Tales of Ringo Key - Southwinds, November 2001

- Local News for Southern Sailors - November 2001 Next Story

Tales of the Ringo Key Marina — Doc Halliday
By Allan Horn

Everyone called him "Doc" but he wasn't a doctor, dentist, vet, professor, or even a Ph.D. His only known affiliation with the medical profession was the fact that he was the worst hypochondriac in a three-county area.

Perhaps he acquired the nickname because he tended to prescribe martinis for "whatever." If you stopped by Doc's boat to say hi, or even walked past too slowly, Doc would have a plastic martini glass in your hand in the wink of an eye, with the pronouncement: "Here, this is good for what ails ya!"

Now Doc's idea of a good martini would certainly scare most germs, and probably a few viruses. His recipe was as follows: "Drop a large green olive with pimento into chilled martini glass. Then stare at the label on a bottle of vermouth as you pour the glass full of gin."

Doc was about 60 years old, but he didn't look a day over 59 and a half. He was around five feet six inches tall and very slender, with windblown reddish-gray hair, even on the days that there was no wind. He had a white mustache that appeared to carry remnants of his morning coffee in its coloration. His skin was very tan and resembled a man's favorite leather easy chair with its thousands of small wrinkles at every stretch point.

Doc had never been married but showed no signs of being "light in the boat shoes." He did appreciate the female anatomy and spent a great deal of time admiring it...from a safe distance.

His one great love of a lifetime, a dazzling beauty named Ethel, had left him at the altar and run off with another man. Doc had never completely recovered from the experience and had developed a deep-seated hatred and mistrust of women in general from that time forward. He had replaced her with a spayed female Basset hound, which he, of course, named Ethel.

In the time I knew Doc, he had only gone on one date that I was aware of. He had gone to a nearby restaurant and bar to celebrate his birthday, become about five sheets to the wind, and met a "glamorous" widow. Mrs. Widow arranged to meet him the following Monday evening for dinner at the same establishment.

The next day, Doc was ecstatic about this beautiful woman he had just met and was anxious for Monday to come around so he could see her again. During the interim, Doc had spent hours describing this woman to everyone who would listen around the marina, and with each telling she became even more spectacular.

By the time Monday had come around, Doc was as nervous as a schoolboy and acting like he was going for a command performance in front of the Queen of England.

Doc had purchased a new Botany 500 suit and a haircut for the occasion, ordered flowers and a limo, and planned an itinerary for the evening that would have impressed Ivana Trump. The coup de gras would be "night caps in the lounge at the Hyatt Hotel on the beach." He had reserved a suite for the night, "just in case."

The morning after the big event, Doc was conspicuously absent from his cockpit, and when I did see him, he seemed to be trying to get to his car without being noticed.

I stepped onto the dock in his path of escape and said, "Well, Doc, how did it go last night?"

Doc looked around frantically for a means of escape, and finally looked resigned to answering. "I guess I was more drunk on my birthday than I remembered." He would never say another word on the subject again.

What Doc DID talk about was usually his health. I suspected that Doc liked to keep an entourage around him that would keep him advised on how he looked...healthy or not. He was always asking people if he looked a little pale or if they knew anything about a myriad of maladies, from prostate disease to infected adenoids.

Every three to six months he would go in for a prostate check. About every four months, he went in for chest X-rays and a blood count. Twice a year, he did the treadmill and EKG routine. In between all of these tests, he would undergo practically every other torture that could be devised by modern medicine. Doc KNEW he was a sick man, regardless of what his doctors told him.

Finally one day, in a fit of frustration from hearing months of descriptions of Doc's symptoms, Sandbar Sam told Doc that he knew what was wrong with him.

"Doc, I know what all of these symptoms mean, but I also understand why your doctors won't tell you, so I don't think I should either."

Doc was thunderstruck. He turned as white as a new mainsail and dropped his martini glass on the cockpit sole.

"You KNOW?" Doc whispered. "Sam, you HAVE to tell me..."

"I can't, Doc, it's not my place...I'm not your physician of record. Besides, there's only one known cure, and that doesn't always work, so it's generally something they don't like to even tell the patient."

Sam turned to me and winked with the eye that Doc couldn't see. To the surprise of everyone in the cockpit, Doc fell to his knees and crawled to Sam's feet, bowing like a Muslim to Mecca...

"Sam, you HAVE to tell me...PLEASE! I'll do anything to know. You don't know how I've suffered."

Well, of course, we all knew how Doc had "suffered." He told us constantly! We had heard about his swollen toes, his mobile aches and pains, his flatulence, his skin tone, his lack of stamina, his dilating pupils, and countless other invisible and imagined ailments. None of us could see any of the signs he showed us, and naturally, none of us believed they were there.

Sam put on his straightest face, and said, "Doc, if I were to tell you, your doctors would probably just deny it. I could be brought up on charges as practicing medicine without a current and valid license, and it probably wouldn't help you anyway."

"I PROMISE. I won't tell 'em...PLEASE SAM, I have to know!"

Sam winked at me again, and said, "Okay, but brace yourself. This is serious business."

Doc peeled his forehead from the cockpit sole and looked into Sam's eyes and said, "I'm ready."

Sam cleared his throat, took a sip of his martini, and began his dissertation. "This is a problem that was first noticed in Great Britain by a Doctor Fresnic, back in the '50s. When I was at Cambridge, I heard him speak during a seminar on rare and rarely curable maladies."

Doc was listening intently, absorbing every word in deep concentration.

Sam went on. "Fresnic had first noticed these symptoms in military personnel returning from the Falkland Islands, where there were few unattached women, and not much to do except to drink excessive quantities of gin and play cards. By the way, Doc, exactly when did you first notice these symptoms?"

Doc closed his eyes and thought very hard. "I don't know...maybe about three years ago. Is that important?"

Sam replied, "Hmmm...three years. That's not good. You could be starting to show external signs of development any time now. Yes, it's extremely important if there is any chance of effecting a cure."

Doc's eyes widened. "You mean there's still a chance? I mean...is it fatal? How long do I have to live?"

Sam said, "Oh, it's not fatal so long as you can deal with the ramifications of the symptoms... you know, stand the embarrassment."

Doc visibly relaxed, but then tensed again when Sam got to the embarrassment part. "What do you mean, embarrassment?"

Sam put a pained expression on his countenance, and spoke softly. "It's called Fresnic's Lactation Syndrome. It's a hormonal thing...an imbalance of hormones created by a chemical in gin that depletes your testosterone levels and causes various problems... the same problems you've been having...but the worst part hasn't happened yet. It's almost inevitable, since you have abstained from female companionship all these many years."

By this point, Doc's eyes were bulging so far out of his head, they looked like they might fall out at any time.

"What's going to happen to me?" Doc squeaked.

Sam calmly said, "It's not really all that bad. Maybe you can take them off with liposuction or something, maybe plastic surgery...hardly leaves a scar these days."

Doc jumped to his feet and started hopping around the cockpit waving his arms like some demented ostrich in a mating dance. "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!"

"Breasts, Doc. You are going to grow large, gorgeous, perky, pointed-up breasts. The kind most women would kill for."

Doc stopped his gyrations and looked Sam straight in the eyes. "You mean like BOOBS? I'm going to grow BOOBS? That's impossible...isn't it? You're just putting me on, aren't you? Oh God. BOOBS!"

Doc collapsed into his captain's chair and looked down at his chest as if he had never noticed it before!

I was about to burst out laughing, but held it in to see how far Sam intended to go with this sadistic torture. I knew that this was Sam's payback for months of listening to Doc's hypochondriac laments and frankly, I had heard enough complaints from Doc myself.

Sam went on. "You see, Doc, all of these soldiers went to the Falklands on two and three year hitches. Most of them had little chance for an active sex life, and they complicated their hormonal imbalances from that by overdosing on gin. By the time they came back to England from the Falklands, they all made Kim Basinger look like a boy. I'm surprised it hasn't happened to you sooner, but then you are older, and your production of testosterone is much lower than a guy in his early 20s."

Sam made all of this so believable that I might have believed it myself had it not been for his surreptitious winks and grins.

"So you said that there is a chance that I can beat this thing...how?" Doc pleaded. Sam shook his head and replied, "SLIGHT chance I said, only a slight chance. First, you have to switch from gin to some other beverage...maybe vodka martinis like James Bond, you know...shaken not stirred."

"I could do that. That's...well, not easy, but I could do that. What else?"

Sam shook his head some more, and said, "This is one that I'm sure you could never agree to. You just don't like women that well."

Doc said, "What are you talking about?"

"Well, you would have to develop a relatively normal sex life to get your hormones back in order. Find yourself a nice lady that you can date, build a relationship with, and get those glands pumped up and in working order again."

Doc initially started shaking his head no but then pulled his T-shirt out and peeked down through the collar like he was expecting to see his chest begin to bulge. "I could...maybe...well, I could TRY to do that."

"Think about it, Doc. You might be able to beat this thing before the final stage sets in. I think you might just have the personal drive to beat it," proclaimed Sam.

"FINAL STAGE? You didn't mention a final stage. What's that? Oh...you don't mean..."

"Yup," said Sam. "It just withers up and drops off."

Doc broke out in a visible sweat, grabbed the gin bottle and started to pour a drink. Suddenly, he looked at the gin bottle as if it were a writhing cobra in his hand and threw it overboard.

Less than a week later, I was walking up to the marina showers when Doc stuck his head out of his cabin and said, "Hey, Al, come aboard a minute. There's someone I want you to meet."

I stepped aboard Doc's boat and ducked into the cabin to find myself facing a rather striking woman in her early 50s. She appeared to be wearing a bathrobe and little else.

Doc proceeded to introduce Helen, his internist's nurse, and say that Helen had always been very nice to him and she was being nicer than ever lately since he explained his health problem to her!

"Since you WHAT?" I exclaimed.

"Oh, it's okay," said Helen. "I've seen advanced cases of Fresnic's before, and I really know how to deal with it in a case like Johnnie's. In fact, I've wanted to give Johnnie personal therapy for a long time now."

Johnny? I guess I never knew Doc's real name before now.

"We're leaving for the Bahamas at dawn, so if I don't get a chance to say thanks to Sam, would you thank him for me? I feel WONDERFUL!" Doc beamed.

"When will you be back?" I asked.

Doc and Nurse Helen hugged each other, looked in each other's eyes lovingly, and simultaneously answered, "When the cure is complete!" '