“So, the parrot says to the bartender, ‘Whaddaya mean, three dollars!  I can buy a beer for fifty cents in Hong Kong!’”

Everyone around the table laughs except for Alice.  Her eyebrows go up, and that familiar quizzical expression clouds her face.   I know what’s coming.  I’ve heard it so many times.

“Is that really true?” she says.

The laughter turns to guffaws.  Alice’s innocent gullibility is legendary.

“Come on!” she says when the laughter dies down and everyone wipes the tears from their eyes.  “We’re supposed to be telling TRUE stories!”

“Well, I’ve got one,” I say, and everyone starts rolling their eyes up into their heads.  Even though I never, ever stretch the truth, I’ve developed an undeserved reputation for embellishment.

“When I was in college, I met a fellow named Stan.  Brilliant guy.  A bit unconventional.  You see, virtually all of us came to college right out of high school, but not Stan.  He went into the Air Force or something first and I guess he was some kind of a spy---he would never tell me exactly what he did in the service, but I always got the impression that it was pretty spooky stuff and that if I ticked him off he could quietly kill me and my body would just disappear.”

“Anyway, Stan was quiet.  When he spoke, he was incisive.  He was also broke.  He came to school with fifty bucks in his pocket.”

“How did he pay his tuition?” asks Ralph.

“Horses,” I answer. “He was an expert handicapper.  He’d go to whatever racetrack was open.  He parlayed that $50 into $500, and the $500 into $2,000 and just  kept going.  Occasionally, he’d get into a losing streak, and then he’d have to move into the basement of one of his teacher’s houses and start eating other people’s leftovers, so he was always really skinny, and he couldn’t afford razor blades, so he had a big bushy beard, but other times he’d be really flush and live well.”

“After college, he went to medical school, which he also paid for by going to the track.”

“Hard to believe,” says Sally, taking a drink of her Diet Coke.

“But true,” I say. “And, he went on to practice medicine. Being an unconventional guy, he always preferred small towns to big cities, and the smaller the better, as long as there was a race track nearby.  Everything went along just fine.  He married and had a little girl and did a wonderful job treating his patients.  One day, one of his patients was dying a grisly, painful death and had just hours to live, and was in shrieking, agonizing pain from the cancer that was killing her, so her son begged Stan to do something to alleviate her suffering.”

“Makes sense.  I’d do the same,” says Bob.

“Stan explained that she was already getting a ton of drugs and that if he increased it, she’d have seizures and become comatose,  but at least it would end the pain during her last hours,  and the son agreed that this would be for the best, and said good-bye to his mother. Stan increased the medication and the pain stopped and the mother had a seizure, went into a coma, and eventually died.   A few weeks later, he was treating another patient who was also dying.  This old guy had so many things wrong with him that there was no hope of saving him, but Stan tried anyway, and even pumped one of those hand-operated respirators for three hours, until an older doctor came into the emergency room and told him to stop, that there was no use.  It was a valiant effort.”

“Why are you telling us this?” says Alice

“Because one day afterward, a bunch of cops showed up at Stan’s office and arrested him, put him in handcuffs and dragged him off to jail.  He was charged with two counts of murder by an overzealous prosecutor.  Heck, he wasn’t even guilty of malpractice, let alone murder.  The amazing thing was, the jury thought that the doctors who testified on Stan’s behalf were just trying to bamboozle them by using a bunch of fancy big words, so they convicted him, and he spent a couple of years in prison before the appeals court acquitted him.  The state government gave him a big gob of money to apologize and even passed a law so that this would never happen to another doctor.”

“Unfortunately, it was too late for Stan.  He had lost everything---his license, his wife had left him, he had gone bankrupt paying legal fees, and even the money the state gave him disappeared to the bankruptcy court.  He spent the next six years trying to get his license back, trying to find work, living in his car much of the time, eating other people’s leftovers.”

“Did he die?” asks Alice.

“No.  He’s still alive.  He’s practicing medicine again, finally, and saving lives and rebuilding his life, and looking forward to attending his daughter’s graduation from college.  He moved out of the back seat of his car and into an apartment.”

“Like THAT’S a true story,” says Alice, rolling her eyes.

Everyone laughs.  Except me.  There’s nothing funny about this story.

                                  Jim Whitehouse

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