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I travel for two reasons: To see new places and escape old ones. Since graduating from the University of Virginia, I haven’t lived in one place for more than two years. People or cities I don’t like, I tend to leave behind. Taking my physical past with me has to be a conscious decision. I pack it in a box or else it gets thrown away.

For Raven, every street is a stroll down memory lane. Every block triggers a scene. “I never walk down that side of the street,” Raven told me one afternoon. “That’s where my friend Bruiser got in a fight, and I get bad vibes.” Familiar faces are everywhere. Raven will tell you he feels like a fugitive, like he’s always running from something, but he’s been running in the same place. How can you shake the past if it surrounds you?

Yesterday, Raven and I went on a bike ride through South Beach. “I want to show you exactly where things happened,” he had told me during our interviews. It’s one thing when the Raven says, “My three best friends from elementary school lived in the housing projects.” It’s another when we are facing the Bay, looking at three gorgeous, luxurious high rises, and he points to the one on the left, now called the Apogee. “That used to be the projects,” said Raven. “Seven three-story buildings. That one there, on the right, the Yacht Club—that used to be the city dump.” In his lifetime, the city dump had become million-dollar condos.

Before we’d taken one pedal from his driveway, Raven announced, “Remember I told you about the two killers from In Cold Blood? They stayed there.” He pointed across the street, to 335 Ocean Drive. “It used to be called the Somerset Hotel. My Mom and I would go next door to pay our rent, so we must’ve passed by when they were there.” Raven was nine-years-old during the Christmas of 1959 when Richard Hickock and Perry Smith hid out in Miami Beach. A few days after their South Beach vacation, the two were arrested in Las Vegas and sentenced to death by hanging for murdering a family of four in Kansas.

“And that building next to it, 329 Ocean,” the Raven continued, “That’s where George P. Leonard took the famous cowboy actor Lash LaRue to Alcoholics Anonymous.” George P. Leonard was an old beach character who looked like Ernest Hemmingway with a bushy white beard and a notebook in hand. George swore he wrote better than Hemmingway, but nobody had discovered him. Raven actually kept George’s writings, which went something like this:

7:23 – Sitting at McDonald’s, oh I gotta pee.

7:27 – The eggs are no good, I’m going to return them.

Around George’s waist, a rope held up his pants and functioned as a beer holster. Homeless, George would often get arrested for public drunkenness. Upon his release, he penned protest letters to the courts. “Dear Screwed-Up, Incompetent Judge Jones,” began one. Raven had told me the story about George and Lash LaRue, but I’d forgotten where they met.

“They met at the Playhouse Bar, and George invited him to the AA Meeting,” answered Raven, without acknowledging any irony. “You ready, White Lightning?” said Raven. “Let’s get started.” 

Our first stop was the park on Ocean between Second and Third Street, named after the environmentalist, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, whom we have to thank for the Everglades National Park. In 1989, Douglas gathered with other influential community members like Barbara Capitman, the founder of the Miami Design Preservation League, and Miami Beach Mayor Alex Daoud to save the park from turning into a parking lot. Raven was asked to read a poem, but he had to go first in order to make the run that afternoon. Shirtless with his one black glove, he had leapt from the stage as soon as he finished and shouted dramatically, “Now I gotta run.”

Raven was recounting the story to me when a man stopped him on the bike. “How you doing, Raven?” he said. “When are you running today?” The man, Jesse, was a boat captain who grew up in Miami Beach in the 1970s. He looked at me.

“This is White Lightning,” said Raven. “She’s doing a story on me.”

“Oh that’s great,” he said. “Boy this place has really changed. I would’ve never dreamed it could turn into what it is today. Back then it was just like a small surfing community, where everyone knew each other. Then, it went from a retirement community to a crime zone overnight.” He was referring to 1980 and the Mariel Boatlift, when 125,000 Cubans came to the shores of the United States between April and October. Amongst the hundreds and thousands of good, hardworking Cuban refugees, Castro had tucked in undesirable or useless members of his society, including thieves, killers, rapists, and the insane. Escoria—scum—he called them, came from Cuban prisons and asylums to Miami. Many of these criminals took refuge in the rundown buildings south of Sixth Street. 

“No way you would’ve lived in South Beach then,” Raven told me. “It was way too dangerous.” We waved goodbye to Jesse and made our way south. Raven narrated the tour along the way. “This is where the old band shell used to be. My grandmother would come here for the old people dances. They’d play music from the old country, like the Waltz. It was a quarter to get in the turnstile, but I’d sneak in and watch sometimes.” Now, electronic music thumped out of the speakers above our heads. If you want to get a drink at Nikki Beach Club, be ready to lay out $20 for a vodka soda.

Our tour continued. “That was the old pier where I’d write songs, and I met Bulldog and Killer. Over there was the dog track.” We pedaled towards the beach and went south, to Government Cut, at the end of the island. “Fisher Island didn’t exist. That was all trees. Even here, by the rocks, this area was lined with Australian Pines. I used to take girls here on dates. It was really romantic.” His bike slowed. “Uh-oh,” he said, “Here’s an old-timer.” He nodded towards a barefoot man wearing khaki cargo pants and standing on a bench. He looked like the actor Martin Short. Raven introduced us. “White Lightning, meet Dave the Wave. Dave used to hang out with Goliath.” Goliath was another beach character, a bodybuilder from Coney Island, who once appeared on the Dean Martin Variety Show with his hand-balancing partner, David. At sunset, Goliath and his girlfriend, Suzanne, would strut down the beach wearing long purple robes. When they got to the rocks at the end, they dropped the robes. Their naked bodies absorbed the final rays of sun. Dave the Wave often joined them.

“Yeah,” said Dave the Wave. “We’d just sit on the rocks and smoke herb and talk to people about Jesus, totally naked. We’d say Jesus died for our sins so we could be free and guilt doesn’t exist.” Dave the Wave had just come from dropping his mom off at work. “She’s 89,” he said, “And still working. We got the blessings of Abraham—health, wealth, and happiness.”

“You got any stories about Skindiver Don?” asked Raven. “I told her about him.”

“Aw man, this will blow your shit, Bob,” said Dave. He launched into a story about the legendary spear gun fisherman who, in one breath, got two beautiful red snapper. “When he gets to the surface, he had a six-pound red snapper in one hand and another beauty on the spear, holding it straight up in the air. In one dive he got both of them. I couldn’t believe it.”

“Remember when he went to jail in his Speedo for robbing lobsters?” said Raven.

“Oh yeah,” said Dave the Wave. They shuffled through a few other characters like Holy Joe, who preached and handed out Bibles every Sunday on South Beach. “Nothing would stop Holy Joe. People would be throwing dead fish at him, or seaweed, but he’d just keep going. I saw some kids toss him in the ocean once. He’d come right out, saying I forgive you and reading from the Gospel.” Dave looked at me. “You know the Gospel?”

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s the Good News,” he said. Dave took over Holy Joe’s mission for a few moments before he told me about the times when enormous bails of marijuana would float ashore in Miami Beach. “I knew this one guy who was trying to become a lifeguard, and he used to drive an ’88 Oldsmobile. A week later, I see him driving a real nice Chevy Conversion van. I knew there had to be a story there.” His friend had found five bails of dry marijuana and sold it for $30,000. He took the money to the Chevy dealership and bought the van in cash.

I had to check my Decobike back into the system, so Raven and I parted ways with Dave the Wave. Riding to the bike stand, a white pickup truck with a surfboard in the back pulled up next to us. “Raven!” said an older man. “You still running?”

“Yes I am,” said Raven. “You still surfing?”

“Trying to,” he said. “You gotta keep active because it’s harder to hit a moving target, you know?”

“I know,” said Raven. 

We finished the day’s tour on the corner of Fifth Street and Washington, where the old, famous Fifth Street Gym once stood. Raven’s Mom had worked across the street at a 24-hour drugstore. One of her customers was a young fighter by the name of Cassius Clay, who most people would come to know as three-time World Heavyweight Champion, Mohammad Ali. One time, a year after Clay had won the Gold Medal at the 1960 Summer Olympic Games in Rome, Cassius Clay brought his own mother into the drug store. He pointed to Mary, Raven’s Mom, at the cash register. “This is the lady that takes all my money,” Clay said to his mom.

Mary shook her head and joked with Cassius. “Well, I wouldn’t take all his money if he didn’t come in here and treat all his friends.” Today, a Wells Fargo Bank stands where the gym once churned out champion after boxing champion.

“I’m sorry we didn’t get to everything today,” said Raven. “But you saw some of the sites, so that’s good.” We rode back to his house to watch a video I checked out from the library. It was about Miami Beach founder Carl Fisher, and Raven is the only person I know with a VCR. On the way, people stared at the two of us. “They’re trying to figure out how an old guy like me is with a pretty young woman like you,” observed Raven. “They probably think I have a lot of money or something,” he said.

The plastic grocery bag covering his ripped bicycle seat crinkled in the wind, and the tire wobbled from side to side as he gripped the rusty handlebars. His chest hair poked out of his black button-down shirt, tucked into his shoelace belt. I smiled. “You’re probably right.”

Golden Ray (age 8) and Imagination (age 10) receive the "Event of the Year" certificate at the Raven Run Banquet for being the youngest to complete the eight mile run and swim. Not only are these boys stellar athletes, they give some pretty amazing life advice.

After writing some 79,000 words for the manuscript and after sifting through two years' worth of video footage, Laura Lee and Mary Beth have covered some ground with Raven in the New Year. Check out our update for the play-by-play (kind of).

“How you doing, Raven?” I asked on the phone earlier today. Sometimes, he answers “Hangin’ in.” Other times, it’s, “I’m all right.” And often, it’s, “I’ve been worse.” But he hasn’t been saying that lately. Today—and yesterday and the day before—he doesn’t remember when he felt worse. His feet are numb. His calf feels like it’s going to explode. His back is killing him. His hamstring is tingling. Yesterday, for the first two miles, he had to bend over every block to relieve the pressure pinching the nerve in his lower back.

“When are you getting your next shot?” I asked. Six months ago, he got temporary relief from an epidural steroid injection, which reduces swelling and inflammation.

“They won’t do it,” said Raven. “They say it’s dangerous because all my ligaments and tendons are too tight from running. It’s like steel.” His arthritis may also prevent the doctor from reaching the narrow space for injection. Plus, long-term treatment by epidural steroid injections isn’t recommended.

In December, Mary Beth and I visited his Pain Medicine/Back Doctor to learn more about his condition. He has been diagnosed with severe spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spinal column around the spinal cord, which compresses nerve roots. Associated problems include arthritis, pinched nerves, and sciatica. He was born with some scoliosis. Most people, she said, would have already had surgery by now. They’ve referred him to a surgeon, but recovery would keep him off the sand. Anyways, without health insurance, Raven probably couldn’t afford this option. “Whether he can continue for another three months, or six months, or a year—it’s really up to his pain tolerance,” she told us. “And he’s in a lot of pain.”

One person who knows excruciating pain is Raven’s long-time girlfriend, Miracle. Just after turning seventeen, she broke her back in a waterskiing accident. In a joint interview, they shared their experiences living with chronic pain. “When I get up, the clock starts running,” said Miracle. “My pain will double every minute or every three minutes—it becomes astronomical very quickly. You think, ‘Can I get the coffee and the water in the coffee pot before I go down?’ It’s the last twenty seconds, and the pain is becoming so unbearable, it’s blinding, the light’s are going out, and you’re on your knees, trying to finish the coffee while you’re going down.”

Raven clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “I’ve watched her cry herself to sleep because she’s in so much pain. I try to comfort her, but . . . ”

“And with Raven,” continued Miracle, “Nobody sees what I see, the pain he’s in for hours and hours when he gets up. It’s a long, drawn-out process, getting out of bed, putting the pants on—it’s just awful to watch someone in so much pain and not be able to fix it for them.” 

“I feel the same with you,” said Raven. “I don’t think I could be with someone that doesn’t understand the pain. It brought us together. Our bond is the pain.” 

I observed that it must be a common conversation topic in their household, and Miracle gently corrected me. “You can exhaust the subject of pain pretty quickly. There ain’t much to say, and language fails pain. That’s one of the torments. Once you run out of metaphors—it’s like steel spikes, cold fire, bla-bla-bla—there’s not much you can say to make someone understand the intensity. Our health industry has this visual analog scale of pain that you’re supposed to give a number between one and ten, but everyone who knows anything about experiencing pain knows what a crap system that is for communicating.”

“Sometimes,” Raven said, “I can’t even stand up to brush my teeth.”

Miracle nodded. “With chronic pain, there’s a set of ‘Can’t Evens.’ You know each movement is costing you so much. ‘I can’t even stand up to brush my teeth’—there’s a point of communication there.”

But, with the run, there is no “can’t even” because Raven hasn’t missed a day in thirty-eight years. Without giving his body time to heal, he reinjures himself every day. Little wounds nag for weeks. I was trying to understand how Miracle managed to support his voluntary, eight-mile routine. “Do you ever feel like saying, ‘What the heck are you doing?’ instead of ‘Go out there and run?’” I asked Miracle.

She didn’t hesitate. “Well, it took time to understand what ‘every day’ really meant, without exception. You think we understand what words mean, but we really don’t give them much thought at all.” Miracle teaches photography at FIU, and, at the beginning of every semester, she writes the following mantra on the board: The beginning of wisdom is the proper naming of things.

Okay. But how was she supportive of Raven getting out on the beach, every day, running through the pain? “The only thing that’s going to make him feel better is to get those endorphins going,” she said. “And he loves it so. It’s his reason to live. Who would want to live in this much pain without something really, really good in your life?” 

Raven will tell you that getting to the beach every day is not necessarily a conscious decision. He has been diagnosed with OCD—obsessive-compulsive-disorder—but he doesn’t want to take medicine. “This is what I do. It’s part of me,” he said. “And I don’t want to take any pills that might make me not be myself. Plus, people depend on me to be out there, and I don't want to let them down.” 

My brother once told me that, in medical school, when learning about all the different diseases, he sometimes felt he was exhibiting symptoms. Medical Students’ Disease, they call it. Around the time I began interviewing Raven, my lower back started killing me. Was Raven giving me spinal stenosis? For four months, I hurt all the time. I would drop something and think, “Do I really need to pick that up now? Why not wait to drop something else and save a painful bend.” My Mom would call every day to check on me. She knew that chronic pain could lead to bad things—depression, impaired memory—and she was worried about her baby. 

“Laura Lee, why don’t you just stop running for a month, let your body recover, and take Ibuprofen?” my brother had recommended. 

I looked at him and said what most athletes I know would say: “Are you crazy? Four weeks?” His expression told me he wanted to ask the same question. Fortunately, the Sports Medicine Orthopedist told me I had a lower back strain, an injury from beach volleyball. After a few months of physical therapy (and more swimming, less running), I’m better. But I got a taste of back trouble. Anyone with chronic pain that gets out of bed in the morning and is reasonably pleasant to those around him deserves a big pat on the back. (So to speak.) 

“That pain steals everything,” Miracle had told me. “You can’t think about anything but the pain for hours and hours. It’s terrible.” 

I was talking with my brother last night, and he put his girlfriend on speakerphone. She’s an osteopathic physician, a runner, and a third year resident in psychiatry. (Thank you, Brother. Very convenient for this project—now, does she have any connections in Nashville?) She elaborated on complications that Raven could face in the future. “He could get stress fractures, his arthritis could impinge the nerves so much that he loses motor function in his legs,” she said. Basically, Raven was running towards a wheelchair. “He does know that he will still be Raven even if he’s not running, right?” 

Um. “I think Raven’s hoping that, ultimately, he gets taken out by a falling lifeguard stand or just won’t wake up one morning,” I said. “He can’t imagine a life without running.” Amongst other ideas, she suggested a few therapy sessions. 

Miracle had mentioned my point before. “Knowing him as I do, would he want to continue a life where he even had reasonably good health but wasn’t running? ‘Oh, change! So many new horizons will open up!’” she said sarcastically, imitating what others have said, then stopped. “But in some ways, it is getting better. Good stuff is happening. There’s renewed hope of people hearing his music.” Raven is a songwriter who dreams of getting his big break. 

It was Canuk, a lawyer and a Raven Run commuter from Canada, who grabbed the microphone at the annual Raven Run banquet two weeks ago. “Raven’s streak should never be taken for granted,” he reminded us. “The sun may rise tomorrow, Raven may not run tomorrow. Say thanks to him every once in a while because it’s him that brings us all here together.” 

I dread the day that Raven can’t gather his flock at the Fifth Street Lifeguard Stand at 4:30pm (DST - 5:30pm). But he is really hurting now. Please send good, healing thoughts his way—or, perhaps let’s extend the good thoughts to everyone we come across. Plato said it best: 

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is facing a hard struggle.”   

“We wanted an intimate ceremony and someone who knew us, not just a stranger with authority,” explained Extra. “We thought Raven would be perfect. He’s someone we know and love and trust.”

“He’s a friend,” added Molder. “We wanted a friend to marry us.”