Chapter 7

"Pay attention," said Phil.

He was lecturing Vic Singleton, George Panther, Maddy and Flair on endurance swimming in Vic's suite in a Long Beach hotel. The ex-bootlegger was having a hard time learning about this strange world, but with the announcement of the swim contestant to the papers and radio, Phil insisted that Vic as the sponsor ought to know a little about swimming and endurance.

Phil pointed out that many land mammals besides man could swim, and in the case of fire or catastrophe swim well indeed with no prior experience in the water. Sea mammals, of course, did the best. Whales could swim for thousands of miles at good speeds. Seals could swim easily at five miles an hour and reach up to twenty miles an hour if they were chasing their dinners. Porpoises had been known to keep up with modern steamships, while a mammoth sea turtle had been clocked at twenty-two miles per hour. Penguins could easily do ten miles an hour and go up to thirty in short bursts. Some had been found more than a thousand miles from land, quite happy in the desert of the ocean.

Polar bears were great swimmers, well-insulated for their cold water environment and had been clocked at six miles per hour, while a trained human swimmer would be lucky to do three for short bursts.

Tigers and elephants had been found swimming; the only way they could reach certain isolated islands in the South Pacific or near Africa. Monkeys had been taught to swim for the inducement of food thrown upon the water.

Small mammals were likewise capable of good swimming records. Rats had been kept swimming steadily for fourteen hours, as well as woodchucks, chipmunks, skunks and possums in stints of six to eight hours.

"I hope no skunks enter my race," laughed Vic.

"You'll get a few human ones," commented George.

Phil moved on to human swimmers. Slow in speed they could still last for many hours in the water. Most challenging was the English Channel swim, first conquered by Matthew Webb in August of 1875 in the time of twenty-one hours and forty five minutes. It was thirty-six years before anyone was able to successfully swim the channel again. Several other men accomplished it, but Gertrude Ederle's recent swim was not only the first female success, but she set a new time record of fourteen hours and forty minutes, from France to the English coast and won her ticker tape parade, fame and money. The English Channel distance was exactly twenty-two miles.

"But we have a twenty-two mile swim from Avalon to the California coast," said PhiL "And no one has officially done the Catalina straits at all. So the publicity, after the Ederle swim, is going to be enormous. You, Vic, are going to have to know a little something about professional swimming. The newspapers treat such swims as a kind of weird circus anyway, so a little reality coming from you will help the cause."

He then went into some of the factors that made for good endurance swimming. Protection from the cold was important. That's why he thought Maddy had a good chance to win this show, because women's bodies were better insulated than men's, with a fatty layer just under the skin. However, the Catalina water, even in January, should not be a great problem. Buoyancy was a factor. Surprisingly the best endurance swimmers hung low in the water. Surface swimming offered waves and currents to slow the pace. Those who could swim deeper in the water did better, so a neutral or even negative buoyancy was best. The power in swimming came from the arms and muscles in the upper torso, so the arms should not be too long; a compact, symmetrical torso and arms in proportion was best.

Phil didn't believe that legs counted at all in long-distance swimming.

"The motion's wasted in up and down movement," he said. "It's like pumping a bicycle where most of the effort is wasted in up and down motion, maybe ninety percent. I teach my swimmers to use the legs as little as possible or not at all."

The rest was a matter of the individual's physique. Great oxygen intake, rapid sugar conversion for energy, a slow heart rate from good conditioning, plus an iron will to win - these things made up the pattern of a champion endurance swimmer. To this you could add training for the specific event and that was the whole story.

"What about kinds of strokes?" asked George.

"I teach crawl," said Phil. "However, I long ago learned not to force an ideal stroke on a swimmer. There is no ideal stroke, because bodies are different. I once saw a swimmer with a frenzied eighty or ninety strokes a minute, hanging on top of the water and felt sure he was going to drown. He beat all my well- trained students instead."

"I remember that," said Maddy as they all laughed.

"What kind of gear will Maddy need?" asked Vic.

"Not much," said Phil. "Endurance swimming is cheap. Nose clips if she wants, although most don't use 'em. Some ear protection against later infection, perhaps cotton with a little oil to combat water penetration. A cap to cover the ears, certainly. It cuts down heat loss up to twenty percent. Lots of swims are lost by the swimmer getting too cold; it's as simple as that. Goggles for the eyes, yes, in salt water."

"And grease?" asked George, fantasizing the bodies of the girl swimmers glistening sexually.

"Probably," said Phil, "but you have the problem of a thin grease like Vaseline wearing off too quickly and a thick one like lanolin being hard to apply. You only need a millimeter or so. If nothing else it gives a psychological lift. Also it saves the friction points of the body from burns. Hours in the water and your armpits, groin, shoulders and even chin begin to ache pretty badly. But no grease on the face or arms. Grease on the face makes it impossible to keep the eyegoggles sealed, and on the arms gives you a loss of the arm's biting power in the water. Greased arms allow slippage and loss of power.

"Now," he finished, "you already have learned more than ninety percent of your newspaper readers will know about swimmers and swimming for records. Anything the reporters ask beyond that you can turn over to me as technical consultant."

"What if they claim the swim is rigged because Maddy works for Vic, the promoter?" asked George.

"A swim is a swim is a swim," said Phil. "We'll have impartial judges. The first one in at Catalina and out at Point Vicente is the best swimmer and it doesn't matter who she's related to, or works for. It's a fair swim."

"I'm glad you said that," said Flair. "I'm going to swim, too. I'm going to hire my own trainer. And I'm going to win, too."

Having dropped her bombshell, she gave Maddy and the others a dirty look and left the room while the group stared after her in astonishment.

To Phil's sorrow the New Jersey group was broken up now. Flair's sudden decision to enter the swim and compete against Maddy was only the latest blow.

"How can she do in this race?" George asked Phil.

"Flair's a helluva swimmer," said Phil. "With the right training and some luck she could give us a bad time."

"How do you feel about Maddy now that she's... she's..."

Phil felt his face set sternly. "I dreamed up this whole thing for Maddy to begin with," he said. "It makes no difference to me that she's decided to marry Vic. I owe her a good winning swim and I'll give her my best."

Secretly he felt quite hurt. He realized that he'd counted on the old intimacy but it was gone. He had Maddy during the daytime but her nights belonged to Vic. Once the training started he began to scold her for her night time activities.

"You're losing sleep, f-f-fooling around with your fiance too much," he complained. "How can I bring you to top form when you dissipate my work each night?"

She merely gave him a cool, infuriating smile. "Look at my daily records. At this point in my training I'm way ahead of where I was when you and I worked together before. Love makes the difference."

He could've killed her.

Flair disassociated herself from the group. She found her own trainer and paid him from her own funds. When Phil complained to Vic he got practically no response.

"She has my guts," said Vic. "It's good for her to step out on her own."

"She could give us bad publicity."

"Maybe the public will go for my fiance and my daughter competing for the prize I give," said Vic proudly.

They did. The newspaper and radio stations also began to build interest in the endurance swim because it was open to all with no entrance fee, and the prizes were huge. Phil had had a fierce struggle with Vic on that.

"Twenty-five thousand dollars to the winner!" roared Vic. "That's five times too much!"

"Twenty-five, fifteen and ten," insisted Phil. "A channel swim is already thought to be a nutty, useless affair by most people. But nobody thinks twenty-five thousand dollars is silly, not even with Wall Street booming."

In the end he won his point, and it was a wise decision. The newspapers and the public would ignore some ego maniac making the swim to get his name in the papers. Or a small affair sponsored by some athletic club for a minor prize was only of limited local interest. But these days a whole family could live extremely well on twenty-five hundred dollars a year. A comfortable living for ten whole years was important money. Invested properly it could last the winner almost indefinitely.

So the entries poured in, as interest mounted, and the publicity for the Vic Singleton Invitational Swim grew across the nation and stimulated interest in foreign countries. Very soon a snowball effect carried them along to the delight of Vic.

"We've got a legless newspaper vendor from San Francisco, and a seventy-year-old entry from Nebraska," he told Phil. "One of the papers is going to start a daily column on us in December, and I'm almost tired of seeing my name in print. Me, Vic Singleton, a nobody from Jersey City, New Jersey. I got to hand it to you, Phillip."

But Phil could only answer with a dour "Thanks." For him it was afternoons in the training boat following Maddy's daily swims, directing her conditioning on land, watching her diet and worrying, as he spent lonely evenings alone in his hotel room. He was even deprived of the company of Texas Bunny who was lost somewhere inland a few miles in the dusty streets of Hollywood, trying to advance her singing career. Nights she had a job warbling in a small night club, so she didn't come around at all anymore.

By Thanksgiving he grew philosophical about it.

"Love and sex had crumbed up my life every time out," he told George. "At least this time there's no chance to spoil things that way."

"Considering that it almost got you killed with Vic and now you're his fair-haired boy, I'd say it didn't hurt you too much," George responded dryly. As Vic's main publicity man he found life quite interesting, especially when certain female, nubile entrants sought his after-hours company with the mistaken idea that they'd have a better chance if they could get close to an "insider."

The holidays came and went with Phil busy if not happy. He hardly noticed as the swim date of the middle of January rushed towards him.

On the night before the race all the contestants were brought by boat from the mainland to the Avalon settlement in Catalina. Hotels were filled; most camped in tents along the beach. There was a general carnival air to the whole area, with the rising excitement about tomorrow's race. Although more than three hundred people had entered during the long publicity build-up, the actual contestants were down to about a hundred and fifty on the last night before the event. The coldness of the water accounted for most of the dropouts, because in January the temperature ran between fifty-five to sixty-five degrees.

Vic Singleton's yacht had been brought around the canal from Atlantic City a couple of months earlier. On this last night he gave a candlelight dinner party for a select few in the big dining room. His guests included a sports editor, the head of the biggest radio station in the area, a motion picture mogul and officials from the Long Beach and Los Angeles city councils. The guests enjoyed champagne and steak as well as the presence of Flair, Maddy and Texas Bunny, whom Vic invited especially so she could meet the movie mogul.

It was to be a truce for the night but of course Maddy and Flair who had to swim tomorrow could not stay late.

After the dinner was over, Maddy, eyes shining, took Phil by the hand.

"Come to the stateroom," she begged. "I want you to see my wedding gown. It's the most gorgeous creation I ever saw."

Phil had already seen her wedding gown. Flair had dragged him there when he first arrived. It was indeed an expensive affair of white satin and veils, displayed on a dresser's dummy in the big bedroom. To Phil it looked like enough cloth and train to cover three brides. Both the gown and the room left a sour taste in his mouth. It was here that he'd first pronged Flair but it was also here that he'd seen Vic screw the love of his life and change everything.

"Very fine," he murmured to Flair.

"What are you going to do about it!" cried Flair. "Right after the race that slut is going to marry my father!"

What Phil did about it was haul off and slap Flair a resounding smack on the face. His nerves were screwed up to the breaking point, but Maddy was no slut. He stalked back to the dinner, leaving Flair shocked and in silence, glaring after him in rage.

Now with the dinner over, Maddy wanted him to see the dress for a second time and he had to go because he couldn't admit he'd seen it already. On the night before a big race you humored your star athlete. Flair sat with her father, head resting dreamily on his shoulder, monopolizing all his attention. Texas Bunny was involved with the movie mogul, George was making eyes at the nubile wife of one of the city officials, while the husband loaded on the champagne. Phil and Maddy slipped away.