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Corky: Part II an often requested tale, still with no embellishments

April 25, 2026

This is the second part of the story of the mysterious death of a dog my pal The Iguana’s wife had and the incredible, yet all true aftermath.

This is the anniversary of when I first reported this 20 years ago. Due to many requests, I decided it was time for a retell.

I left off last week with the dear departed dog being placed into the family freezer to await the arrival of a burial gong from Japan before it could be put to rest.

This all took place during the first few weeks that we moved into our neighboring houses along a beautiful, yet remote, stretch of beach in Mexico.

It took The Iguana’s wife about a month to realize that she did not want to live out in the country away from town. So, she took her remaining five dogs and moved to Ixtapa, leaving The Iguana with the dog in the freezer. The Iguana, by the way, is legendary Seal Beach lifeguard chief and former big-time surfer Tim Dorsey.

One of the drawbacks of living far away from town is that every so often we have a power outage. And on one such day, The Iguana just happened to go to town to do some shopping and other errands.

The power was off for about eight hours.

I saw him on the dirt road leading to our houses as he was coming back home and told him that the lights had been off all day.

At first he just nodded, but then he gasped, “Oh no, the dog!”

He ran into the house and started to open the freezer to check how bad this might be. But he had barely opened the door when the smell hit him, and he immediately slammed it shut.

This was really bad.

After thinking it over for a few hours on my patio, and with the aid of a few samples of some fine local tequila, he came to the logical, or not, conclusion that the only rational thing to do was to bubble wrap and duct tape the entire refrigerator and leave it that way until the arrival of the aforementioned burial gong from Japan.

This sounded reasonable to me, and I totally was not going to help him clean out the freezer anyway.

The saga of the frozen dog sort of made its way through the local community and, with the aid of one of my columns, all the way back to Orange County. People were always asking me, “Hey, does that dude down in Mexico still have the dead dog in his freezer?” As time went on, it became local lore.

Some months later, the Iguana had to take a trip to California to take care of some business and visit friends and family. For some reason, unknown to him or me, a whole bunch of guys who normally just camp out stayed in his house while he was gone. I thought that he said they could, but I became concerned when I noticed a whole army over there.

So, one night I went over to make sure everything was OK. There was a party going on, which seemed like fun. So I stayed, and a plan to dispose of the dead dog was hatched.

These guys figured that the dog should be buried. But nobody was gonna unbubblewrap the fridge and get it out.

So, the plan was laid to dig a big hole the next morning and bury the whole fridge.

This sounded great on paper. But the truth is that this was in May, when it hadn’t rained in seven months, and the ground was like iron. There was no way anybody was gonna sink a shovel into that.

So that plan was abandoned. But at the party the next night — it became a nightly thing, I guess — a better and more workable idea came up. And I have to admit to being a part of this one.

We decided to get a bunch of boards down on the beach in the morning and float the fridge out past the shore break in front of The Iguana’s house and drop it into the deeper water right offshore. This would eventually build up sand and sea life around it and become a reef. “Dead Dog Reef!”

A new surf spot. Marvelous idea.

Unfortunately, when we got the fridge unplugged and over on its side there was no way that six of us could pick the thing up. So we put it back up and plugged it back in and that was that.

For another six months.

Until a cat died…

Orange County Register

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Corky: Part II an often requested tale, still with no embellishments

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