For the lives he saved
What did he get
But a pauper’s grave
And a memory I’d not forget.
Years later, Raven got a call from a 29-year-old man looking for someone who knew his father, Chuck Holmes. “I was good friends with your father,” said Raven. “He was one of my heroes.” They talked for a while, and Raven told stories of how Rings had led by example, gone to church, and was the one who encouraged Raven to work out and stay healthy. “By the way,” Raven said, “how did you get my number?”
Someone from the old age home where his grandfather had lived told him that his father was friends with a guy who runs on the beach every day. “So I called lifeguard headquarters,” he said. “They told me, ‘Well, it has to be the Raven,’ and gave me your number.” He hadn’t seen his father in twenty-five years. After the phone call, Raven sent him a long letter with pictures. “We really respected your father,” Raven wrote.
Raven wanted a way to honor his favorite characters who couldn’t run eight miles but enriched the Raven Run experience. “So we came up with the idea of coaches,” said Raven. “There’s pretty much six characteristics for a coach. They gotta be homeless, alcoholic, annoying, colorful, around for a long time, and feed birds. Some get all six, some only have one or two.” At the first banquet in 1996, Placard Man overwhelmed the pool with votes and became the first official Raven Run Coach, but Raven has retroactively named coaches dating back to 1975. (The Astrologer and Handshue are both official coaches.)
Raven realizes that songs like “Whiskers on the Rocks” might not make him rich or famous, but he has paid tribute to Placard Man, immortalizing him in words. “It’s not what people are buying these days,” he told me. “But that’s okay, White Lightning. Maybe when I’m dead and gone people will like it. I’m just no Taylor Swift.”
ELEVEN
ANDREW
The 1992 hurricane season was so quiet that bored reporters were calling the National Hurricane Center and asking, “Where are the storms?”
In the third week of August, the Center finally had an answer: A weak storm was developing off the Atlantic Coast, but scientists predicted it would fall apart before reaching land. On August 22, that changed. Hurricane Andrew was a concentrated, fast-moving hurricane unlike the slow, sprawling giants that had come the years before. South Florida residents had two days to prepare for the third Category-Five hurricane ever to land in the Continental United States.
Miami Beach ordered an evacuation. Residents drove to newer homes of friends and family living in South Miami. City buses carried people to high school auditoriums on the mainland. The Astrologer, worried about her beloved cat, started driving north. But at a gas station, the wind blew open her car door and the cat scurried away, never to be seen again.
Raven’s roommate at the time was a man who looked like Drew Carey and turned every conversation to sex. “Dr. Pleasure was probably my worst roommate of all time,” reckons Raven. He weighed 250 pounds and drove a powder blue Pinto. “All you could see was his gigantic head,” Raven says. At one o’clock every day, he announced, “Oh! My soap operas,” changing the channel from whatever Raven was watching. He used Raven’s toaster oven and never cleaned up, leaving crumbs all over the kitchen.
On August 22, Dr. Pleasure asked Raven if they should evacuate. “I’m going to stay,” Raven told him. “But you should do whatever you think.” He decided to ride out the storm with Raven. They drove his Pinto to the beach and filled up plastic grocery sacks with sand to stack against the living room’s sliding glass door.
On the beach the next day, lifeguards were busy clearing the stands. As usual, Raven ran his eight miles, followed by a three-tenth-mile swim. “The water was a little rough, but it was nothing like the swim I took with Springman during Gilbert,” noted Raven.
Baseball Man was waiting for Raven when he came out of the water. Baseball Man was chubby and baldheaded with a cigarette dangling from lips and tobacco dribble on his shirt. He cruised the beach rummaging through trashcans (his favorite find was Kentucky Fried Chicken) and searching for someone to answer his baseball trivia. When tourists didn’t answer correctly, he said, “You don’t know your baseball. You’re not good Americans.”
When Baseball Man first met Raven, Pete Rose had just been banned from baseball for gambling. “Can you believe Pete Rose is out of baseball!” shouted Baseball Man. “You know how many hits he got?”
Raven answered 4,256.
The hair of Baseball Man’s bushy blond eyebrows stood up straight, all the way to his forehead, and his eyes bulged. “You know your baseball,” he said. After that, Baseball Man was usually waiting for Raven at the 6th Street lifeguard stand, lying in the sand. Raven often would invite him over to watch the World Series and eat a can of Campbell’s soup for dinner.
Before Hurricane Andrew, Baseball Man asked, “Do you think I could stay with you?”
Raven said of course. When Leigh the lifeguard heard that, she dug out a bar of soap from her lifeguard stand and tossed it to Baseball Man. She said, “Raven, if you’re going to bring him in, make him clean up a little.” Baseball Man jumped in the ocean fully clothed, soap in hand, splashing in the bubbles. When he was satisfied with the job, Baseball Man walked up to Raven, put his hand in the air, and asked him to smell his armpit. “Look, I’m clean!”
That afternoon a news station interviewed lifeguards, who told the reporter, Susan Candiotti, that she had to speak to Raven. “Are you really planning to run through the hurricane?” asked Candiotti.
“I have to,” Raven said on the evening news. “But this is my thing. I don’t recommend it for other people, because it’s dangerous.” That night Candiotti concluded her segment with: “You heard it from Raven. He’s going to run no matter what.”
On the way home, Raven checked in with Placard Man to see if he needed a place to stay. Placard Man planned to take cover at the Flamingo Park racquetball courts, so Raven headed home with Baseball Man. Back at the apartment, Dr. Pleasure wasn’t pleased with Raven’s hospitality toward the Beach’s homeless population. Baseball Man bossed Dr. Pleasure around, telling him how to set up the sandbags, and the two bickered all night.
Around two in the morning it sounded like a freight train was about to barrel through the wall. Winds whipped around at 110 miles per hour. Every time lightning struck, Baseball Man let out a bloodcurdling scream. “It’s all over!” he shouted. “It’s all over.” The windows rattled. The sky was painted green and purple. Baseball Man continued predicting the apocalypse, and Dr. Pleasure told him, “Cut it out.”
The lights flickered twice, and the power went out for good. Raven was on the couch, holding a flashlight and pressing his ear against the transistor radio. The National Weather Service warned everyone to stay indoors. “Do not think you are in any way safe,” came the announcement. “If you have not hunkered down and put the mattress over you—friends, this is the time to do it.”
Twenty miles south, on the mainland, wind hit 160 miles per hour. Gusts peeled roofs off like foil from a casserole dish. Trees crushed cars like aluminum cans. On the ground floor of Mercy Hospital, a twelve-foot storm surge carried a foot and a half of water through the front doors. Fish were flopping down the hallways. In the parking lot, a fifty-foot cargo ship ran aground.
At 326 Ocean Drive, Raven prayed. Nobody slept. By seven o’clock, winds had dropped to around fifty miles per hour, gusting at seventy. Raven announced he was going to check out the damage on the beach, and Dr. Pleasure came along. Streets were blocked with felled trees. A neighbor’s roof was covering Raven’s bicycle. “The beach looked like a scene from Robinson Crusoe,” recalls Raven. “Dead fish were all over, suffocated by sand in their gills. Seaweed and mangrove thorns were everywhere.” Close to the shoreline, Raven made out a lumpy mass wrapped in plastic. Walking closer, he recognized the bushy beard poking out of the plastic burrito. “Placard Man!” said Raven. “How you doing?”
P
lacard Man had survived the night at Flamingo Park, but he didn’t get a wink of sleep. Now he was trying to get some peace on the beach, but the rising tide kept waking him up and forcing him to move back every half-hour.
On the way home, they saw Susan Candiotti again. For the second day in a row, Raven made the evening news. “How’d you make out, Raven?” asked Candiotti. “Well, we made it,” said Raven. “We got a little water in the house, but everything’s all right.” Then Candiotti turned to Dr. Pleasure. “What about you, sir? How come you didn’t go to a shelter?”
“Well,” said Dr. Pleasure, “Raven said it’d be all right.” The camera panned to Raven and his disheveled, windblown hair, crooked glasses, looking like a wet rat.
“You had enough faith in that man?” asked Candiotti.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Dr. Pleasure. “But next time I’ll go to a shelter.”
Baseball Man hit the road right after the storm, and Dr. Pleasure moved out soon after. “He met some woman, thank God, and he moved to her place,” recalls Raven. “The address, of all things, is 6969 Collins Avenue. Oh, he loved it. He’s in his glory. Then he meets this Russian woman in the elevator and married her and moved to Milton, Florida. I nicknamed her Mrs. Butterworth, I don’t know why.”
For seven months, Raven didn’t hear anything from Baseball Man until a mission in Oregon called asking if he knew George Smith. “Yeah, I do,” Raven told the woman. “He’s a good friend of mine.”
“Well he came in last night, had a heart attack, and gave your name as a friend. He died. We can’t find any relatives.” Raven said he knew George had a sister and a mother. “Well, we’ll try to look,” she said.
A few days later, Baseball Man’s sister called Raven. “I heard you were George’s friend,” she said. They talked for hours. “His sister was a regular woman,” says Raven. She told Raven that after recovering in AA, George got married and had a daughter, but he couldn’t handle the responsibility. He started drifting. She told Raven, “I’m real happy he was your friend.” She sent pictures of Baseball Man as a young man and, every year, she sent Raven a Christmas card.
When I asked Raven how many roommates he’d had over the years, he listed more than a dozen, including the Miser, Budget Man, the Bohemian, the Giggler, and Vulcan Pilot. “Vulcan Pilot was the best roommate ever,” said Raven. In seven years—from 2002 to 2009—Vulcan Pilot, who has close to three hundred runs, spent a total of three nights at the apartment.
Raven was as generous with his mailbox as his living room couch. Over the years, many members of the homeless or itinerant South Beach community have used his address to get mail. To name a few, there was Placard Man, Systems Man, Big Unit, Stalker, Baseball Man, the Streak, Burke’s Law, and Experiment Man.
After Hurricane Andrew, a 26-year-old runner from Madrid took Dr. Pleasure’s room. Corvette Man had recently taken a leave of absence from his job as a flight attendant at Iberia Airlines to train full-time for triathlons. To cover rent, Corvette Man worked as a valet, a job that doubled as training; he sprinted from the parking lots back to the front of the hotel.
When I met Corvette Man running on Raven’s 64th birthday in 2014, he was still speedy. I asked what it was like being Raven’s roommate for three years. “The best years of my life,” he replied. “I used to see Raven when I was a kid on vacation with my parents in South Beach. He is an athlete.” If it takes one to know one, Corvette Man is qualified to make the assessment; he completed his first marathon at age 14 (he’s since lost count), and he’s finished many Iron Mans. Today he hopes to convince Raven to cut back on the mileage. “Pretty soon Raven won’t be able to walk,” he told me. Corvette Man honors Raven’s run and his songwriting, but most of all he respects Raven’s way of life. “The thing I learned from Raven,” he said, “is to keep it simple.”
* * *
MOTHER NATURE HAD GIVEN RAVEN A BREAK during Hurricane Andrew, but She was less forgiving on the morning of April 24, 1994. Shuttling between his couch and bathroom with food poisoning and diarrhea, Raven didn’t know how he was going to run. At least it can’t get any worse, he thought.
Walking out to the beach, there was a coldness in the air. The sky turned black and commenced a show of lightning. Within a mile, golf ball–size hail hammered his shoulders and face. Pulling his glasses off so they wouldn’t break, he felt lumps rising on his scalp. “The surfers had their boards covering their heads. You could hear the pounding—boom, boom, boom.”
Giggler was taking refuge in his lifeguard stand. “All of a sudden, I see Raven coming toward us with blood running down his face,” recalls the Giggler. “He was getting bludgeoned—like, stoned by God. I remember the captain pulled up in the truck and told me to get in, and I was like, ‘Uh-uh, no way. I’m not stepping one foot out there.’ ”
At the next lifeguard stand, Raven ducked under an awning to take refuge. “If I had run two or three more minutes, I could’ve died,” he told me.
“At least you had the sense to stop,” I said.
“I didn’t stop,” he said. “I ran in place.” When the hail let up, Raven took small, delicate steps to finish the eight, sliding over a layer of ice cubes. “That was a hairy one,” he remarked. “But the fear at least made my food poisoning go away.”
* * *
DONNA AND RAVEN FOUGHT all the time, but the make-ups were worth it. “With the Astrologer, I could get away with anything,” says Raven. “With Donna, it was the opposite. She was extremely jealous.” The roller-coaster romance kick-started Raven’s songwriting. “I wrote more songs about her than I did about anybody in my life.”
Titles inspired by his spiky, silver-haired muse include “Donna Done Me Wrong,” “Give and Take,” and “She was my Bonnie, and I was her Clyde.” Raven teamed up with a lifeguard called Teen Idol, who sang and played guitar, and the Giggler, who played the flute. On the sidewalk outside the Revere Hotel, the motley crew would play for change, which they usually gave to a homeless person at the end of the night. In all, Raven and Teen Idol have written thirty-five songs together—Raven comes up with an idea and the lyrics, and Teen Idol fills in the rest, including the melody and instrumentals. Their most requested song, “Have You Seen This Man?” is “about God, actually,” Teen Idol told me, adding, “but I’m not very religious, so it could be about any man or woman.” Teen Idol taught Raven how to copyright his work, and Raven holds copyright to 560 songs. “To be honest, most of our songs are doom and gloom,” Teen Idol told me. “Let’s see. There’s ‘Difficult Love,’ ‘Born Under a Violent Moon,’ and ‘Growing Old Before My Time.’ ” He laughed. “That one has a line: ‘Grey streaks in my hair, can I even make it up the stairs?’ It’s pretty depressing.”
Teen Idol is a lieutenant on the Beach Patrol and keeps watch from his lifeguard stand at 30th Street, which is a block away from where I lived. I became friends with him, checking in before I went swimming. When he had a break, he swam with me.
Teen Idol has five Raven runs, thirteen Raven swims, and fifteen Spring Picnic performances with Raven. “I’ve run twice with him in really bad thunderstorms—lightning crashing around us, and I have a thing about lightning,” said Teen Idol. “I go, ‘Bob, I think it’s getting a little hot out here, and he’s like, ‘It’ll pass. It’ll pass.’ I’ve seen him when it’s pouring down rain so hard you can barely see, and he’s running by himself.”
Among the lifeguards, he said, Raven’s reputation falls somewhere between psychotic and inspiring. “His gumption,” said Teen Idol, “I mean, that’s something.” It extends to Raven’s songwriting. “Art is a rough business; most of what you send out just goes in the trash. But he keeps plugging away.” Since 1989, Raven has sent out his work to publishers every other day.
On what draws people from all over to run with Raven, Teen Idol believes, “It’s the fortitude. When you find out the guy hasn’t missed a day in forty years, you think, How does that work?”
* * *
CHANNEL SURFING ONE EV
ENING IN 1994, Raven came upon a documentary about the man who had stolen his song in Nashville in 1970. In the television program, the man confessed that for much of the early seventies, he was stoned or drunk, and those years were cloaked in fog. Raven had always thought the man had done it on purpose—to deny a young, hopeful writer his dream—but listening to him, Raven realized: Maybe the guy just woke up the next morning with new material in his pocket and chalked it up to high inspiration.
The hate Raven had been carrying became too heavy. “I think about what could have happened if he hadn’t stolen my song,” says Raven. “I could have gotten rich and famous, but maybe I could have fallen for its excesses. Maybe I would lead an unhealthy life with drugs and alcohol—no running, and no real friends. So it all worked out. That’s how I try to look at it.”
Of the people in his life that he respected most, he noticed a common thread. Everyone had overcome a demon. “Johnny and Waylon,” says Raven, “they got sober, they found God—they beat their devil and made great music.” Raven came to understand that the song thief was in an early stage of battling the devil when they met. The devil had won that round in Nashville, and Raven’s lyrics were his prize. But Raven got a concession, and that was the Raven Run.
At the end of 1994, a lifeguard called the Man of a Thousand Faces organized a 20th birthday party for Raven’s streak. After Raven performed with the Giggler and Teen Idol, as he was thanking his friends, a lifeguard called Pin Head shouted, “Here’s to another twenty years!”
Raven, at 44, was thinking maybe it was time to settle down and have a Raven, Jr. He had chosen the streak over family, marriage, health, and jobs. What was Pin Head suggesting—that as a 65-year-old in 2015, he’d still be running?
“Twenty more years?” repeated Raven.
“Yeah,” said Pin Head. “What’s another twenty years?”
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