“I’m going to try,” he said, sipping on orange juice. “If I can walk, I can run.”
She looked at him. “You gotta do this every day?”
Raven said yes.
“You know you don’t have to.”
“Yes, I do,” said Raven. “Unless I’m dying.” She told him not to be so dramatic. He lied and said he was feeling a little better.
After pull-ups under the chickee huts by the 3rd Street lifeguard stand, he staggered to the beach. He was light-headed for the first mile but as he inhaled fresh ocean air, the familiar rhythm shook off his nausea. Finishing mile eight, he felt relieved.
It was day fifteen.
His resolution was still intact.
Usually he ran barefoot, shirtless, and in jean cutoffs that became so caked in sweat and sand they could stand up on their own. When sand chafed off his toe skin, he put on socks, but they got holes. Many days, his socks were soaked in blood, which he rinsed off in the ocean during his three-tenths-of-a-mile swim. Bulldog gave him a pair of combat boots and old leather boxing shoes, and his mom bought him a pair of two-dollar Keds sneakers, which he wore until the blisters raised mounds on his feet and burned so much he couldn’t sleep.
Not long after the food poisoning, jumping off the eight-foot wall at the DecoPlage Hotel in bare feet, he landed on a piece of plywood and a three-inch-long nail. As the nail punctured his skin, it made a popping sound, like pshh. Raven leaned back against the wall and lifted his leg with the plywood attached. He slowly extracted the nail from his right foot, between the ball and the arch, and cast the board aside. On his way back to 3rd Street, he tried to land on the outside of his foot. After the swim, the lump had swelled to a golf ball.
He went to his mom and asked what to do. “Was the nail rusty?” she said.
“I think it was a little rusty,” he said. “But not rusty-rusty.”
“You need to get a tetanus shot,” she said. So he went to the hospital.
For the next two weeks he hobbled down the beach. His limp threw off his running stride, which hurt his left hip and knee. “It was like I was running on a ball of fire,” says Raven. Soon he had shin splints. At this point, most people would have questioned the soundness of the resolution.
Raven kept going.
* * *
GETTING TIRED OF SUMMER FLINGS with tourists that breezed in and out of town, 24-year-old Raven wanted someone stable to settle down with. An older woman, Christine, with pale blue eyes and long blond hair, caught his eye. She liked to bike and swim and do yoga, eating organic long before it was trendy. She had this youthful, surfer-girl vibe about her. At 45, her body defied her age, which she showed off in a little white bikini.
When Raven tried to hit on her, she brushed him off. Then one day, the lifeguard who worked at 8th Street, Bob Romer, pointed her out to Raven and said, “I was with that woman for a night, and I think she’d be really good for you.”
“She’s not interested,” said Raven. “I already tried.” Raven assumed it was their two-decade difference in age, but Romer assured him that she was into younger men. After a couple weeks, Romer was chatting with Christine in front of the lifeguard stand when Raven ran by without his usual cowboy hat. Christine said, “Hey, you look a lot better without that hat.” And Raven thought maybe he did have a chance.
The next week, she invited him over for dinner. “Before I know it, she’s on the floor, unbuttoning her blouse, and we were together,” Raven recalled to me, rifling through a stack of old photographs. “Here she is, White Lightning,” he said, handing me a photo. “Tell me how old she looks.”
In the photo on the old pier, Christine is wearing big sunglasses and a green bikini with a white ring pattern. Raven is right; her stomach is flatter than mine without a dimple or wrinkle in her porcelain skin. She has her right arm around Raven, who has his bare chest out, abs tight, and cut biceps, wearing black socks and denim cutoffs. “The guy on her left is Goliath,” Raven told me, referring to the bodybuilder that Dave the Wave had talked about.
In the picture, Goliath is smiling with his arms bowed out to the side. He has shoulder-length curly blond hair and is wearing a yellow banana hammock–Speedo. “Goliath took these big steps and lifted his legs real high, like in slow motion,” continued Raven. “Everything was a pose. And Goliath would talk real mellow. He’d say, ‘The sun is like my gold.’ ”
Raven calls Christine the Astrologer because most of her paycheck as a legal secretary went to psychics, and she knew everything about horoscopes. When they started dating, the Astrologer was having an affair with her boss, a fat man from Belgium whom she called the Heavy. To communicate with Raven if the coast was clear to come over, she left him notes in the telephone booth outside her apartment at 412 Ocean Drive, a block away from where we were sitting at Raven’s apartment. “After the run, I’d go and check the phone booth,” said Raven, flashing a smile. “It was pretty exciting for a young guy.”
That Christmas, 1975, the Heavy went back to Belgium, and Raven spent the holiday with the Astrologer, who cooked a big traditional organic feast of duck, millet, stuffing, and rice. “I had never eaten duck before,” said Raven. Holly tinsel, blinking lights, and mistletoe blanketed the Astrologer’s apartment. Her brown Maine-coon tomcat, Thomas, jingled all over the house in his Christmas bell collar. Bing Crosby blasted out of her record player. Raven was content. “The Astrologer loved Christmas,” explained Raven.
As a kid, Raven never had a Christmas tree, so he was enamored by the Astrologer’s zest for holidays and life in general. After Christmas, the Astrologer called things off with the Heavy, who unsuccessfully tried to woo her back with a poem entitled, “A Dark Wing Has Covered My Sun.” A health nut, the Astrologer even ran a few miles with Raven. “She was all about me running and not drinking.” She also encouraged his songwriting. “She had faith that I could make it,” said Raven.
Raven and the Astrologer were together on-and-off for twelve years. Raven spent most nights at the Astrologer’s apartment and set up an office in her bathroom. For extra cash on top of working security, Raven rented his empty studio out to a revolving door of tenants, to the point he has trouble naming all of them. “You would’ve liked the Astrologer, White Lightning,” said Raven. “She was so intelligent and well traveled. After going out with her, I said I could never again date a woman who isn’t smarter than me.”
* * *
THREE WEEKS SHY of fulfilling his New Year’s resolution, Raven got pneumonia. His high fever came with terrible chills, and the inflammation in his lungs made it difficult to breathe sitting down, let alone on the move. Raven was coughing and wheezing as he hammered out a set of pull-ups. Casey, an old man who hung around the pier and wore a clunky hearing aid around his neck, watched Raven in silence. “I don’t get this,” he finally said. “Why don’t you just let the pneumonia run its course and take a day off?”
“I just can’t,” said Raven. “I gotta run.”
On mile four, Raven was sweating and shivering and bent in half as he ran past the 1st Street lifeguard stand, where the Nay was working. A former Marine and a Vietnam vet, the Nay was the prototypical handsome lifeguard—big square jaw, dark tan, and a pith helmet to top it off. Raven considered him one of the toughest men out on the beach. The Nay leaned his head out the lifeguard box and shouted, “You’re not quitting are you?”
“No, I’m not,” answered Raven. The Nay gave him a nod of respect, which, Raven says, “was all I needed.”
Though Raven didn’t formally renew the resolution in 1976, he liked his life so much more with the run. “It made me feel like I was really doing something,” he said. “Even if I didn’t have any money, I was really strong. I felt invincible.” Old residents were stopping Raven in the street to congratulate him. “You’re doing great,” said one familiar stranger. “You’re a real inspiration,” said another. “You’ve become much more focused, and you got a steady girlfriend, too. We’re proud of you,” said a third of
dozens. It was the praise Raven had been craving his entire life.
He decided to extend the streak until one afternoon in 1976, when the Astrologer invited him to see an exhibition on the bicentennial at the downtown train station. The time was going to conflict with eight miles. Raven asked himself, “Do I really want to do the run for another year and get hooked on this crazy thing?”
He decided no.
Then an hour before meeting his friends, he got antsy. Oh, I could just do a quick eight, he thought. So under his pants he put on running shorts and sprinted to the beach.
* * *
MANY PEOPLE WHO HEAR about Raven will offer their nonprofessional medical opinion and diagnose him with OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder. This is not news to Raven, because he was already diagnosed, by a church counselor, fifteen years earlier, but he refused medication. “It’s a part of me,” he says. “I don’t want to take pills that make me not be myself.”
Personally, if I don’t exercise, I don’t feel good. I consider my compulsion to move a healthy addiction, though I wanted a professional opinion. “A positive addiction,” wrote psychiatrist William Glasser in his book of the same name (cited in James Fixx’s classic, The Complete Book of Running), “increases your mental strength and is the opposite of a negative addiction, which seems to sap the strength from every part of your life except in the area of the addiction . . . Negative addicts are totally involved with their addiction, having long since given up on finding love and worth. The positive addict enjoys his addiction, but it does not dominate his life.” Dr. Glasser believed that running was a positive addiction, because the exercise consistently helped people shake themselves loose from bad habits. I still think my addiction to exercise is positive, but where does Raven fall on the spectrum? Without a doubt, running dominates Raven’s life, but it is through his obsession that Raven has found love and worth, which has enabled him to provide love and worth for thousands of others.
To avoid pretending that I am any kind of expert on the matter, I sat down on the couch with Dirk E. Huttenbach, MD, a child psychiatrist who also happens to be my father. Handing me a copy of a Psychiatric Times journal, he said, “I found this article when I was cleaning up. I think you’ll find it useful. Sometimes it pays to hold on to things.”
Immediately I knew he would be sensitive to Raven’s condition.
“Respecting Rigidity?” was the title of the Psychiatric Times article that my father handed me. The author, Dr. Lewis, writes that a system, including personality, cannot progress from chaos to flexibility without a “rigid and intervening structure” in between. He gives government as an example: We rarely see a government move from anarchy straight to democracy. Anarchy is usually followed by totalitarianism, from which democracy may or may not develop. The same is true for people trying to control a chaotic life: First, to rein in the chaos, they adopt a rigid lifestyle. (After two and a half chaotic decades, Raven sought structure through running.) But the issue, continues Dr. Lewis, is “whether the system becomes fixated at the rigid level of organization or goes on to develop a more flexible structure.” (Raven’s running routine is pretty fixated.) Still, the point Lewis gets across is that “A rigid structure, however constrictive, is more adaptive than a chaotic one.” (Through that structure, Raven could organize the rest of his life.)
We all have people in our life who operate at different levels of rigidity. Raven is certainly the most rigid person I know, but in fact my father is also pretty rigid. He is a man of routines. Every morning, he must eat the same cereal (Oatmeal Squares) with the same brand of orange juice (Tropicana) that contains the same amount of pulp (“lots of pulp”). He reads the newspaper. He drinks Folgers instant coffee, from the same mug. He doesn’t buy new things when the old things still work (including medicine and cheese). I think he has worn the same flannel bathrobe my entire life, or he has bought an identical one to replace it. The only time I hear him curse is when he is trying to use a computer, turn on the television, or load a DVD. His 1994 Honda Accord has 240,000 miles.
“Stability is attractive to a lot of people,” observed Dr. Huttenbach. Furthermore, he believes, “Having certain routines simplifies life. It may allow people to be creative elsewhere.” The stability that my parents provided in my life gave me confidence to seek out new experiences in different places.
If people are rigid, it can be endearing and in some ways easier to navigate a relationship—for instance, I know what to buy at the grocery store when Dad comes to visit. But if people are too rigid, it can be off-putting. “Usually obsessive-compulsive habits drive people away,” said Dr. Huttenbach. “It’s usually ‘my way or the highway,’ and that’s not a good way to attract people.” He paused. “But Raven has attracted a lot of people.”
* * *
RAVEN’S STREAK TURNED TWO on New Year’s Day, 1977. Nineteen days later, it snowed for the first time in the history of South Florida, snatching the Miami Herald headlines from the news of President Carter’s inauguration. By the start of the run it was a balmy 46 degrees, and Raven yanked off his shirt, vowing to be bare-chested from that day forth.
That year his running uniform got new accessories. First, Bulldog gave him a black visor with RAVEN monogrammed on the front bill, replacing his spray-painted-black cowboy hat, which he had worn through the top. Then, after wearing out his combat boots and bloodying all his socks, Raven rode with the Astrologer to a store in North Miami Beach and purchased a pair of Nike’s waffle shoes. “Wow, they were comfortable,” says Raven. “They had so much cushioning. I felt like I could fly.” He wore the bright yellow Nikes until his feet poked through the toe box and the soles flopped apart.
There was also the glove, his talisman. Heading north one day, around 38th Street, Raven found a big, black rubber glove washed up on the shore and thought, I should put this on. He shook out the seawater and slipped it on his left hand. When he made a fist, energy pumped through his body. “It sounds kind of crazy, but psychologically, as long as I have it on, I will never quit,” says Raven. “It’s the power.”
Over the years, he developed a set of rules for the adoption of new gloves. For instance, he can find a glove or someone can give him one, but he cannot buy a glove. (Currently he has five gloves waiting in the wings.) He prefers left-handed gloves because he’s right-handed and likes to push his hair back with his right hand. Cloth or leather gloves are acceptable, though ideally they are rubber and hug his arm up to his elbow. He wears them until they fall apart (anywhere from ten days to two years) and keeps his keys and coins he finds inside.
In the summer, sweat pools around his fingers, and one time in the late ’70s, he was running by a girl who out of the blue said, “Get the fuck away from me. You’re a real creep.” Without thinking, Raven turned his glove upside down on the girl’s head, pouring hot sweat down her face.
A few weeks later, the mean girl’s boyfriend, who was a cop, approached Raven. “Hey,” said her boyfriend, “you dumped sweat on my girlfriend’s face.” Preparing for a battle, Raven said yes but instead of taking a swing, the guy chuckled. “I wish I could’ve done that,” he said. “She’s a real bitch.”
When the lifeguards heard the story, it became instant legend. Rumor was that Raven was going around the beach dumping sweat on every girl. But he insists that this has only happened once. “I know it wasn’t right, but I can only take so much,” Raven told me with a black glove sitting next to him on the couch. “I’m only human.”
Raven’s final new accessory was a poet called Coyote. Coyote was a trim, good-looking young man who loved girls with frizzy hair. He also loved baseball and boxing, wrote songs, and played the guitar and harmonica. “I liked him,” says Raven. “He was always a little too friendly with my girlfriends, but I said that’s okay because he liked girls with frizzy hair.”
The two started writing songs together. One day, before the run, they were talking baseball at the lifeguard stand. When Raven started to jog, Coyote followed him. �
�Want to try the eight miles?” said Raven. He said okay.
The Astrologer couldn’t believe it when she heard someone else had finished eight miles. “You should keep a list of people who make it,” she said. “I’m sure you won’t have that many.”
SIX
RUN FREE
Many runners, wanting to impress Raven on the first run, will start rattling off their race résumé and marathon times. This is a mistake. When they finish, Raven will look them straight in the eye and say, “You shouldn’t pay to run.” Raven cherishes the inclusive nature of running; anyone can afford it. He hates that the sport has become commercialized, though occasionally he will endorse a running event if it benefits a charity.
Last year about 20 million runners finished one of 28,000 organized racing events that took place in the United States. The Boston Marathon alone attracted over 30,000 registered runners. When Raven started the streak in 1975, fewer than 2,000 people crossed the finish line in Boston. Bill Rodgers crossed it first, setting a new American record of 2:09:55.
Raven believes Sylvester Stallone should get credit for popularizing jogging. “Right after Rocky came out in 1977—that’s when I noticed people started running,” says Raven. “Everyone was singing ‘Gonna Fly Now’ and thrusting their hands in the air.”
I asked Raven about James Fixx, the author of The Complete Book of Running, published in 1977, which has gotten credit for the modern running craze. Through running, Fixx lost sixty-one pounds and quit smoking two packs of cigarettes per day. But he noticed the mental benefits were even better. “I was calmer and less anxious,” he writes in the foreword. “I felt more in control of my life. I was less easily rattled by unexpected frustrations. I had a sense of quiet power, and if at any time I felt this power slipping away I could instantly call it back by going out and running.”
Running with Raven Page 6