Man, I had completely forgotten about this one.
Hang on, it gets fun
When we were 13-14 or so, me, my step bro, and a few friends used to ride the last bus at night down to Newport Harbor in Cali, fish all night, and take the first morning bus back to analslime...anaheim, whatever.
We fished behind Davies Locker, pretty much a landmark out there.
I caught a roughly 5 foot blue shark and we all decided it would be cool to cut the jaws out of it....try and imagine, this was about when the movie Jaws was a big thing.
So we, not having anything sharp enough on us, decided to take it home with us and do the dirty at home.
No prob, stuff it in a burlap sack and take it home on the bus.
The bus driver knew us all so it was a non issue.
Once at home it was no problem to get the jaws out and boil them clean.....made a nice display.
OK, now what do we do with the carcass ?
I do not recall which of us came up with the brilliant idea of stuffing it into the curbside gutter at the end of the block (something about it leads to the ocean printed on it might have swayed us towards this).
Well, about a week or so later there came this funky odor in the neighborhood.
And it got worse......I mean gagging a cockroach bad.
The cops came, firetrucks were in attendance, hazmat crews....you name it.
It probably took them 6-8 hours of searching to find the gutter was the issue.
None of us ever said a word (although trying to keep straight faces was very difficult) and none of us ever got blamed.
Some cop came to the conclusion that it must have swam into there and died when it got stuck and the gutter dried up.
My step bro, being a honest to god card carrying math club dweeb, jumped to the front and told the cops that he had heard of such thing happening and was currently doing a school report on the subject.
The cop offered to give him full copies of his findings and fully supported the lying little asshat which could not have worked out better.
To this day, only us (at the time) young fishermen know the truth of the story.
Yes, the Orange County Register (local newspaper) did a story on it.