12
Popular Culture Review
SWIFTY: “I like anything that’s moving, that don’t stay put.
It’s not an ordinary thing to see me, it’s kind of an obsession. I
like to kill distance. See a straight track—get to the other end
of it first, before anyone else—That’s wliat I was made for—
running—look at my legs!”
JOE: “Pips, huh?”
SWIFTY: “ That’s from training. If this hadn’t happened I’d
be on my way to the Olympics right now. I could still have a
chance at the New York eliminations if my lawyer can spring
me before the fifteenth. [Heflexes his legs],—^But look at that!
Getting loose already!—If I could get permission to run
around the yard a few times—say, before breakfast or
supper—^why, I could keep in pretty good shape even in here.
Even if I had to stay in here a year—^that way I could keep in
condition.” (52-53)
But, Svsdfty’s past athletic heroics, calisthenics, and self-congratulatory schemes
to turn the prison into a training ground elicit only mockery and warnings from
the inmates who predict that he, like Sailor Jack, will go insane. Swdfty’s dreams
of having an Olympic career and getting out in time to make “the New York
eliminations” deadened in his new prison world. Sadly, he is a caged animal
\\hose obsession to run is thwarted by his environment, the other prisoners, and
the heartless Warden Whalen.
In this early play, as in many of his later ones, Williams represents
sports dreams as foolhardy illusions, life lies, that young men tell themselves to
face the future fortified with hope. Sports become both the vindication and
victory of these young athletes’ lives. But the names attached to this
impressionistic young athlete, Swdfty and “Mr. Olympics,” undercut his runner’s
desire to “kill distance.” His prison nickname, Swifty, is cruelly ironic for a
runner whose track is the size of a prison cell while his surname, “Trout,”
likewise evokes places and things that can run with unstoppable speed—^brooks,
fish—as he cannot. But “Swifty” is a trout out of water, quite literally
imprisoned on an island in the middle of New York City harbor. He ends his
race for life in the convict-packed infernal hole, sardonically labeled
“Klondike,” where the warden keeps the temperature at near boiling point to
torture the prisoners for initiating a hunger strike. Trying to breathe in the
Klondike, Swifty dies with his “inert body” lying over the small air hole. In
pronouncing him dead. Butch resorts to a sports metaphor acknowledging
Swifty’s slaughtered idealism, “I guess he’s beating a cinder track around the
stars now” (141). The cinder track image hauntingly segues with the hot place
where Swifty was “burned up.”