happy Hour, of course—some things don’t change! A classic kind of guy—Classic Deluxe!” Raven smiled, turning to the five-foot-eleven brown-eyed photographer, “The prettiest rose from Texas—Yellow Rose!” A Mexican man with a toothy grin got ready to wave. “He’s looking to find his lost piece of mind—Lobotomy!” Finally, it was time to introduce his longtime friend. “When he walked into the Fifth Street Gym, Muhammad Ali would shiver and go the other way—K.O. Killer! And he’s got his son, Danny, here, who is attempting eight.” A decade earlier, Danny had failed to finish but this time he was confident.

  The day’s route was Back-and-Forth-South: 5th Street south to the pier, up to Espanola (around 15th), back south to the pier, back north to Lincoln Road, back south to the pier, then finally finish at 5th. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” I asked Killer.

  “You can ask me all you want, man,” he replied.

  “When Raven first told you he was going to run every day,” I said, “what did you think?”

  “I thought he was full of shit.”

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT, A GROUP OF US went for dinner at Boston Market. Killer showed up wearing the shirt Raven had given him—a sleeveless, thin, black nylon shirt that had RAVEN RUN on the front in neon green letters and a raven-looking bird. I asked, “How did running change Raven?”

  “One thing it did is that he got too tired to chase as many women,” said Killer.

  “So running calmed him down?” I asked.

  He tilted his head and looked at me. “You ran eight miles today, right? Did it calm you down a little? You might’ve wanted to go out dancing later, but not now. Maybe tomorrow night.” When he first met Raven, Killer said, Raven didn’t have an athletic bone in his body. He could barely make one or two miles. “Look,” he continued, “the guy I knew was the Cowboy. That’s what we called him, the Cowboy. He was real easygoing. He was not obsessive-compulsive. Now all of a sudden—when you run with him, he can tell you what step you’re on—‘we’re on mile two, fifth block, two steps.’ Has he ever done that for you? He can do that! That’s not normal.”

  “It ain’t normal,” agreed Raven.

  His son Danny jumped in. “There’s a lot of schools of thought on exercise. There’s guys who say you can work out seven days a week, and you can be fine. But there’s other guys that say you have to take a rest day.”

  Removing the red straw from his fountain drink, Killer waved it around as he talked. “When you get older, man, you get older,” he said.

  Soon the restaurant was closing, and Killer was back to admonishing Raven for not taking a day off or cutting back his mileage. It saddens him to see his friend in pain, but he admits Raven is better now than when he started the streak. “You know he didn’t have nothing in his life. Now at least he feels his life is good,” remarked Killer, his face softening before the final monologue. “Look, we’re all human beings. We like to talk to other people. No matter how much you hear about people that go in the woods to be by themselves, you still wanna associate with people. You wanna be somebody. The world’s version of somebody and my version of somebody is two different things. But to make a long story short, Raven is a good guy, he’s always been a good guy . . . You can’t tell the future, bro. Live every day like you’re gonna die tomorrow but learn like you’re going to live forever. Who said that? I just did! Somebody else said that, too. Gandhi said that. Gandhi was a smart guy.”

  As we made our way to Killer’s sedan, an attractive woman from Argentina stopped Raven on the sidewalk. She was with her young son. “I know you!” she exclaimed, star-struck. “You are the runner. I want to run with you.”

  “Come on out,” said Raven, pointing to her son. “Bring him, too. What is he, about nine? Looks athletic! Youngest runner we’ve had is six years old. Fifth Street lifeguard stand, five thirty, hope to see you there.”

  FOUR

  “FUGATIVE” ON THE RUN

  In the beginning, Raven’s running goals revolved around girls. If a pretty sunbather was up ahead, he increased his mileage. Raven, at 23, looked like Kenickie from Grease with buff arms, a toned stomach, and sun-bleached brown hair combed in a wave. He wore a smoldering expression on his face, which was clean-shaven except for long, wide sideburns that draped down like candlesticks. About forty years younger than the average Miami Beach resident, Robert was an attractive option to young tourists visiting their grandparents. “You could just go up to their towel and start a conversation,” explained Raven. There weren’t cell phones, and people played transistor radios out loud, giving Raven an easy opening line about music. “They were easily approachable. I don’t know what I’d do today, where it’s like you’re interrupting.” Following Bulldog’s lead, Raven became friends with the regular crowd at the pier and with lifeguards manning their white-box stations.

  There wasn’t a running culture in Miami Beach. A few old men shuffled along for a mile or two, and boxers did a couple of miles of roadwork, but casual jogging didn’t exist. If you ran back in the seventies, you were either a hippie or you were racing to be like Steve Prefontaine. The sport appealed to Raven because “it was not complicated. ” When he ran, he felt good. “We didn’t know it was good for the heart and all that,” he says. His body and jean cutoffs were the only equipment he needed. Nike’s waffle-sole shoes hadn’t made it to South Beach, so Raven, by necessity, was a pioneer of barefoot running.

  Running gave his afternoon structure. “I’m a Libra,” says Raven. “We don’t like making decisions. I like knowing what I have to do.” Soon, other things started falling in place. He got a job as a security guard for a condo in Miami Beach, where he could wear dark clothes and write songs in between security laps on the graveyard shift. By the end of the year, he’d saved up enough money to rent a studio in the apartment complex where his mom managed the building.

  One day, Robert saw an ad in the paper from a Miami production company looking for up-and-coming singers. He showed up at the office with a cassette recording of him singing “Fugitive on the Run,” which he’d written in Nashville, and the producer signed him on the spot.

  At the studio,
the arrangement was different from what Raven had in his head, and it took him a while to get it right. After fifty takes, a short man with thinning red hair and a huge grin walked in the room and started dancing. “He was unmistakable,” says Raven. It was the actor, Mickey Rooney. When Robert finished the song, Rooney looked right at him and said, “Let me give you a piece of advice, son. You’re not having fun. You gotta have fun.” The song, explained Robert, was about a man on the run for a murder he didn’t commit. The content required him to be serious. “But still,” said Rooney, “if you’re not having fun, it’s never going to come out right. Come on, man. Loosen up.”

  Raven now considers it a terrific piece of advice. “That’s true on the job or on the run,” says Raven. “You do better if you have fun with it. Everyone around you will feel it if you enjoy what you do.” Rooney stayed for a couple more takes, dancing silly and trying to make him laugh, before he returned upstairs to visit the secretary. After take seventy-five, the producer finally said, “You got it.”

  Two years had passed since his song was stolen, and Raven thought he was going to get back everything he had lost in Nashville. In early 1973, the Great World of Sound released “Fugitive on the Run,” which they mistakenly spelled “Fugative on the Run.”

  The track was only slightly more successful than its spelling. “They didn’t push it,” explains Raven. “It went out to little towns in Iowa, Texas, and Oklahoma or something.” He got one check for fifty-two dollars, and he never heard from the Great World of Sound again. “Once again, my dreams were shattered,” said Raven, gazing at the original forty-five, which is pinned to his apartment wall.

  To cheer his friend up, Bulldog suggested they go and see a new Western—a nice thought, but the man who stole Robert’s song happened to have a featured role. Watching his nemesis on film, Robert waited for his simmering anger to explode but instead he just sat there and enjoyed the soundtrack. “From running, I felt a change in myself,” said Raven. “I was more calm and mellow, and easygoing. I could control my anger. Everything became more manageable.”

  * * *

  ROBERT STARTED RUNNING greater distances, more often, by himself. In 1974, seven miles was getting easy but nine was too much. Like a Goldilocks of long distance running, Raven settled on the number eight. Eight miles was just right, the perfect challenge, and—though he prefers odd numbers—he liked that a sideways eight represented infinity.

  When people asked him, “How can you spend that much time alone running?” Raven said he was used to being alone. If he weren’t running alone, he’d probably be writing alone, sitting on the pier alone, working security alone, or at his mother’s apartment not talking to the Eagle, which made him feel more alone.

  His new running identity deserved a new name. “I’m not a Cowboy,” he complained to Bulldog. “I don’t ride horses.” Bulldog studied his friend who dressed in black, a writer who stayed up all night with a little mystery to him, kind of like Poe. “Eh,” said Bulldog, his face brightening. “You’re more like the Raven.”

  Finally, Raven felt like himself.

  Eight miles took about ninety minutes. Song lyrics filled the silence in his head, or he counted steps. On average it was 13,900. Raven ran in the soft sand close to the shoreline. Back then, before the Dade County beach reclamation project, there was a lot less beach. North of 15th Street, waves washed all the way up to the buildings, lapping at hotel pool decks and parking lots. At Espanola Way (between 14th and 15th Streets), a steel wall as tall as Robert stretched from the beach out to the sea and cut off access to northern sands. This wall was the first in a series of “groins” installed to prevent beach erosion and trap the sand that the tide wanted to carry south. (For those who have run with Raven, this is why we make the turn at Espanola.) Usually he looped between Government Cut and the first groin at Espanola, though once a week he ran north to 47th Street on the “obstacle course” route. Around groins, through parking lots and pool decks, Raven outran the security guards who were yelling, “No trespassing! This is private property!”

  One afternoon before the run, walking along the beach by himself, Raven heard screams from the water. Three girls were waving for help, caught in a rip current. Raven took off for the waves. He had never been much of a swimmer. In the water, his body is almost vertical, legs dangling underneath like a tadpole. When he got to the first girl, the current pushed them into the steel groin. Barnacles were scraping off his back as he held her. “Grab the piling,” said Raven. “Follow it back to shore.” Then he swam for the second girl, who was farther out. By the time he got her in, the third girl had followed their same path and was close to shore.

  They were sisters from the Bahamas, where their mother served as ambassador. “How much can we give you?” the oldest sister, age 15, asked. “Our mom will wire us money, as much as you want.” But Raven refused the money, saying, “There’s no price on a life.”

  When Raven recalled the rescue, he delivered it in the same way he would deliver any old story—no self-aggrandizement, no heroism. There was even a little regret. “I could’ve used the money,” he acknowledged. “I ran into them on the street, and they stopped people, telling them, ‘This guy saved our life.’ I was kind of embarrassed.”

  Following the rescue, Raven added a three-tenths-mile swim to follow his eight-mile run. “In case that ever happened again,” explained Raven, “I wanted to improve my swimming.”

  Over the next four decades, it would happen again—sixteen times.

  * * *

  BY THE END OF 1974, Raven was running eight miles thirteen out of fourteen days. He ran in the afternoon or evening but didn’t have a set start time—and didn’t need to, because nobody ran with him. Whenever he took a day off, he felt guilty. He felt like he was missing something on the beach. Running was all he could think about. “But people told me I should rest one day, so I did,” he says. “It never felt right. And it was harder to come back the next day.”

  On January 1, 1975, it was a clear, crisp, sunny day in South Beach. Bulldog was running by Raven’s side. “I made a New Year’s resolution,” Raven told Bulldog. “I’m going to run a whole year straight—every day, eight miles.”

  Bulldog laughed. “Yeah right,” he said. “Come on, Johnny. What are you thinking?”

  But Raven was determined. Watch me, he thought. After three miles, Bulldog dropped off and Raven kept going. “I had never gone through with a goal in my life except to get to Nashville, and even that, everything fell apart,” recalls Raven. “Running was going to be my thing.”

  III

  GRIT

  Raven’s greatest asset is his tenacity. He doesn’t give up. He’s like the Eveready battery. He just goes and goes and goes.

  —Hurricane, age 84, 588 runs

  I’ve seen him when it’s pouring down rain so hard you can barely see, and he’s running by himself. I’ve run twice with him in really bad thunderstorms. Lightning crashing around us, and I have a thing about lightning. I go, “Bob, I think it’s getting a little hot out here,” and he’s like, “It’ll pass, it’ll pass.” In 1995, his back got so bad he couldn’t walk. I said, “You gotta quit, man.” And he’s like, “Nah, I gotta run.” His gumption—I mean, that’s something.

  —Teen Idol, singer, songwriter, lifeguard, and Raven Runner

  I aspire for that singular dedication and focus. Today’s woulda-coulda-shoulda society embraces excuses. Raven refuses, be it weather, age, or health. I mean, he is more dedicated to his run than we are to basic needs.

  —Unoffendable, 51 runs

  I felt invincible.

  —Raven

  FIVE

  HOOKED

  Today Raven hasn’t run by himself in over a decade. When Tropical Storm Isaac came to town in the late summer of 2012, people were worried Raven might have to run alone. So that afternoon eighteen runners and two dogs showed up to battle sand and fifty-five-mile-per-hour winds. “I always say Mother Nature is on Raven’s side,” said
Dizzy, a 54-year-old ultra-marathoner and middle school principal from Cuba, along for the eight-mile adventure. With over seventeen hundred runs, he is number two on the list. “There were three big squalls, and they all hit us when we were running north with the wind at our backs.”

  These days, Raven’s motivation to show up comes from other runners. “One hand washes the other,” he explains. “In the beginning, I was doing it for myself but now knowing that runners will be there, that motivates me to keep coming out.”

  For the streak’s first decade, however, six runners ran with Raven. He ran alone 3,637 days out of 3,650 days. Raven was the only person expecting himself to run eight miles every day, and most people dismissed him as a loon.

  Five days into 1975, Raven’s grandmother died. He didn’t go to the funeral because the Eagle did. Plus she was at the end of a long battle with Alzheimer’s, and his grandmother hadn’t recognized him for a while.

  A week after her funeral, Raven opened up a can of stuffed cabbage and tomato juice for dinner. He noticed a hint of rust on the can but thought nothing of it. Two hours later, picking up his date from her hotel room, he felt like he was in the middle of a cyclone. Sweat pooled on his arms and dripped down his forehead. His stomach cramped, and the undigested cabbage pushed back up. The rusted can gave him the worst bout of food poisoning in his life.

  He spent the night in his date’s hotel room, going back and forth to the bathroom as she accused him of having a bad trip. “I don’t do drugs,” he promised. “This is from cabbage.” The next morning, with all the color drained from his face, Raven stopped by his mom’s apartment. “You’re as sick as a dog,” she said, making him a piece of toast. “You’re not going to go run today, are you?”