I hope you have been following this story the past two episodes, because if you haven’t, you are gonna think this is really crazy.
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Which it is.
Anyway, we left off last time with the dog of my neighbor Tim Dorsey, The Iguana, down in Mexico, having died and being kept in a freezer until it could be buried according to his wife’s wishes. Dorsey is a well-known early Seal Beach lifeguard chief and former big-time surfer.
After close to a year of being bubble-wrapped and duct-taped up, the dog and freezer remained in his kitchen.
I should mention that during this time, the power had gone out many times, once for eight days. But The Iguana’s wife refused to let him bury the doggie until she received a burial gong from Japan.
She had long since moved back into town, and I guess it didn’t matter to her that he had gone without a refrigerator all this time.
Then one day her cat died. She called him up and insisted that he come to town and get the dead cat and put it in the freezer, too.
Being the nice guy that he is, and against my advice, The Iguana went to town and picked up the limp kitten and brought it back out to the house, where he reluctantly unbubble-wrapped the fridge.
He cleaned the whole thing out and put the kitty in a plastic bag and stuck it in the freezer with the dead dog.
And, also against my advice, he started using the refrigerator. If you were over there, the one thing you never asked for was ice in your drink. It was a bad thing, a really bad thing.
Then one night, we were sitting on his deck trying out a few samples of the local tequila. For some reason, I decided that I wanted to check out the frozen dog and frozen cat in the freezer.
This is something that I will always look back upon as one of my real lapses in judgment.
So, I ask The Iguana if he cared if I opened the freezer to see the frozen pets. He said, “Heck no, go right ahead.”
So, I did.
As I was standing there in total shock, I had to ask The Iguana, “Hey, dude, are you really sure that this cat was dead before you stuck it in here?”
He said, ” Yeah, ” and asked why I was asking. I told him he’d better come take a look.
“Oh, my god!” bellowed the freaked-out Iguana at what he saw. “Whatever ya do, don’t tell my wife.” This was followed by a lot of pacing and ranting, and you could see his heart beating rapidly through his T-shirt.
This story should end here. But noooooooo. It doesn’t.
More and more months go by, and the frozen, now really dead animals stayed in the freezer. Finally, the burial gong arrives from Japan. I have no idea what took it so long.
Anyway, it arrived at the home of The Iguana’s wife, and plans were made to finally bury the pets in her backyard in town.
On the day of the planned burial, The Iguana got the plastic bags with the frozen pets out of his freezer and put each one in its own ice chest for the drive into Ixtapa.
At the time, there was a power struggle going on in Mexico between the good guys and the bad guys. Nobody is really clear on who is who in all of this. But somebody had been killing many of the chiefs of police around the country.
And a couple of days before the planned burial was to take place, the chief of police in the town of Lazaro Cardenas, about 45 minutes north of us, had been shot along with some of his expert bodyguards. So there were police and military checkpoints all over the place looking for guns and/or drugs.
Now, here is The Iguana driving happily to town to finally bury the frozen pets. The two ice chests are in the back of his pickup truck. His three dogs, two cats, turtle and goat are riding in the cab with him, as this is a “family” kinda ceremony, and he has the radio playin’, and all is good in the world. Until he gets pulled over at one of the military checkpoints.
Five guys armed with automatic weapons ask him to step out of his truck. They immediately spotted the two ice chests in the back. A gringo with ice chests usually means one of two things: Cold water and/or cold beer. And maybe fresh fish (a lot of fishing goes on there). Either way, they are gonna get some and are perking up.
Upon opening the plastic bags, they are amazed to find a frozen cat with terror on its face and the autopsied frozen dog. They gasp and step back in horror. And then they all aim their automatic weapons at The Iguana in disgust.
The head guy, who it turns out speaks a little bit of English, looks at The Iguana with anger and repulsion and says, “You crazy, twisted gringo, what is the matter with you?” They think he is eating the house pets.
It turns out, there was no law that said you couldn’t transport frozen pets in Mexico.
So, after an hour or so of holding him at gunpoint in the blazing hot sun, they reluctantly had to let him go and the animals did finally get buried.
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