Happy Demise Day, chapter from …The Twain Shall Meet

April 21st, 2010 - By j guevara

Excerpt from: The Twain Shall Meet. Happy Demise Day, Mark Twain

We woke Mark up with only ten minutes overtime. Connie had him close his eyes while she guided him to the deck. The whole trip; open your eyes, SURPRISE!!! Yeahhhhh! Up with the music.

Mark didn’t know what to think, other than we’d lost our minds.

Puzzled, dazed, he looked nervously around at the balloons and decorations, the bubbling Jacuzzi, candles and all, and then asked us what was going on.

“It’s a party, Mark, a Jacuzzi party …in your honor.”

He stiffened a bit and shot a glance at the sign, but relaxed when he saw it wasn’t there.

“In my honor? May I enquire as to the occasion?”

“Happy Demise Day,” we cheered, holding our Baileys up for a toast.
“Demise Day?”

“Right, it’s the Diamond Jubilee of the day of your demise. Speech, speech…” I turned down the music.

I thought for a minute there that I would go on record as the one who put Mark Twain at a loss for words. Never happen. He stood erect, cleared his throat, and began:

“’tis an honor to be called to such a special occasion, this Diamond Jubilee …more so since I am the one it is honoring. It has seemed eons since that first celebration of my demise, though I did not attend that one, consciously that is, I am sure there was a sizable few who felt they had cause for celebration, and welcomed the opportunity with enthusiasm. After three-quarters of a century, many would think that I might be slowing down. Let me assure them, as far as my demising goes, I have not yet begun.”

‘Here, here …Cheers!’ Then we downed what was left of the Baileys.

After Mark changed into his red hula trunks, we all slipped slowly into the ol’ Jacuzzi… ‘Ahhhhhhh’. Mark gave it a double ‘Ahhhhhhh’. An eight-person Jacuzzi with only three people leaves a lot of room without having to wait your turn to try all the different combinations of jets to body parts.

Mark seemed in his element, finding the shoulder blade-lower back-calves-foot coordinated pulsating jet position, in less time then it takes a moray to nestle into a crevice.

I popped the champagne, and poured. No matter what changes women may make, on down to turning all men into submissive eunuchs, cork-popping will always be the man’s job.

“Ahhh yes, champagne,” Mark said after a sip. “I should have known. Finally, I have found a perfection that has not changed, or has needed to. The one thing the French got right. A toast: To that little monkish monsignor who first uttered, ‘My lord, I am drinking stars’.”

We ate and drank, and drank and ate, while effervescent bubbles from air jets and fizz from champagne turned us into jellyfish. We even got Mark to do one of his stories, the one about the man bending over with the ram lining up to charge him. Connie confirmed that he didn’t miss a word; it was exactly as she’d read numerous times.

After fritters and before oysters, we presented Mark with High Eagle’s dream catcher – a pentagonal frame woven with various homespun threads in several desert sunset colors, and decorated in beads, shells, and hawk feathers – an ingenious Hopi invention that filters out bad dreams but captures the good ones.

A tricky thing to do, important too, ’cause if the dream catcher maker screws up, you could get in an incubus amount of trouble. Never fear, when it comes to dream catcher making, High Eagle knows his business.

We reassured Mark that High Eagle, a fifteenth generation hippie Hopi shaman of the corn clan, protector of the eastern light and guided by the healing flute vibrations of the Kachina Kokopelli, was rated as one of the top dream catcher makers in the country, twice on the cover of Dream Catcher Magazine, chairman of Shamanist International, and proprietor of Shaman r’ us head shop.

We brought out the key lime pie with candles and sang ‘Happy Demise day to youuuu…’ Demise day being the opposite of birthday, Mark made a wish and lit the candles, but wouldn’t tell us what he wished, after which I gave him the greeting card I’d made.

He admired the abstract design, said something about it being a fitting depiction of my mind – a left-handed compliment, to be sure – and read aloud…

To the laziest man I ever knew,
Who after 75 years of rest…
Gets up and yawns,
looks out and says,
“…think I’ll take a vacation from death.”

“My utmost compliments on your verse, particularly the way it so directly fits the person of subject. I have always been lazy, I was born lazy. From the beginning of my sojourn in this world there has been a persistent vacancy in me where industry ought to be. I see no reason why my state of demise should change that.”

“Reid,” Mark said as though he had something he wanted to bring up, but was not sure how to begin. “I do not wish to diminish the significance of this celebration, nor would I wish to impinge on any aspect of its good time, but would I be wrong in pointing out that the year 1910 subtracted from 1986 would leave us with an extra year to this jubilee?”

Damn! I was hoping nobody noticed.

“Well’p, you know Mark,” I said with a slow drawl that he could relate to, “I thought about that, kicked it around my calculator several times. Even tried changing year one to year zero, but that cantankerous calculator would not cooperate to my satisfaction. So I resorted to a technique I’ve recently learned from a dear friend.” I paused to demonstrate another technique I’d also learned from that same dear friend.

“And what, if I may ask, might that be?”

I forced myself to extricate from a most comfortable position, turned to my dear friend, and replied, “Never let truth get in the way of a good story, never let facts get in the way of a good laugh, and never let dates get in the way of a good cause for celebration.”

He gave me a knowing grin, and let it go at that.

All say, “How hard it is that we have to die”– a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.” MT

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