Pinellas Park, Florida. Freeze-Dried Memories

By PAT JORDAN

Jeff Weber, beaming, holds up a calico cat in the palm of his hand. "It's almost done," he says. He hefts the cat a few times to show how light it is. The cat lies curled in a circle in Weber's hand, the way cats do when lounging. Its unblinking yellow eyes are fixed for eternity on its tail. Weber gestures with the cat toward a circular cat bed, hollowed out in the center like a large doughnut. "The owner wanted it the way he always remembered it," Weber says. He lowers the cat to its bed. "See!" he says, still beaming. "A perfect fit! It's something else, isn't it? Have I got an idea or what?"

Jeff Weber, 35, an ex-furniture salesman, ex-convenience store clerk, ex- satellite dish salesman, has spent his life chasing his dream: "An oddball business that will make me money, so I won't ever have to work for anyone," he says. The pursuit of that dream has often put Weber in conflict with his wife Mary, a barber at an old-fashioned men's barbershop.

"I haven't been fond of some of Jeff's ideas," she says. "But I kinda like this one. My customers don't, though. They think it's yucky. They think they'll have to keep their pets in the freezer."

"Only when they first die," Jeff says. "They keep 'em in the fridge until they ship 'em to me. Then I freeze-dry 'em before they thaw out." Jeff gazes proudly at his model 48104 freeze-dry chamber that he purchased for $30,000 from a company in Minnesota. The cylindrical chamber, 4 ft. by 9 ft., is the sole possession of Jeff's Preservation Specialties, Inc., the company he operates out of a bare room in an industrial mall in Pinellas Park, Fla. The hulking chamber, with a glass window at one end, resembles those gadgets in science fiction movies that hold spacemen in a state of suspended animation while they hurtle toward distant galaxies light-years from earth. The chamber doesn't work that way, however. What it does is draw the moisture from dead organisms until they are mummified in a perfectly preserved state.

Jeff will freeze-dry just about anything. But most of his business is in freeze-drying the deceased pets of distraught owners. Cats. Dogs. Birds. Snakes. Lizards. Hamsters. Even alligators. Presently, he has about 30 such pets in his chamber, undergoing a freeze-dry process that will take from three to six months, depending on the size of the pet. Jeff charges about $400 to freeze-dry small pets and about $1,800 for large pets like the two Doberman pinschers sitting perfectly still in the softly humming chamber. The dogs are bathed in a mysterious yellow light and surrounded by a Noah's ark menagerie of other perfectly serene-looking pets, all of which would probably be at one another's throats if still alive. A chipmunk, its tiny paws held out as if to receive a nut, is standing in front of a cat, which in turn is crouched beside one of the Dobermans. Farther back in the chamber the second Doberman is surrounded by some small dogs and dozens of cats, cockatiels, cockatoos, snakes and lizards. In their freeze-dried state, all the animals look eerily alive in their natural poses, except that they are stock-still and their wide eyes are unblinking.

"When the pets are done," Jeff says, "they'll outlast the life of their owner. They retain natural characteristics no taxidermist could ever duplicate. That's why owners bring them to me. I can mold their pets into positions the owners remember from life. One owner wanted his cat lying so he could put it on his VCR, where the cat always lay. He moves the cat around the house throughout the day, just like when it was alive. Another puts out water for her freeze-dried dog. One guy had his Husky freeze-dried in a sitting position so he could put him beside the easy chair and pet his head while he watched television, just like he used to."

Jeff is an ordinary-looking man with blow-dried hair, a trim mustache, and thick-lensed eyeglasses that make his eyes look constantly startled, like those of the pets he freeze-dries. Most of Jeff's customers are serious about their pets. They have trouble accepting the death of their loved ones -- Jeff calls it "denying the grieving process" -- so they bring them to him.

"I started my business in Florida," he says, "because I thought I'd make a lot of money from old people who were attached to their pets. But they're mostly into cremation and burial. They're afraid of new ideas. Most of my customers are younger, in their 20s, with no kids, from the Midwest."

Old people have an adverse reaction to Jeff's bizarre service for a number of other reasons too. They prefer to bury or cremate their pets, he thinks, because they don't want to be reminded that their own deaths are looming closer. Jeff's natural customers seem to be yuppie types who not only prefer to deny death, but would also like to deny all that is unpleasant in life. Most of those people have heard about Jeff's service through stories done on him in newspapers from as far away as Britain, and on television and radio shows.

"Still, business hasn't been that good," Jeff says. "I've only done about 200 freeze-dryings in two years. If business doesn't pick up, I might have to sell my machine to a funeral parlor. I've been negotiating with one that's thinking of using my machines in the human sector. It has this idea for 'perpetual viewing chapels.' "

Perpetual viewing chapels would contain row after row of glass-fronted coffins, either filed away in drawers like precious jewelry, waiting only to pulled out and viewed; or propped up on end side by side, behind one vast glass partition, like a gigantic human butterfly collection. Each corpse would be freeze-dried exactly as the deceased would like to be remembered by its living loved ones.

( Freeze-drying human bodies, however, would be an expensive proposition -- about $15,000 to $18,000 apiece. Since there is no law in Florida against freeze-drying humans, however, all it would take for such a perpetual viewing chapel to take root, so to speak, would be a mortuary license, a corpse, someone living willing to shell out $15,000 to $18,000, and, of course, one of the machines.

Strangely enough, those people who have called Jeff to inquire about freeze- drying a human being have been asking not about a beloved, deceased relative but about themselves. They are people who are less interested in avoiding conventional burial and cremation than they are in striving for immortality.

Jeff says he would never be freeze-dried himself, or buried conventionally, when he dies. He prefers cremation. "I couldn't bear to be buried in that little bitty box in the ground," he says. Until such a distant time, however, he will continue to pursue his dream: a money-making gimmick no one has ever thought of before. He's already latched on to one in the far reaches of his imagination.

"Drug-sniffing dogs for the private sector," he says, beaming. "Parents could rent 'em to sniff out their kids' rooms to see if they're hiding drugs. Big businesses could use them to sniff out the desks of employees they suspect are using drugs. That would avoid all those constitutional questions about urine testing and lie detector tests." Jeff's eyes open wide and unblinking behind his thick-lensed glasses. "Whaddaya think?"