Running with Raven Read online

  ALSO BY LAURA LEE HUTTENBACH

  The Boy Is Gone: Conversations

  with a Mau Mau General

  Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP

  RUNNING WITH RAVEN

  The Amazing Story of One Man, His Passion, and the Community He Inspired

  LAURA LEE HUTTENBACH

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  CITADEL PRESS BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2017 Laura Lee Patterson Huttenbach

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  CITADEL PRESS and the Citadel logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-0-8065-3842-6

  First Electronic Edition: May 2017

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8065-3844-0

  ISBN-10: 0-8065-3844-9

  For my siblings—Pat, Eric, and Marisa—for making sure

  I am never more than myself, and for making me believe

  that myself is enough, maybe sometimes too much.

  For Mary Beth Koeth, for how you help us see the world.

  For Mitchell Kaplan, for the way you honor books and writers.

  And for Raven Runners, for every eight miles and these stories.

  Table of Contents

  ALSO BY LAURA LEE HUTTENBACH

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  RAVEN’S COMMUNITY, A SELECTION OF CHARACTERS

  PREFACE - WHAT IS IT ABOUT RAVEN?

  I - PERMANENCE

  ONE - PAINT IT BLACK

  TWO - ONLY DADDY THAT’LL WALK THE LINE

  II - AUTHENTICITY

  THREE - THE WORLD’S VERSION OF SOMEBODY

  FOUR - “FUGATIVE” ON THE RUN

  III - GRIT

  FIVE - HOOKED

  SIX - RUN FREE

  SEVEN - CASTRO IS STILL LAUGHING

  IV - FITNESS

  EIGHT - NOT A RACE

  NINE - BETTER THAN ALCOHOL

  V - BELONGING

  TEN - GENTLE SOUL

  ELEVEN - ANDREW

  VI - ACCOUNTABILITY

  TWELVE - SPINAL STENOSIS

  THIRTEEN - YOU’RE THE MIRACLE

  FOURTEEN - THE BIG WAVE

  FIFTEEN - OFF THEIR BUTTS

  VII - CAMARADERIE

  SIXTEEN - TRUE STORY LORY

  SEVENTEEN - CHUCK NORRIS AND JESUS CHRIST

  VIII - LEGEND

  EIGHTEEN - EQUAL IN RUNNING CLOTHES

  NINETEEN - WEAVER

  APPENDIX - RAVEN RUNNERS LIST

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  RAVEN’S COMMUNITY, A SELECTION OF CHARACTERS

  Along with Raven and Laura Lee “White Lightning,” more

  than twenty-five hundred people have run with Raven

  through these pages, including:

  Miracle, Raven’s longtime girlfriend, is a professor at FIU, a pool player, fisherman, runner, and a swimmer. Her greatest fear is of entrapment, while Raven’s is of abandonment.

  Mary Cooper is Raven’s mother. Her second husband, the Eagle, with white hair and a pointy nose, became Raven’s nemesis.

  Bulldog was an outgoing boxer at the famed 5th Street Gym, where Muhammad Ali trained. Together with Bulldog’s best friend, Killer, the boxers convinced Raven to run.

  The Astrologer, twenty-one years his senior, was Raven’s first serious girlfriend, from 1975 to 1988. She was big into working out and loved Christmas and psychics. The Astrologer suggested that Raven should keep a list of runners.

  Coyote, a poet, harmonica player, and male nurse, was the first person to run eight miles with Raven in 1977.

  Yul, an avid arm wrestler—bald and with a speech impediment—was the third runner to complete eight miles with Raven in 1982.

  Placard Man, a Raven Run coach, was a well-liked, germo-phobic homeless man who carried around handwritten public service announcements on cardboard. Raven received his mail.

  Gringo, a former land baron in Spain, has run over fifteen hundred times with Raven, including in eighty-six-mph wind during Hurricane Irene, but today can’t bear to see Raven running in so much pain.

  Taxman, a 63-year-old socialist and accountant, has logged the most runs (1,959) with Raven. Conservative runners call him “Comrade Tax.” His wife, Lasagna Lady, is a Raven Run coach.

  Dizzy Issie, a middle school principal and ultramarathoner who came from Cuba in 1967 on the Freedom Flights, met his wife and best friend on the Raven Run. He is ranked number two.

  Poutine, named for her favorite Canadian dish, holds the female record for 143 consecutive runs and swims.

  Hurdler, a law professor and former steeplechaser, earned his nickname jumping over every trashcan on the beach, which came to 572 cans.

  Creve Coeur, a bodybuilder and federal marshal from Creve Coeur, Missouri, with more than four hundred runs, asked Raven to marry him and his wife, Hollywood Flasher, in an intimate ceremony over eight miles in 2009.

  Butcher started running with Raven after getting released from prison for drug trafficking. In 2013, he ran with Raven two hundred consecutive days, which he says saved his life.

  PREFACE

  WHAT IS IT ABOUT RAVEN?

  ROBERT “RAVEN” KRAFT is a 65-year-old songwriter who runs eight miles every day, without exception, in the sands of Miami Beach, and he’s been doing that every single day for the last forty-one years.

  Seriously. He hasn’t missed one sunset.

  It’s common for people to dismiss Raven’s content by his packaging, because, I’ll admit, he is a strange-looking fellow. For his running uniform, he is shirtless in short black shorts, one black glove, a black headband, black socks, and running shoes that don’t have to be black. Nearsighted, he wears aviators that turn dark in the light, and when he’s not wearing them, he squints like Clint Eastwood. He combs his longish black hair into a wave that breaks across his scalp. The ends of his mullet curl with sweat. He cuts his own hair and trims his white beard, dyeing black his mustache and chinstraps that frame his thin chapped lips with a dark heart. Scoliosis, sciatica, and spinal stenosis have caught up to his running pace, so he can’t stand up straight. A deeply tanned torso covered by a forest of chest hair slouches over his caved-in abdominals, turning his body into a five-foot-ten apostrophe. When he runs, his right foot lands heavier than his left, giving him the gait of a graceful pirate with a peg leg. He wears his pain on his wrinkled face, and it’s not pretty. He is not a person with whom you’d expect to relate or from whom you’d expect to learn. Most people think he is homeless. If I didn’t know him, I’d probably cross the street.

  But people from every American state and all over the world flock to meet him. Over twenty-five hundred people—ages 6 to 80—have run eight miles with him, earning a nickname and a spot on his esteemed runner’s list. The top three runners—Taxman, Dizzy, and Gringo—all have over sixteen hundred runs on the books (that Raven meticulously keeps). Raven hasn’t run alone in over a decade.

  What is it about this man that makes people from everywhere come to his South Beach sandbox? Besides a nickname, what do you get from Raven?

  In seeking the answer to that question, I—White Lightning—have run over a thousand miles with Raven. I’ve attended Raven Run events like the Annual Awards banquet in January, the Spring Picnic, and Raven’s Birthday Dinner on October 17. I’ve recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with him at his apartmen
t, and I’ve talked to him on the phone for much longer. I have written this book. But my problem is that I’m generally drawn to obsessive, offbeat types who can tell a good story about a place that is unfamiliar to me. In this way, Raven is definitely my type.

  To figure out the source of Raven’s magnetism, I started asking Raven Runners two questions: Why did you first come to run with Raven? And, why did you come back? In response, I heard eight common refrains, each of which will be explored in the eight parts of this book.

  For example, when Amy, a pretty 40-year-old woman from Denver, moved to Miami Beach, she had trouble finding friends. “My biggest complaint was that there was no community,” she said, expressing a common frustration for residents new to the Beach. “The city was so transient.” Her colleagues at the Miami Design Preservation League—the organization that promotes and protects the Art Deco of South Beach—suggested that she run with Raven. On her second attempt in July 2009, she completed all eight and became Preservationist. “This run was so important to me,” she recalled on a run in 2014. “First it was the challenge of eight miles. Then it was the social group and community. Then it was the physicality. I got so strong.” She started doing half-marathons. “I gained so much confidence,” she continued. “For my job, I had to be outgoing and raise money and meet people, but that wasn’t the real Amy. I have social anxiety. But when you meet people running, it creates this intimacy. Maybe it’s because you’re looking forward, rather than directly at the person next to you. You just feel comfortable sharing things you’re going through.” Preservationist has over two hundred runs with Raven. She named some of her best friends—All-American, Troublemaker, Seaside Sparrow, Juris Prudence, and Expresso. “Every day I know where Raven is,” she said. “He’s the most constant thing in my life.”

  At the Raven Run Annual Awards banquet one January, I was sitting across from Green Thumb, a kind, 69-year-old real estate agent. He sports a white beard and a tan face, and he tends to the South Beach community garden. “I have to say, you always meet interesting people with Raven,” he observed. “You never meet, like, a consultant.” That night, when Raven was trying to induct a runner called Firecracker into the Hall of Shame—a controversial practice among us—she protested and launched into a fiery tirade. Green Thumb and I just looked at each other and shrugged. To us, the memorable and colorful characters are a real draw. To Raven, they are unavoidable because the run is free and open to anyone and everyone (unless—I’ll go into this later—you are one of six banned people who got violent and threatened to kill Raven). For accepting everyone, sometimes Raven pays a price.

  Many runners gave me attributes that they admired about Raven. “I aspire for that kind of singular dedication and focus,” said Unoffendable, a 50-year-old marketing professional and Vikings fan. “Today’s woulda-coulda-shoulda society embraces excuses. Raven refuses, be it weather, age, health, whatever.” Before he moved from Miami to Texas in 2014, Unoffendable completed twenty-two “partials”—four-mile runs—in a row. “That opened my eyes a bit,” he said. “When I tell his story I usually challenge the listener to think of the last time he skipped sleep (party or study) or food (usually illness), and this dude runs eight on the sand. I mean he is more dedicated to his run than we are to basic needs.”

  Raven knows where he is supposed to be every day, and he has no desire to be elsewhere. He is clear on his purpose in life—to give strangers and friends eight miles to belong and make connections. He finds it meaningful. Purpose and authenticity rub off—not necessarily because you share the same purpose or because you are like that person—but because you have a purpose or you want a purpose, and you want people to accept you when you are being yourself. That’s what Raven encourages—to be healthy, to do what you say, and to be true.

  “I could not think of a person nor an event of any kind which seemed as predictably dependable as Raven and his daily run,” remarked Shoe Guy, a former Eastbay Shoe executive who has 693 runs with Raven. Through him, he has made great new friends and recruited his own family to experience eight miles. “If you find something special like the Raven Run, it grows in value when you share it with people you love,” said Shoe Guy. “My girlfriend, part Native American, became ‘Moccasin.’ My three sons became ‘Shoe Horn,’ ‘Midsole,’ and ‘Cleats.’ And finally, my daughter-in-law, a lovely former ballerina prone to an occasional fall became ‘Slipper.’ ”

  What surprised me most by the answers I received from Raven Runners on why they run with Raven was how little they related to running. “While we are all runners, it’s not really about ‘the run,’ ” observed Canuck, an attorney from Toronto who has over two hundred runs with Raven. “It is the people who have made this run into the special thing that it is.” Raven offers everyone consistency and structure in an American city whose appearance and identity are continuously changing. Unlikely relationships sparked over eight miles now span the globe.

  Raven’s girlfriend of the last nineteen years, Miracle, is a professor of black-and-white print photography at Florida International University, specializing in pictures of Florida wildlife. She knows the scientific name for every plant, though she has trouble remembering doctors’ appointments. She is willowy with long blond hair, which she brushes frequently, and plays in a pool league under her other pseudonym, Miami Slim. One of the most eloquent people I know, Miracle believes Raven fulfills two profound needs in people: “In our culture today there’s this need for the kind of myth that people used to have and we don’t have anymore,” she told me on the phone while she was driving to class. “I mean nobody believes in the Man of Steel. People want something that they can believe in. I think Raven is that thing. No matter where you are in the world, you know there’s this superhuman guy doing something that’s just impossible to imagine.” She cleared her throat. “And the other thing that I think is universal to our species is a need for knowing where your place is. You call it roots or home, but that sense of where you belong is extremely important. If you know anyone that doesn’t have that, you know how cursed they are because they spend a lifetime of wandering and searching. They may never find it. The fact that Raven is doing this in one place, he has that. I think people who want to hear the stories from him, it’s not just about entertainment, it’s about connecting to the idea of a sense of place. You can call it regional, even local, even limited to an eight-mile stretch, but it’s an idea that extends into the heart of every human being. When they touch Raven, they touch the myth and the sense of place simultaneously.”

  * * *

  I first met Raven on a weekend afternoon in May 2011, three months after moving to Miami Beach from my hometown of Atlanta. I was lying out in the sand with my friend Jessie, an attorney who played volleyball with me at the University of Virginia, and Raven happened to stop right in front of my beach towel. “Hey,” I said. “I’ve passed you running on the beach. You’re the Raven.”

  “I know,” he replied, adjusting his black headband. “I remember you. I’ve probably been running since before you were born. When’s your birthday?”

  “August first, 1982.”

  “That was a Sunday,” he said. It was? “They were dredging the beach, and I was running under the old pier when a wave washed ashore. I veered to the right to miss the wave and went headfirst into a concrete piling.”

  “Were you okay?” I asked.

  Reaching behind his neck, Raven delicately pressed water from the end of his mullet. “I cracked my head open,” he said. “A lifeguard drove me to the hospital, and I got eighteen stitches.” The doctor told him he’d had a concussion and needed to stay the night for observation. “But instead I went back to the Beach to finish my eight miles,” continued Raven. “I even made it to work that night. I was a security guard.”

  “That’s not a positive association with my birthday,” I said.

  “Actually it turned out real positive,” he said. “Somebody called the Herald, and they ran my story inside the Neighbors section
—the Raven Run’s first press!”

  Water was dripping off his chest hair. “Did you just get done running?” I asked.

  “No, I went swimming. I run in the evening. You should come with us. Meet at the Fifth Street lifeguard stand at five thirty.”

  Before I could think it through, the words left my lips. “What day?”

  Any day. Every day. There was no weather hotline, no confirmation number. If Raven was alive, he’d be running. “I’ll start thinking of a nickname for you,” he continued. “But you have to finish the eight.”

  Jessie, lying in a bikini on the towel next to me, popped up. “Do you have a White Lightning yet?” she asked.

  “No,” said Raven, pointing at me. “Is that what people call you?”

  It wasn’t, really. It was what a homeless man standing on the corner of 5th and Ocean had called me on the way to the beach that afternoon. After looking me up and down in one fell motion, the man proclaimed, “Good afternoon, White Lightning.” Jessie and I—normally immune to the street commentary of Miami Beach—burst out laughing and had been talking about it ever since.