WORCESTER, Mass. This city in central Massachusetts is midway between Boston and the bucolic Berkshire Mountains, the latter being home to many spas where the residents of the former can get away from the bustle of the city. “I try to get Mike out here once a year,” says Linda Rutazanski about her commercial real estate broker husband. “I’m afraid if I don’t he’s going to die of a heart attack, strangle his boss or run off with his secretary.”
“Ahh–so boring!”
But as with any health remedy, there is a possibility of an overdose, as Mike’s friends Larry Utz and Jim Narberry learned late last night when they got an urgent text message from their friend. “Either of you guys there?” it read. “I’m having a reaction to Linda’s liver detox regimen–can you help?”
“We’re on it,” Narberry texted back, and with a call to Utz the two arranged to meet Rutazanski here for emergency treatment at Moynihan’s, a neighborhood bar in the South Main district.
A call was placed to the owner, Jerry O’Riley, to have adequate medical supplies and personnel on hand when the three men met.
“How bad is it?” O’Riley asked.
“I think he may have been exposed to cucumbers on his eyes,” Utz said, his voice barely under control.
“Oh no–not that!”
“That is serious,” O’Riley said. “I’ll tell Smitty”–the bartender on duty Saturday nights–“to get a pitcher of beer ready.”
As the Rutazanskis’ Subaru pulls up outside, the three men leap into action like a pit crew at a NASCAR race.
“Is he going to be okay?” Linda asks.
“No way of knowing until we get him inside,” Narberry says. “What–exactly–did you subject him to?”
“I signed us both up for a Liver Detox weekend,” the wife says as she watches helplessly while her nearly-lifeless husband is wheeled into the bar. “No alcohol, lots of cauliflower, cabbage, kale . . .”
Utz looks into her husband’s glassy eyes. “You didn’t make him eat broccoli sprouts–did you?”
“Well, yes,” the pallid man’s wife admits after a few seconds’ hesitation. “Was that so . . .” she begins, but Narberry cuts her off.
Quahogs
“Get some quahogs into the toaster oven,” he shouts, “STAT!”
Female liver detox devotees, while well-intentioned, often causing lasting damage to men’s bodies says Dr. Clyde Macy of the Center for Masculine Health, an expert in “retoxification” treatment. “The male body is a very delicate thing,” he notes while examining a computer printout of salt, fat and alcoholic beverage intake among 1,250 married male subjects. “If you suddenly eliminate one of these three essential food groups from a man’s diet, the result isn’t toxic cleansing but toxic shock.”
Mike Rutazanski is wheeled to a booth on a gurney, then propped up to receive an emergency dose of a drug cocktail that has been successfully used to reverse the adverse effects of liver detoxification: a shot of ginger brandy, a bag of Andy Capp Pub Fries, a Narragansett beer, and plate of stuffed quahogs, a tough clam whose taste and texture has been unfavorably compared to an L.L. Bean boot.
The patient begins to show signs of life as the injection reaches his vital organs, and a chastened Linda Rutazanski pats his arm as she looks lovingly into his half-closed eyes.
“Can you ever forgive me, sweetie?” she asks over a lump in her throat.
“Sure,” her husband mutters in a barely audible voice.
“I had no idea good health could be so dangerous.”
This should be a warning for us all.