Robert was excited when his mom started dating an older man with a car, but the happiness wore off quickly when “the Eagle” returned to his ways of drinking, gambling, and womanizing. After learning the good-for-nothing was going to become his stepfather, Robert, age 14, put on a black shirt. “I looked in the mirror and said, ‘That’s me. Other people can wear colors, but I’m only wearing black.’ ”
Mary married the Eagle on October 17, 1965—Robert’s 15th birthday. There was no honeymoon. Instead, the Eagle moved in to their one-bedroom at 745 Euclid, the Krafts’ fifth home in a decade. (Mary and Robert had taken it as an omen to leave their previous apartment when, as they were listening to the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” their roof caved in during a hurricane.)
On Thanksgiving, the Eagle took Mary out to dinner, and Robert ate a Lum’s hotdog by himself. On Christmas, the Eagle invited his racetrack buddies over to play poker. Robert, as usual, was listening to FUN 790 AM on his transistor radio in the corner. The radio wasn’t loud when the Eagle grunted, “Hey, turn that down.” Robert didn’t move.
Boozed up on Kentucky bourbon, the Eagle’s friends prodded him. “Are you going to let your stepson treat you like that?” The Eagle shoved his chair away from the table and went after Robert with fists swinging. One punch to the chin took Robert by surprise before he fought back. “I was bigger than him by then,” notes Raven. The Eagle’s friends realized the same thing as they pounced on Robert, dragging him to the bedroom. They closed the door and held it shut.
Mary was crying. “Please let him out,” she said. “He’s going to break down the door.”
But Robert sat down to catch his breath. With his back against the wall, he lowered his head between his knees and silently made a promise: If the Eagle ever lays another hand on me or my mom again, I’ll kill him.
* * *
HE WAS LOSING HIS FAMILY, and the world didn’t care. His classmates were running down hallways singing gibberish like “Wooly Bully.” That didn’t speak to Robert. How could it speak to anyone? The Beatles were no better. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You”—it was bubblegum music, songs that stuck in your head but had no substance. “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah?” says Raven dismissively. “I mean, come on. Girls are going crazy over this stupid stuff?” The boys were acting just as foolish, cutting bangs and doing fake British accents to sound like Paul McCartney and John Lennon. The whole thing pissed Raven off. It was another reminder that he was different, an outcast who didn’t like the Beatles, because How could someone not like the Beatles?
One song changed his life, and it lasted six minutes. When Bob Dylan asked, “How does it feel,” Robert knew. “Like a Rolling Stone” told the story about an outcast who lost love because the girl didn’t think he was good enough, then her tables turned. “I always thought I wasn’t good enough for anyone,” says Raven. “That song spoke to me. Loud.” When I asked Raven what exactly it was about the song that spoke to him, he looked at me like I was covered in purple spots. “I mean, have you heard it?” he asked.
Someone—not just someone but Bob Dylan—felt the same way he did. And a nation was buying Dylan’s single and singing his story, connecting the down and out. There were a lot more outcasts in the world than Robert knew in junior high. Just by asking how does it feel, the song, he hoped, encouraged empathy. “Dylan wasn’t just I loved her and lost her,” says Raven. “It was about hard living. It had a message. It made you think.”
“Like a Rolling Stone” reassured him in a misery-loves-company way, but it also gave Robert a purpose: If Dylan’s message was resonating with people, maybe his own experience was worth something. If he could get paid for it, even better, but the important thing was to pick up the pen. “I didn’t think my life was going to get any better,” says Raven. “But if I could say something people related to and give them hope that they’re not alone in this tough world, I wanted to try. It’s always good to know you’re not alone.”
In the last week of ninth grade, a popular kid—a yearbook editor—stopped Robert in the hallway. “You want to know what you got for our class superlative?” He had gotten a superlative? “Yup,” the boy continued, “we voted, and you got Most Likely to Commit a Murder.” Robert looked down and walked away.
“I’ve had that in my head my whole life,” says Raven.
In the junior high auditorium at the end-of-the-year ceremony, Robert was waiting for the principal to call his name for Perfect Attendance, the only award he ever strived for. But Robert Kraft wasn’t called, because, according to school records, he’d missed more than half a day. (Regarding that day, Raven says he had gone to the hospital after a rusty fishhook on the pier gave him blood poisoning. But he swears he was back at school before one.) “I was so upset. I wanted that award, that recognition, so bad,” says Raven. “Encouragement is important to a kid, and nobody encouraged me.”
That fall, he started tenth grade at Beach High, a bigger school than Ida M. Fisher Junior High, and a twenty-block walk from his grandmother’s apartment, where he moved to escape the Eagle. As classmates were dropped off in Cadillacs, Robert arrived in a black Ban-Lon shirt soaked in sweat. Upperclassmen bullied him. “They’d shout, ‘You’re Paint It Black,’ from the Rolling Stones,” says Raven.
Shortly after his 16th birthday in gym class, Robert was playing football on a wet field. The quarterback, who was a senior, told him to go long and deliberately sent him to a puddle. As Robert reached up to catch the pass, his feet slipped, and he landed in the mud. Everyone folded over in laughter, and Robert looked to the teacher for help, but he did nothing. “I thought, That ain’t right,” says Raven.
The next day he dropped out.
TWO
ONLY DADDY THAT’LL WALK THE LINE
In May 2013, Raven and I went for a bike ride in South Beach. We left from his apartment on Ocean Drive and 3rd Street, with me on a Deco Bike—a Miami Beach rental—and Raven on his black Schwinn Beach Cruiser. As usual, his chest hair poured out of his unbuttoned black Levi’s jacket, which covered his shoelace belt. I was wearing jean cutoffs, a tank top, and flip-flops, with my blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. “I want to show you exactly where things happened,” he had told me during our interviews.
Before we took a pedal from his driveway, Raven announced, “You know those two killers from In Cold Blood? They stayed there.” He pointed across the street, to 335 Ocean Drive, which are low-rise condos. “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 the killers were there.” Raven was 9 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 later sentenced to death by hanging for murdering a family of four in Kansas.
“And that building next to it, 329 Ocean,” Raven continued, “that’s where George P. Lenart took the famous cowboy actor Lash LaRue to Alcoholics Anonymous.” George P. Lenart was an old Beach character who looked like Ernest Hemingway with a bushy white beard and a notebook in hand. George swore he wrote better than Hemingway, but nobody had discovered him. Raven actually kept some of George’s writings, which went 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. “You ready, White Lightning? Let’s get started.”
As Lamborghinis and Teslas cruised by and young couples in bikinis passed on the sidewalk, heads turned to look at 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.” 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 and pushed the bike across the street.
For Raven, every avenue is a stroll down memory lane. Every block triggers a scene. Familiar faces are everywhere. The past surrounds him. As we were making our way south, a man stopped us 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 writing my bio.”
“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.”
“Oh, in the eighties, it was bad,” said Raven. “No way you would’ve lived here, White Lightning. It was too dangerous.”
We continued, with Raven narrating the tour along the way. “This is where the old band shell used to be. My grandmother came here for the old people dances. They’d play music from the old country, like the waltz.” Now, electronic music thumped out of the speakers above our heads. If you want to get a drink at Nikki Beach Club, a vodka soda costs about twenty bucks.
Raven pointed toward the water. “That was the old pier where I’d write songs and I met Bulldog and Killer. Over there was the dog track.” We pedaled toward Government Cut. “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 toward a barefoot man wearing khaki cargo pants, an orange shirt, and reflector glasses, standing on a bench. Short with a big goofy grin, the man 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 Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight 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 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 eighty-nine,” he said, “and still working. We got the blessings of Abraham—health, wealth, and happiness.”
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, reading from the Gospel saying I forgive you.” 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 bales 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 bales of marijuana and sold it for $30,000. He took the money to the Chevy dealership and bought the van with cash.
I had to check my Deco Bike 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.
When we traded in my bike, Raven looked to the west, where three luxurious high-rises creep out of Biscayne Bay. “Michael Martin, Tommy Waters, and the Bruiser lived there,” he said, as he pointed to the Apogee Building, which now stands on the plot of land that used to contain the modest homes of three friends from elementary school. “There used to be seven drab three-story buildings,” continued Raven. “That one there, on the right, the Yacht Club—that used to be the city dump.” In his lifetime, the dump had turned into the Yacht Club.
We finished the day’s tour on the corner of 5th Street and Washington, where the old, famous 5th Street Gym once stood. Today it’s a Walgreens. “No more sawdust and punching bags,” said Raven. “I tell you, White Lightning, I may be the only thing that hasn’t changed around here.”
* * *
TO HIS RUNNERS, Raven now represents a sense of permanence and stability he lacked in his youth. Evictor was 46 years old in 2009 when he first ran with Raven on Memorial Day weekend “having never voluntarily run more than a few hundred meters at once since junior high cross-country,” he clarified in an email, “when I first realized that running is simply boring pain, the very worst type.” His neighbor, a runner called Firecracker, invited him to run with “her eccentric friend” Raven, which she called “a cathartic experience.” Evictor agreed to try it out and run a few miles, but he had to be in West Palm Beach for an event that night, so he said he couldn’t make all eight. “I figured I’d say hi, jog a couple three miles with them, and head out in plenty of time.”
Evictor’s description continued: “Hot sunny day, huge crowds all seemingly shouting out this guy’s (Raven’s) name, giving him high fives, et cetera. Met Dizzy, Hollywood Flasher, Creve Coeur, Tortuga, Poutine, Chapter 11, Gringo, Hurricane, and a few others I’m forgetting now.” He started talking to Raven about St. Louis, his hometown, and before he knew it they were at mile three. “I really didn’t want to stop [and] admit failure; however, I also realized it was very hot, and I was very tired and in some pain.” He paced his run according to the sun, “slowing down in the delicious shade of the buildings below Fifth. Also, Dizzy and Tortuga were circling to the back of the pack, where I was, offering encouragement (shame?), and I doggedly continued.” Along the way, Hurricane, a runner in his 80s, was asking him for legal advice on eviction-related issues “despite the fact that I’ve been involved in no more than four or five evictions in my entire legal career,” clarified Evictor. By the end of the run, he had eight miles and a new nickname under his belt as the 869th runner on the list.
“I could hardly walk, more stumbled drunkenly to my car, numbed,” he recalled. “By the time I got home, any thought to going out was overcome by my body’s need for an immediate sitz bath, where I collapsed for about three hours. I limped pitifully for the rest of the week, and the next Sunday, figured I’d try it again. It became a habit after that, as my body adjusted to the weekly pounding.”
Today he has 175 runs with Raven and believes that the “folks I’ve met have almost uniformly been some of the most interesting and kind people I’ve met since moving to Miami.” On why Raven has such a powerful draw for people, Evictor wrote this: “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 ba
ck mightily against that, because he will always be there tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow . . .”
* * *
“BETWEEN SEVENTEEN AND TWENTY-FOUR—those seven years—I lived a lifetime,” Raven told me, sitting in his living room. “I traveled. That’s why I don’t like traveling anymore. I did all that.”
In 1968, Robert decided to surprise his dad with a visit in California. As Raven is generally skeptical of happy endings, I wondered how he rationalized going across the country to see his deadbeat dad who clearly wanted little to do with him. “Maybe it was naïve,” Raven said, shifting his eyes to his sneakers, “but I kept thinking that, you know, he’s my father, and at some point he’ll start acting like it.”
The visit was a disaster. Walter berated him for dropping out of school. He refused to go to a Dodgers game. He bragged about giving money to the City of Hope charity. Then he fell asleep in his armchair. Forty-five years later, Raven wouldn’t look me in the eye when he told this story. “I guess that’s good he gave to charity, but start at home first, right?” said Raven. “In high school I didn’t have enough money for bus fare.” Raven got quiet. “My father didn’t tell people I existed,” he said. “He didn’t even offer me a glass of water.”
Raven would spend his life trying to gather a family that he didn’t have—losing his father and always being afraid that his mother wasn’t going to come home.
From Los Angeles, Robert went to Las Vegas to visit Richard Phillips, a friend from high school. For three months, Robert bussed tables at the Golden Nugget casino. On long walks in the desert, he searched for who he was and what he wanted to be. He wanted a job traveling and chasing stories. His mother encouraged him to become a professional card dealer—a croupier—but he was leaning toward moving to Montana or Texas and living on a ranch. “You know, live a simple life,” Raven explained to me. “Bale hay. Take care of horses. Fix fences.”
Running with Raven Page 3
