Running with Raven

by Laura Lee Huttenbach

  Raven followed her next door, and the Eagle was blue in his armchair, certainly dead, at 79. When the funeral home came, the undertakers were drunk. The bumbling employees covered the Eagle in a dark maroon sheet and loaded him on a gurney. As they were carrying the body downstairs, a wheel got stuck on the railing. “So I’m standing there watching,” says Raven, “and they look at me—young and strong—and they say, ‘Hey, man, do you wanna help us carry this guy out? We got him stuck.’ I said, ‘I’d be glad to.’ So as I’m helping them lift it, I turned to my mom and say, ‘I always knew I’d be carrying him out.’ And she said, ‘Oh, stop that. It’s not funny.’ ” When Raven told me this story, I must have made a face because he added, “Don’t worry, White Lightning, she wasn’t that sad, and he was old.”

  After burying her husband, Mary called Walter Kraft. “Robert’s a really good boy and you hardly know him,” she told Walter. “Maybe you should come and visit.”

  “That’s a good idea,” he said. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes. The biggest mistake was when I left you. I should’ve stayed with the family. I really messed up.”

  Raven wouldn’t find out about this conversation until two months later, when Walter had a stroke that left him paralyzed. Calling from his hospital room, Walter told Raven, “I made a big mistake, and I love you.”

  “When you start feeling better, you can come down and stay with me,” said Raven. “I got an apartment, and the weather’s nice.”

  Raven recalls, “I didn’t say if. I said, when you get better. And I could hear him whispering, ‘That’d be nice.’ I’m sure he didn’t really mean it, but it was kind of a relief to me.”

  Two weeks later, Walter Kraft moved to hospice, where he died the following night at 67 years old. The date was April 29, 1987—exactly one hundred days after the Eagle’s death. A lot of Raven’s friends assumed the loss of a father would break the streak. A lifeguard called Slipper offered to buy him a plane ticket to California, but he said no.

  “I didn’t want to miss a day,” says Raven. “People said that’s the wrong thing to do, that I should show respect. But I hadn’t spoken to him in ten years.”

  Raven heard that only six people, including the minister, went to Walter’s funeral. One of his father’s only friends called Raven and said, “Your father was always like a fugitive, running from something.”

  Maybe a piece of his dad was in the run. When Raven talked to me about his father’s death, he sat with his hands in his lap, looking between the floor and the window, like a little boy trying not to cry. “I felt sad,” said Raven. “Not crying sad—the sadness was just I wish I got to know him: Why did he leave me? Why did he get married eight times? What was he looking for?”

  Then he perked up and tilted his head. “Maybe it’s good, White Lightning,” he concluded. “Maybe if I had known him, I wouldn’t have liked him and anyway, it could’ve been a lot worse. If I had grown up with a normal father, I probably wouldn’t be who I am today.”

  * * *

  NO MATTER WHAT LIFE THREW, Raven knew eight miles would set him straight. Gradually new people joined. His tenth runner was the “Testosterone Kid,” an 18-year-old boxer training at the 5th Street Gym. Broke and new to town, the Testosterone Kid was sleeping in Muhammad Ali’s locker at the gym, sweeping the floors to earn his keep. His first run was in July 1987.

  The Kid’s coach was a former boxing champion, Beau Jack, who said, “You can run with the Raven, but don’t leave your fight out on the beach.” In other words, eight miles was too far for roadwork. But the Testosterone Kid didn’t listen to Beau Jack.

  Raven was actually impressed that a boxing legend like Beau Jack even knew his name. When I didn’t recognize Beau Jack’s name, Raven introduced me to his story. Beau Jack’s fighting experience began in the 1920s, in barbaric “battles royal”—exhibitions financed by wealthy white men who organized fights between six or ten blindfolded black men. The last to remain standing won the purse, which usually was around $2. Beau Jack’s first battle royal was staged at the Augusta National Golf Club, where he eventually became a caddie and met Bobby Jones, who helped launch his boxing career. After becoming Lightweight World Champion, Beau Jack retired, ran out of money, and began shining shoes at the Fontainebleau Hotel. There, according to the Raven, Frank Sinatra recognized him and brought him to the 5th Street Gym, where he began training young boxers like Testosterone Kid. “He was nearly blind from taking so many punches to the retina, but people would still come to him from all over to get his autograph and talk about old times.”

  One day in 1987 around the third mile running with Raven, the Testosterone Kid’s nose started gushing blood. The Kid casually explained that, in the morning, he had been sparring with former welterweight champion Aaron Pryor. Raven ran the Kid to the Beach Patrol headquarters, where Lieutenant Amwhale administered first aid. Amwhale was a four-hundred-pound former Amway salesman who, during Christmas, dressed up as Santa Claus and distributed tangerines to the Beach’s homeless population.

  Raven jogged in place as the Amwhale tilted the Kid’s head back and plugged his nose. “I’ll be ready in a minute,” said the Kid.

  “No, you won’t,” said Amwhale. “You could hemorrhage and die out there. Your run is done today.” Raven acquiesced and invited the Kid over to watch television later. “I knew it was going to be a lonely night in that hot, moldy gym,” says Raven. So Testosterone Kid came for TV and “honey water,” Raven’s homemade energy drink. Later, the Kid was back and set the first Raven Run record—twelve runs in a row.

  Runner number thirteen was Barnacle, who Raven describes like this: “The first thing he does is go straight to the refrigerator. He grabs a Mountain Dew. Then he opens the cabinet and grabs a bag of peanuts. If you have two bags, he’ll open the one that’s not open and say, ‘I want to make sure they are fresh.’ Then he is just there, putting his feet up on the table, using your phone, changing the television station, wanting to be entertained. ‘What about the lifeguard in 1979? Tell me a story.’ Hour and hours, he’d be hanging out until Miracle shows up and says, ‘Barnacle, unless you want to watch, it’s time to go.’ ”

  After Barnacle, in January 1988, came the Reverend, a Fulbright scholar and a professor from Baltimore. Reverend thought highly of his own intelligence, and the maddest Raven saw him get was after he lost a game of Trivial Pursuit to him. “He was so competitive it killed him,” says Raven. “He was a professor, getting beat by a tenth-grade dropout. After every question, he’d yell, ‘How did you know that? How did you know that?’ And I’d say, ‘Eh, I heard it on the radio.’ ” After Trivial Pursuit, Reverend took out Scrabble. “There I had no chance,” says Raven, who still admires Reverend’s intelligence.

  In November 1988, a firefighter named Steve attempted the eight at an extremely quick pace. “I was going as fast as I could to keep up with him,” says Raven. “Then he said, ‘I’m going to pick it up.’ ” After running four miles, Steve quit. By the end of Raven’s eight miles, his feet had swelled into bubbles, making it look like he had elephantiasis. The run with Steve gave him terrible stress fractures. For two months, the pain prevented sleep.

  Today Raven’s feet are mangled, swollen stubs that he refuses to have photographed. But Steve (who would complete eight miles several years later and earn the nickname Last Laugh) taught him a lesson. “I said I just want to have fun with running,” says Raven. “After all, you can’t beat every runner who edges past you, and you may pass the same guy later, when he’s walking. It’s a run, not a race.”

  NINE

  BETTER THAN ALCOHOL

  Dizzy Issie is the number two Raven Runner behind Taxman, with over 1,800 runs on the books. He was born in Cruces, Cuba, on August 27, 1958, four months before Fidel Castro and his 26 de Julio rebel armies marched into Havana. Issie’s father had been an official in Fulgencio Batista’s government. Issie came to Miami from Cuba aboard the Freedom Flights in 1967 but went straight to New York, where he lived until
1999.

  In 2005, Issie was recently divorced at 46 when he passed Raven and Firecracker running on the beach. “Come on,” hollered Firecracker. “Join us.” Raven smiled, too.

  “Tomorrow,” promised Issie.

  The next day Dizzy was waiting for Raven at the 5th Street lifeguard stand. (Regarding his nickname, Dizzy says, “Let’s just say I’m a product of the seventies. Back then, we were all a little dizzy.”) His first run was right around when he accepted a new job as assistant principal at a public school just north of Miami in Opa-locka. “That place was hell,” Dizzy told me on the phone in 2014. “I saw things there no one should ever have to see.”

  It takes him more than two hands to count the number of loaded firearms he found on campus. When a 12-year-old girl collapsed at recess, he held her in his arms as she took her last breath. Another time, Dizzy was the last person at school to see a sixth grader who was crying in his office, begging him not to send her to JAC, the Juvenile Assessment Center, for getting in a fight. He agreed and sent the girl home. That weekend, as she left a party, someone drove by and shot her in the head.

  Often, at school dismissal, the carpool lines became battlegrounds for gang wars or drug trafficking. A Haitian gang called the West Side fought Latinos and African American students. “With the violence—I’m talking twenty or thirty kids going at it, and you have to break it up—your adrenaline rises, and you can’t go straight home,” explained Dizzy.

  From June to December in 2005, Dizzy ran 136 times with Raven, earning him “Rookie of the Year.” He also shed twenty pounds, which he didn’t notice until five cafeteria ladies surrounded him for an intervention at lunch. “They were these older, motherly, round Cuban women,” said Dizzy. “They were worried that, because I was single, I wasn’t eating. They almost took me home with them to feed me. I was like, It’s okay, I’m running with Raven.”

  The Raven Run became his buffer between work and home. “There you have the clarity of sunshine, the beauty of the beach,” observed Dizzy. “You meet runners from other states and countries. You hear Raven’s stories. Then you go swimming. That completely relaxes my muscles. You can leave all your negativity out there. The Raven Run was better than alcohol, drugs, or psychotherapy.”

  Today Dizzy has a file with Raven Run memorabilia. After Rookie of the Year, Dizzy continued collecting awards—Athlete of the Year (2006), Runner of the Year (2007), Treasure Hunter (2009), Hall of Fame (2010), and Swimmer of the Year (2011). On the run, he met his best friend, Floater, who he calls his “brother from another mother.” But the greatest prize of all that came from the Raven Run was a woman called Gypsy.

  In August 2005, Gypsy, a professor at FIU from Spain, had come to run with her friends, Raven Run regulars Spinner and Cholita. After six miles with Gypsy, Dizzy was smitten. (Their love story is totally Miami: At three in the morning, while they were spending their first night together, Hurricane Wilma came. Dizzy’s place lost power, so Gypsy said, “Stay with me.” School was canceled for the next two weeks, so one night turned into a fourteen-day honeymoon. “We got to know each other so well, it would have taken months of dating otherwise,” said Dizzy. “Daniela [our daughter] wasn’t conceived then, but her name really should be Wilma.”) Reflecting on their relationship, Dizzy realizes, “We made our most important decisions on the Raven Run.” Over eight miles, the couple decided to move in together, to get married, and to have Daniela. “I think it was the time and the structure that the run provided,” said Dizzy. “For one hour and forty-five minutes, we could run together and talk about what we wanted.”

  In 2012, Dizzy got Event of the Year for running 50.5 miles in one day. From the finish line at the Miami Marathon, Dizzy ran home, where Gypsy had a sandwich waiting, ran to the beach, ran around the beach, met Raven at the 5th Street lifeguard stand, and ran eight more. When he finished at the lifeguard stand, he had been running for twelve hours.

  Dizzy’s ultra obsession started in 2008, and Dizzy says things like, “I’ve lost count of the number, but I’ve only done three ‘hundreds,’ ” meaning hundred-mile races. “For ultras, you need to know two terms,” he explained to me. “DNF is ‘Did Not Finish’ and DFL is ‘Dead Fucking Last,’ ” he added. “It’s way better to be DFL than DNF.”

  These days, because Raven is in so much pain and is running so slow, Dizzy usually takes off and runs a faster pace, which tends to piss Raven off. “Dizzy thinks because he’s a middle school principal, he’s normal. Then he goes out and runs a hundred miles. Yeah, okay—you’re normal,” Raven says sarcastically. “He’s really obsessed with the ultras.” He paused. “I know, White Lightning,” he continued without prompting. “Like I should talk.”

  * * *

  IN 1988, AFTER THE EAGLE AND RAVEN’S FATHER DIED, Raven was seeking more stability in his life, so he added a swim streak on top of the running streak. From March 1988 to February 1992, Raven swam three-tenths of a mile after every run, without missing one day. The extra structure gave him security to make other transitions in his life. That year—1988—he also got a new job, a new place, and a new girlfriend.

  Raven and the Astrologer had been dating on and off for thirteen years, and she had become more like an older sister than a lover. Mutually, they decided to continue their friendship but cut out the romance.

  Immediately Raven developed a crush on a silver-haired lady named Donna who worked out at the Police Athletic League Gym. She had pumped-up arms, deep-set green eyes, and thin lips. Raven loved the way her hips swaggered delicately from side to side when she walked—a technique she’d learned as a former runway model in New York. She had also been a farmer in West Virginia, a yogi in California, a stay-at-home mother of two in England, and a secretary at the University of Texas in Austin. She had come to South Beach to take care of her 85-year-old mother who lived in a nursing home.

  Donna was 55, Raven was 37. Her voice was the biggest turn-on. “She had a real slow, sexy voice,” says Raven. “I mean, wow. But she had a terrible temper. When she got mad, she sounded like Clint Eastwood.”

  Their first date was a screening of Action Jackson. Raven fell in love.

  After only a couple months, walking home from dinner one night, they passed a real estate office. Rents were on their way up in South Beach, and his father had left him a small inheritance. He’d been thinking of buying his own place. “What do you think of us starting a home together?” he asked Donna.

  “This relationship is nice now,” said Donna. “But when I’m an old lady, you’re not going to want to be with me.” Raven almost started crying. “You should do it, though,” continued Donna. “You should buy an apartment.”

  So he did. He bought the basement apartment where he lives now on Ocean Drive, in cash, from a couple who gave up on South Beach; they’d been renting the place to Marielitos who didn’t pay rent, and the neighbors were drag queens and prostitutes. The low-rise was three blocks from the start of his running route. Raven thought it was perfect. “The best decision I ever made,” he says.

  Two blocks south of Raven’s apartment, a businessman named Jack Penrod was opening a multimillion-dollar eponymous restaurant and club, Penrod’s. Additionally, he was installing permanent stands on the beach to offer food, drinks, parasailing, jet-skiing, and boat rentals. Penrod wanted to make Miami Beach the spring break capital of the world. Most people in the neighborhood celebrated Penrod’s opening as a sign of revitalization; the chic new establishment was just what South Shore needed.

  But Raven is not most people.

  As residents were kissing up to Penrod to get on his lists, Raven wanted to shut him down. A new property owner, Raven didn’t like all the clubbing rabble-rousers throwing beer bottles on his lawn. Furthermore, he remembered Penrod’s as the old band shell, where his grandmother and other senior citizens had paid a dime to dance on Friday nights. In a blistering op-ed to the Miami New Times (“Kraft Stands on Penrod,” published February 22, 1989), Raven voiced his opposition. He accused
Penrod of encouraging underage drinking, “so our young people can drive home from his club, heightening the possibility of killing and injuring themselves or other people,” wrote Raven. Additionally, “our once-clean beach is now filthy . . . if it weren’t for various can collectors, it would be a lot worse.” He continued listing a litany of offenses—noise pollution, parking problems, public urination, fistfights, vandalism, vehicles on the beach. “While free enterprise is the American way,” wrote Raven in his final line, “there is a limit when one is making great sums of money at others’ expense, health, and well-being. This is called greed. This is what Jack Penrod stands for.”

  The rift between Raven and Penrod came to a head one afternoon on the beach, when Raven was running. “Hey,” shouted Penrod. “Aren’t you the buzzard?”

  Raven looked at him, briefly considered taking the high road, and then responded, “Aren’t you the Pencilrod?” (In 1998, Penrod changed the name of his club to Nikki Beach as a tribute to his daughter, Nicole, who was killed in a car accident by a drunk driver.)

  After reading the op-ed, Raven’s neighbor, Reverend Pearson, called to ask a favor. Penrod was trying to expand his property and build a parking lot on Ocean Drive, which would take the place of a park and children’s playground. The city had already approved the park’s demolition, but community leaders were up in arms. Pearson had a soft, soothing voice. “Nobody knows the beach like you,” she cooed on the phone. “Do you have a poem or song that you can perform during our meeting?”

  On Easter Sunday, 1989, Raven gathered with environmental activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas (whom we have to thank for the Everglades National Park), Miami Beach preservationist Barbara Capitman, and Miami Beach mayor, Alex Daoud, who is still a good friend.

  Reverend Pearson introduced Raven. “Our first speaker knows the beach better than any of us,” she said, “because he’s been running eight miles on it every day for the last fourteen years.” Raven, in his shirtless running uniform, climbed onto the stage and took the podium with a shaky hand underneath his black glove. He was “scared as hell” but focused his attention on his mom, sitting proudly in a lawn chair in the front row.