“Well you’re white, Southern, and you look fast,” concluded Raven, smoothing his salt-and-pepper beard. “George Jones does a great version of that song. It’s an idea, White Lightning.”
That Tuesday, in front of the blue and yellow lifeguard stand, a dozen sweaty runners were chatting and stretching. Raven recognized me immediately. “Glad you came,” he said. “You ready? It’s almost time for roll call.” A minute later, falling in line behind our leader, the flock headed south to Government Cut, at the end of the island.
With the fanfare of a wrestling ring announcer, Raven introduced the runners in attendance. “Right here, on my left, if you have a boss you don’t like, have him hire Chapter 11.” The rest of the group clapped as Chapter 11, a 77-year-old former mechanic wearing two knee braces, gave a nod. Chapter 11’s résumé lists five airlines, two boatyards, and a restaurant as places of employment that went belly-up. “Now, behind me, he’s the man who’s always right—even when he’s wrong, or left, it’s the Strategist!” The runners clapped again for the attorney in his 40s. “From Canada, with the record of one hundred forty-three consecutive runs and swims, she knows the road is long—Poutine!”
At the end of roll call, Raven introduced me. “We got Laura Lee from Georgia here. Everyone say hi.”
Though the Miami summer was just gearing up, the thermometer registered in the upper eighties. By mile two, the gum in my mouth had dissolved. I craved water. The sand shifted underneath me and sucked in every step. It was way harder than Raven made it look. At Government Cut, we U-turned and ran fourteen blocks north, where we U-turned again and repeated the sandy loop.
As we ran together, I asked the questions most every first-time runner asks, and he answered in a matter-of-fact way, like he had fielded them a thousand times before, which he had. He spoke in the crystal-clear voice of a radio announcer. It was like running with a podcast.
Because he had run the exact same path every day since 1975, Raven could give a unique history of Miami Beach—a long spit of sand, hotels, and old shingled bungalows on the margin of a great new international city. He began the streak when the town was known as “God’s Waiting Room,” wall to wall with retirement homes and old people. Then came the Cocaine Cowboys, the Mariel Boatlift, Miami Vice, models, Versace , and world-class conventions like Art Basel and Ultra Music Festival. The man had run through the ruination and rebirth of South Beach—from old white Jews to the Ellis Island of Latin America and the Caribbean—remembering every detail and person who’d crossed his path along the way. I love learning history like this—peering out the window from a unique local’s perspective.
As a traveler, I couldn’t imagine staying in one place for my entire life. “So you’ve really never taken a vacation?” I asked.
“Why would I want to go on vacation?” he said, nodding to the west, to the pink clouds sucking in the last orange drops of sunshine. “I live in paradise. When you don’t wanna leave a place, staying ain’t hard to do.”
Around mile six, Raven turned to me. “I can tell you’re going to make eight miles. You live up to White Lightning. You okay with that?”
* * *
RAVEN CALLED TUESDAYS “Story Hour with White Lightning.” (I learned that the lifeguards had their own nickname for me, Miss Tuesday. “Before your time there was an actress called Tuesday Weld,” Raven explained. “You kind of look like her. I told the lifeguards your dance card was full, but they still like Tuesdays.”) In the two-plus hours it took Raven to run eight miles, we usually got through three or four vignettes. Some days, Raven arrived with character profiles prepared; other times the scenery or passersby inspired the tale. Stories came with meticulous details, down to the day and time. People had rich descriptions. Dialogues were full and lively. I knew not only the make and model and color of the car people drove but what song was playing on the radio when conversations took place. He told me birthdays and unique habits. His memory was exceptional, like Rainman.
The Miami Beach he had grown up in was completely different from the city I know today. “Miami’s probably changed more in the last forty years than any other American city,” said Raven. “And I know we say this kind of stuff all the time, but they just don’t make characters like they used to.”
About his early years, as Robert Kraft, before becoming the Raven, he was reticent, so I suggested we meet for our first interview at a Starbucks in South Beach one Friday night in 2011. Wearing his unbuttoned black Levi’s jacket and chest hair, Raven felt the eyes of every customer in the shop. “I think they’re trying to figure us out,” said Raven, pointing to an Italian family of four staring at our table. Then background music stole his focus. “This was a hit when I was in high school,” he said, singing along to “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.” Almost everyone there looked like someone he knew, and he pointed out the resemblance. When Starbucks closed, we hadn’t gotten far.
“Would you be more comfortable if we talk at your apartment?” I asked.
“I think so, White Lightning,” he said. “But I have to warn you, it’s a little messy.”
The next night, sitting on the ripped cushion of his black leather couch, Raven was articulate and methodical. Next to him, stacked higher than his head, red and blue plastic crates overflowed with records, cassettes, and old newspapers. Shoeboxes stuffed with letters teetered on top. A cut-out picture of Johnny Cash, wearing his trademark black button-down shirt, was taped to the wall above Raven’s first record player, which, he bragged, “worked perfectly up until about twenty years ago.” Below that, he has pinned a Nixon bumper sticker saved from the 1968 campaign. He loves Nixon. Posters of Waylon Jennings and baseball player Ron “The Penguin” Cey stared down at us from their walls. Every lampshade was crooked, and the shelves leaned to one side. The air was stale with a touch of mildew, like a basement filled with running shoes.
He lives alone in a two-bedroom South Beach basement apartment on Ocean Drive between 3rd and 4th Streets, two blocks from the Atlantic. He calls himself a collector, but most people who have been inside use the word “hoarder.” He has every letter that anyone has written to him. Every thing is a memory, and he can’t throw away experiences. “I think that comes from my childhood,” he explains. “We didn’t have much, so everything I got I cherished.” Hoarding is also an antidote to his terrible fear of abandonment. “It’s like if I have my things here,” he says, “I won’t be alone.” His main collections represent his biggest obsessions—music, running, South Beach history, and baseball.
His living room was the setting for our recorded interviews, which usually took place before the run between noon and two o’clock, when he left for the outdoor gym on 9th Street to do pull-ups. Raven preferred to meet after the run, between eight thirty and midnight. For these sessions, we would end eating a Klondike bar or ice cream, then he would walk me to my car and ask me to call him when I arrived home safely. “You gotta be careful, White Lightning,” he told me. “There are a lot of strange characters out there.”
Raven is a collector of things and people. He doesn’t like anyone to be forgotten. In the cast of his life, it is hard to distinguish between an extra and a supporting role, because one meeting with a stranger could change him forever. One interview in particular illustrates this point. Raven was telling me about Jovial Joe, a former Merchant Marine from Boston who looked like a tiny, toothless Kirk Douglas, smiling a gummy smile. As a young man, Jovial Joe used to throw back beers with John F. Kennedy, who was born the same year in 1917. By the time Raven met him, he was retired and passed his days extracting magazines and newspapers from the beach trashcans. “What kind of magazines do you like?” Jovial Joe had asked.
Raven told him, “Anything with sports or music.” The next morning, a collection of periodicals, freshly plucked from the garbage, was hanging in a plastic grocery sack from Raven’s bicycle handlebars. If Jovial Joe found a magazine that he thought would be of extreme interest, he delivered it by hand to the lifeguard stand. Th
e ritual went on for years until one week, Raven didn’t get any deliveries.
When Raven called the Clinton Hotel, Jovial Joe’s winter residence, the receptionist told him that Joe had had a heart attack and died. Raven’s next call was to the funeral home, which hadn’t located any family. Together with his neighbor and temporary German roommate named Angelica, Raven planned Jovial Joe’s funeral service.
“Angelica was bawling her eyes out,” Raven told me. “She didn’t even know Jovial Joe.” At the reception, the funeral director handed Raven the urn. “He had no relatives in the whole world,” explained Raven. “So here I am signing for everything.” Raven decided to sprinkle Joe’s ashes on the beach, where he was most jovial.
I liked this story. Raven had given Joe a family and vice versa. As I smiled, Raven pointed to a dark, wooden box on the shelf directly behind his head. He patted it twice. “He’s right in there,” he said. “That’s Joe.”
I stopped smiling. “Don’t get nervous,” said Raven. “I never had the heart to put him on the beach.” In his possession, Raven has all that remains of a man society never knew. “Every time something nice happens, I say, ‘Jovial Joe’s looking out for me.’ I felt good he was here.”
An appropriate response didn’t come to mind, so, to fill the silence, I asked, “Did the funeral home provide the box?”
“Yeah, they just handed it to me.”
I wrote down “box provided” in my notebook. “Is it locked?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I never opened it.”
I also noted, “Locked,” with an asterisk.
* * *
NEARLY EVERY RUNNER told me that the first time they ran with Raven, they ran out of curiosity. They came to him with admiration or disbelief, and they always came with questions. But when I asked runners why they came back, most everyone’s response touched on a feeling of family, of community, of belonging to something real. They used words like “surprised” and “shocked” when they discovered that Raven, down deep, was someone they liked.
“I was shocked what a genuine good guy Raven was,” wrote Dimples, who lives in New Jersey. “Two years later, I returned for my second run. When Raven arrived, he greeted me with, ‘Hey, Dimples! How are you? You look like you lost some weight from the last time you were here? Your birthday is October ninth, right?’ Shocked and surprised, I responded yes. And off we went for my second run.” Raven makes people feel special when he remembers them. They feel like they are worth remembering.
Canuck told me, “I quickly learned that what I first thought was a bit of a freak of a guy was one of the nicest, if not the nicest, person I have ever met. And that really has nothing to do with running.”
Picadillo wrote to me, “I met the legend but I also got to know a man with a kind heart, a loving humor, and a strong spirit. That’s that guy you want as a running partner.”
In all honesty, it is hard to run with Raven now. The pace is excruciatingly slow, and it’s hard to watch him hurt. “His pain can be hell on him and on people who care about him,” wrote Shoe Guy. “Rather than diminish his impressiveness, this condition only adds to the respect we should have for him. I find that my own aging body doesn’t allow me to get out as much as I might like, but I realize that I am just human, not Raven.”
So runners new and old continue showing up to honor Raven and what he’s given us.
What started as a New Year’s resolution in 1975 has outlasted the presidencies of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, two Bushes, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Raven has covered more than 120,000 miles—that’s a trip around the world, almost five times. “I had no idea what I was getting into,” Raven told me. “I built my whole world, my whole life, around that run.”
At the end of one three-hour interview, Raven inhaled deeply and stood up from the sofa. He winced as his stiff skeleton straightened out and his swollen, arthritic joints readjusted. His face twisted again as he sat back down on the couch. He leaned forward. “The whole thing is about redemption,” he said. “From the beginning, I was just trying to save myself on the run. That’s all. But now people tell me I’ve saved others, so I guess I’ve got something to be proud of.”
I
PERMANENCE
As was said once by our friends Jacques and Macbeth, we are poor players, strutting and fretting our hour on the stage, each with our entrances and exits. We all expect to be at the center of this little play, and each I think is drawn to things, people, events which seem greater than the quotidian experience we cycle through. The Man represents, to a degree, the transcendence, the magnificence that we all expect and aspire to, but simply don’t have the discipline to accomplish or foolishness to really try. Out, out brief candle? The Raven pushes back mightily against that, because he will always be there tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow . . .
—Evictor, 175 runs
It is reassuring to know that in such a transient society there is a connection and consistency to someone or something similar to the rotation of the earth around its axis, night and day, or its orbit around the sun. Do you think Raven rotates around South Beach? Or South Beach around Raven?
—Picadillo, 5 runs
I may be the only thing that hasn’t changed around here in the last forty years.
—Raven, over 15,000 eight-mile runs
ONE
PAINT IT BLACK
Looking around at the fortress of clutter that wreathes his private life, it’s hard to connect this Raven with the spirited raconteur who, every day, assembles a diverse bunch of individuals in the name of community and exercise. His followers would be surprised to discover that, as a boy, their leader was painfully shy. “If I had to describe my childhood in one word, it would be ‘lonely,’ ” says Raven.
To judge if a person has risen or fallen, we must know from where he came.
Raven was born Robert A. Kraft on October 17, 1950, in Richmond, Virginia, to Mary and Walter Kraft. When he was 4, his parents divorced, and his father went to California, where he remarried seven times.
The Silver Meteor train delivered Robert, Mary, and her mother to Miami Beach in 1955, right before he started kindergarten at South Beach Elementary. Mary always told him, “Children should be seen and not heard,” and Robert listened. He had little interaction with kids his age. “We used to call it God’s Waiting Room,” Raven says. “Old people would just be out on the porch, waiting to die. In the summer, you could roll a bowling ball down Ocean Drive and not hit one person.”
He hated school. When he was made to repeat first grade, his teacher wrote on his report card: Robert has trouble socializing. When he’s spoken to, he just nods. His best friends were on baseball cards that he kept in his front pockets. He loved the Dodgers. Players taught him lessons in geography, statistics, math, history, and reading. “I’d memorize everything on the card. I’d look up where they were from. That was my education.”
He still remembers these statistics. Once, on a run with me, Sleazebuster, and a guy called Y2K, Raven recited every single World Series—where it was played, who played, and other fun facts—since 1960. Then Sleazebuster said, “Can I give you my test? I’m trying to think of the roster, and I’m missing some names in the outfield. I got Pee Wee Reese, Junior Gilliam, Gil Hodges, Carl Furillo, Duke Snider—who am I forgetting?”
Asking for the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers roster from Raven was like inquiring what he ate for dinner. “Jackie Robinson moved to third base,” began Raven. “You had the platoon in the outfield—Sandy Amoros or Shotgun Shuba. Catcher was Roy Campanella. Ace pitchers were Johnny Podres, Carl Erskine, and Don Newcombe,” said Raven. “But Junior Gilliam was my favorite.”
Raven’s favorite school days fell on Jewish high holidays, when pretty much all of his classmates and his teacher were at synagogue. “It was great,” he recalls. “We basically had a free day with a sub. We never got homework.” Before 1959, he knew only two Cubans at school, brothers named Ernie and Pompy Santella. So this is why, w
hen I asked Raven how Cuban immigration affected Miami Beach, he answered, “Well it made the Jewish holidays a lot less fun.”
After Castro and the Revolution, Robert’s classes started filling up with exiliados, many of whom did not observe the Jewish holy days. Teachers assigned homework on Rosh Ha-shana, and Robert was upset.
* * *
A SINGLE MOM, Mary got a job working at a candy store, where Robert would sit at the counter after school sipping a Yoo-hoo while she rang people up at the cash register. When he got bored, he wandered outside to a bus stop in front of Dillards Hotel. On a pad of paper, Robert kept track of cars that passed. There was something soothing about making lists. Chevys, Fords, and Plymouths got the most tick marks, while Nash Ambassadors, Hudson Hornets, a Packard, or a Henry J by Kaiser was slightly more exciting. He didn’t care about Mercedes or VW Bugs; only American cars counted. He sketched windows and taillights and became obsessed with fins. “Back then you could tell right away what kind of car it was,” says Raven wistfully. “Now they all look the same.”
When Mary started working the graveyard shift at Al’s Restaurant, a twenty-four-hour luncheonette and auto tag agency, life got harder. His grandmother had moved to her own apartment, and Robert, age 8, started spending his nights alone. In the morning, he lay awake frozen in bed, hugging his pillow like a friend, until he heard his mother’s high heels clicking up the wooden steps to their apartment. “I’d breathe and think, Phew, thank God. I’m going to get fed, I can live another day,” says Raven. “I was terrified of being an orphan.”
He calls himself a latchkey kid and often says, “If there’s one thing my mother taught me, it’s to always lock the door.” (He still compulsively checks locks.) They were poor, too, living in the South Shore neighborhood—the southernmost point of the island—home to the housing projects, the city dump, the bus terminal, Mendelson’s Kosher Meat Market, the MacArthur Milk Factory, and the Royal Palm Ice Company. Today it’s known as South Pointe or SoFi—South of Fifth—with high-rise condos like the Portofino that sell for millions.
Running with Raven Page 2