I'm often asked whether "dick lit" is a mocking response to "chick lit"? And while that may be true as a pure unadulterated marketing ploy to bring men back into the reading fiction fold, more than likely it's the other way around, since basically "dick lit" has been around long before the idea of commitment to something other than himself became the albatross (holding civilization as-we-know-it together) that man had to come to grips with if he wanted to hold cavechick's attention for any longer than it took to rub two rocks together. In fact, “dick lit” has been around since the first caveman's curiosity stuck his dick into the equation when he rubbed those two rocks together around it until WANGO! He discovered, despite the pain (without gain), man cannot live by fire alone, and understood for all time how important it was for man to be able to get off by any means necessary. Which is the logo for this crude, rude, often ridiculous quest that drives everyman's ludicrous every waking and slumbering moment, towards the existential drive for him to fill and refill the Holy and Unholy Grails of existence with momentary proof that KILROY IS HERE, as opposed to the much more noble creator's banner stating KILROY WAS HERE. For was ain't is, no matter what monuments or monstrosities man leaves behind. Or how much he would like to remember those long gone moments of good, bad or indifferent ecstasy that make up the raison d'étre of his piddling existence. So like it or not, “dick lit” is here to acknowledge the good, bad and ugly that goes with it, as it celebrates every young boy’s quest to get off for the first time, everyman’s quest to get off the next time, and every old man’s quest to get off one more time, before there is no time left to get off on. From Bukowski’s SIX INCHES, the all time classic masterpiece of the then still undubbed genre (now claiming accreditation as a low rent literary school), to Joe Maynard’s innocent jism flailing MISSIONARY POSITIONS, to the desperate brutality of Joey Amdahl’s LIFE OUTSIDE THE BOX, “dick lit” no longer has to worry about skulking through the utilitarian sewer of “no redeeming value”, since like it or not, “no redeeming value” (except the writing) is the recognized heart & soul of “dick lit”. MG / 8/25/06

RIDER OF THE JADE HORSE Michael Disend

“I have something for you,” she said as they lay together at the end of an afternoon.

“What?”

He was staring at Jihan’s Li’s gullet, inches away. It fascinated him. They were naked, side by side, and from Penman’s view, nose to throat, it seemed her Adam’s apple was a small animal scurrying back and forth in a silky burrow of flesh.

“This,” she replied, sitting up and reaching for her bag.

Penman stared at her back muscles. He’d been femme-fucked by a variety of androgynous giantesses in his time, but never by one with such a developed physique. He was admiring Jihan Li’s hilly trapezius and the sweep of her latissimus dorsi when she turned and thrust the gift box at him.

Leaning upon one elbow he opened the present and began peeling away the tissue paper, doing his best to keep his eyes off her breasts.

Then the paper was gone and Penman was looking at a small horse.

A jade horse.

Penman saw a galloping jade horse so full of energy it looked ready to charge across the room, spring from the window in an emerald blur onto Austin Alley, then race downhill to Van Ness where it would change direction and keep going until it hit Market Street, blasting through traffic like a lime-colored equine missile.

“Do you like it?”

Penman speechlessly moved his head from side to side, although he meant the opposite.

Jihan Li smiled, looking to Penman like a thousand-armed Kwan Yin, the spiritually hermaphroditic Bodhisattva of Compassion. She took the jade horse from his hands, placed it on the night table, then rolled back on top of Penman, her lips dragging down his chest to his nipples, which she sucked and nibbled until his stiff cock tingled, although it felt oddly irrelevant, almost like an observer.

“Pretend you’re my wife,” she commanded.

Penman groaned and blushed uncontrollably. A burning rose was blooming within his body. He felt open and innocent and royal.
“Oh, you like that. How sweet! Do you know what I want?”

“A man?” he asked wistfully.

Jihan Li looked firmly into his eyes.

“No! I want man who is also a woman.”

Penman nodded against his will, his gaze stealing down toward the strap-on dildo she was generously coating with lube. It thrust out like a red cannon from her leather harness. Why red? Is it because she’s from China? Penman felt a spasm of shame and an urge to jump from the bed, but it was too late. She slid two lube-coated fingers into his bun and corkscrewed them slowly. He shuddered, closed his eyes, and lay back. His last thought before she entered him: “If anybody in Zen circles finds out about this, I’m ruined.”

After that she rode Penman into the sunset.

He fell off one hundred cliffs, floated like a flower petal, sobbed greedily into his pillow.

Then Jihan Li left.

One day Penman inspected the jade horse and discovered it wasn’t jade at all. Just scrap iron painted green.

No surprise. He’d known it from day one. Penman mistake junk metal for yu, Asia’s royal gem? Impossible! But to facilitate scented memories of the Shanghai giantess, he always thought of her gift as a “jade horse.” Whenever he uttered the trigger-phrase “jade horse,” animation instantly ran through his brain of blast-furnace Beijing — represented by a husky figure in goggles, helmet, and canvas suit — vigorously fucking yinny-winny San Francisco, here rendered as a Betty Boop type on all fours with panties stretched below the knees, facial resemblance to an overwrought Penman. This odd figure would trill like a happy robin flying above Golden Gate Park as the pounding and penetration became deeper and deeper, wider and wider, like a mine being blasted through a mountainside.

“I’ve been in sissified Frisco too long, O Lord,” prayed Penman. “Kindly halt the virility diminishment and get me back Yin-Yang rectified!”

He thought of Jihan Li as his last major conquest. It was he who’d been conquered, of course, but Penman rewrote his own history more and more. Once-upon-a-cock, a Hell’s Kitchen porn star had supported Penman. Now he was a bitch for men in female bodies. Cowgirls, black women boxers, gym queens, sullen motorcycle dykes. He must emit a scent of male pussy. Not gay — definitely not gay — just a guy with a hottie femme ghost inside his skin. So when an allurement manifested herself in the personage of Jihan Li — runaway Chinese basketball star on the loose at the Civic Center farmers’ market — Penman dove right into the ocean of birth and death. Nor did he pursue Self-enquiry, as in “Who Am I?” — or surrender to the Silence.

His fattened ego deserved what he got, and got what he deserved, and Penman was so confused he couldn’t even tell cause from effect.

Later, whenever he glanced at the sea-colored stallion, Penman made it a point to remember that Chinese people call jade the Stone of Heaven, a perfect synonym for his shlong. This was obviously why Jihan Li had given it as honorarium to the forever-young Yid’s inexhaustible (yet flexible) uber-maleness.

I’m straight as a fucking arrow, thought Penman. I am, I really am.

“Sure you are, kid,” smirked an unseen voice, which Penman recognized instantly as that of Ego Demon. “What self-serving bullshit.”

“Jade horse, my dick! Jade horse! My dick!” cried Penman desperately.

“Your dick ain’t jade and never was,” smirked Ego Demon. “And neither are you, kid.”

Penman felt as if he were toppling off a stepladder. His head fell forward onto the desk top, striking the computer keyboard and knocking over a coffee cup. The green horse toppled over, as well, resting one hoof upon Penman’s left earlobe. Ego Demon, perhaps realizing he’d gone too far this time, vanished in a puff of chutney-flavored smoke.

When he finally came around, Penman could hear the laughter of homeless people lining up for a free feed in Austin Alley next to the Episcopal Church. Penman listened, grateful they were there and that somebody was taking care of them. That’s what I should do, he thought. Buy a plaid shirt and work in a soup kitchen. Do something useful instead of sexually imploding in the twilight of my years.

As he lifted his head, the hoof in his ear also rose, flipping the green statue over onto its side. Penman promptly stood the horse upright next to his computer.

What exactly had happened that day so long ago?

For starters, Jihan Li had sucked his cock. Then they’d fucked. Of a fashion. Penman lay on top of the huge fugitive sports star and wriggled like a feisty eel. Much of the time, however, Penman’s mug was sunk between her hoop-jumping, steel-and-silk thighs, shlurping and savoring, the way he gorged at the $9.95 all-you-can-eat hot pot barbecue place on Clement Street. Her groans, through Penman’s thigh-covered ears, had sounded like a bassoon under water.

Whenever it got stuffy below deck and Jihan Li heard him gasping for air, she’d let Penman raise his sopping face a few inches, all the while keeping a huge hand on top of his head as if she were palming a basketball. Then, assured he wouldn’t suffocate on her clitoris, she’d press down firmly and return Penman to the ocean depths.

Penman knew that the proper way to assuage a cunt is to adore it like a mouth. Deep soul kisses, serpentine licks, surrendered sucklets. But now he performed his art below sea level so long that he actually felt Jihan Li’s roaring cavity was her real mouth, the devourer of noodles and tofu, the enunciator of arcane basketball plays, and a hyper-energetic feral, slithery mucilaginous beast of the woods who was devouring Penman’s tongue, lips, nose, gums, jaw, and cheeks by omnivorous increments. It was horrifying and overwhelming and wet.

And the more Penman sucked, the more the mobilized folds of her vagina revealed their inescapable three-dimensional aspect, like a large, wet, heavily built forest creature in a shaggy coat on a killing spree. Penman sucked her cunt and surrendered to her cunt and he knew he was nothing whatsoever and that she was everything, her cunt was everything; worship it, suck it, drink from it, his eyes closed and soaked, his nose up her sacred cave, and his whole body eased into deep relaxation, deeper and deeper relaxation, the surrender of dying prey, and Penman knew he was the luckiest landless peasant who ever toiled unceasingly upon a desolate tract of land belonging to the Green Queen of the Northwest Frontier. Every muscle, nerve, and tendon in his body suddenly let go, like a handful of loose rubber bands.

Jihan Li’s cunt was a sacristy at the center of the universe, adorning him in vaginal vestments, a shrine that Penman was born to suck. So he sucked it. He sucked it with a slave’s devotion under her thunderstorm, and the forest creature devoured his sucking tongue and lips, just dragged them within the dark forest, owning Penman’s ass and cock and thighs and face and cheeks, making them silky beautiful because he sucked her cunt, forever under her cunt that he sucked and sucked some more. And when Jihan would unexpectedly change pace and ferociously fuck Penman’s mouth, ramming his face like a pole, his mouth stretched out in a circular rictus. At such moments her rump rested heavily upon Penman’s fragile facial bones, and it felt as if his skull would crack open. He wanted to scream but he couldn’t because his mouth was full of Jihan Li’s cunt.

Then she taught him special shameful mysteries with her red cannon.

Until dusk. Until nightfall. Until the shadow of death.

And when she graciously deposited the happy horsey on Penman’s night table before exiting his front door, about sixteen ounces of her freshly squeezed cum trickling smoothly through Penman’s guts, he could think only of a courtesan leaving her royal lover a post-coital gift, one that empowers him toward speedy success and limitless wealth. Mongolian quarter horse hits straightaway: Penman performs bedtime magic. Not precise battlefield reportage, but who cares? Didn’t Penman deserve the seventh animal in the Chinese zodiac — timeless symbol of galloping success and potency — a jade-fucking-stallion?

Apparently not.

Spray-painted Chinatown tourist shit, mused Penman, spiraling downward toward a familiar state of low-energy discontent. His musings darkened as he contemplated the steed’s shy yet dumbly pleased expression, as if its balls were being fondled by a little girl in a plaid dress, the kind who later obsessively draws ponies prior to becoming a dominatrix.

An emasculating insult. Unquestionably.

Penman frowned, oozing bitterness, and realized he was vibrating in an unprofitable way. Too late! He dropped another notch. Rage, sadness, and annoyance danced onstage in lustrous flounced skirts like three drag queens of doom. He felt bad, real bad! Yet he continued the downward spiral — couldn’t stop — the way he sniffed a sleeveless undershirt, recognized he had already worn it for a week but slipped it over his head anyway.

T

hen Penman noticed a little plug in the horse’s head — like a forelock. He pulled it out. The plug resembled a green ray gun. What the hell was it? There was a tiny hole between the horse’s jaws. Huh? Penman turned the horse upside down and looked at its belly. If this was a kiddie bank, that’s where the removable cap would be. But there wasn’t any. A fucking mystery. A hollow horse with a plug in its head and a hole in its mouth!

He brooded over this for a long time.

A hollow horse with a plug in its head and a hole in its mouth.

Like me.

What a disaster is this world! The whole realm of birth and death is disaster not only waiting to happen but happening over and over again in Penmanland. And always they hunt the Jews, thought Penman. Every country, every time. Claiming Lucifer is behind us making trouble.

A tiny voice whispered helpfully: Absolute stillness of mind is the attainment of Liberation. But Penman ignored it.

He placed the horse back on his desk by his computer, in front of the heavy copper statue of the Monkey King holding a staff, a coffee mug bearing the Monkey King’s face, and a tiny rubber monkey wearing a fez.

Then he stared pensively at the simian trio.

He was seeking the Truth he already was! Why didn’t other people realize the spiritual sacrifices he had made, sacrifices like not snorting cocaine or hanging out in bars and chasing tawdry actresses? These abstinences surely were worthy of note. Why hadn’t she given him a jade horse, a real jade horse!

Penman went to bed early that night, fleeing a wave of depression approaching at breakneck speed. He switched on his Marsona sound machine to a repetitive wave pattern and drifted off. Outside his window he heard homeless people mingling. It sounded like they were cooking a cat on a spit and chanting anti-war slogans.

He dreamed of Jihan Li. She was green- and gold-colored, and had arms extending from her shoulders, back, waist, and chest. Two, three, dozens, hundreds, even thousands of arms, all waving and active. Penman stared at her unafraid as she said, “Miseries exist only in the place you have entered. In order to remove all miseries, go back to your place of birth.”

He slept deeply and rose at dawn.

It was peaceful and quiet, his favorite time of day. According to yogis, the best hours for meditation.

He took a look around his sloppy apartment, glanced fondly at his meditation alcove, and for a few moments felt content.

What was it about jade?

What? What?

Fuck it!

Who the hell cares?

Enough with the jade horse and my cock and sissification and fictitious desires and wasted human births already!

Penman, suddenly fed up with entangled delusion, changed into his meditation clothes — black gung-fu pants and gray, coffee-stained sweatshirt — and sat down in the full-lotus position.

Then he let go of everything. Surrendered his body to the cushion, letting his thoughts float off like puffy balloons. Even thoughts about Jihan Li’s cock and cunt and the odd karma Penman had created with her. He let all of it go, and the vexations dissolved and he felt more and more settled and clean and free with a straight back and a handsome face and left hand on top of right.

Like a sitting Buddha was Penman.

After some time he arose, feeling like a million bucks. He could have sat longer, of course. A whole day, maybe even a week, and he definitely would and could have transcended the burning pain in his legs. But he simply had things to do today. “The worst error when seeking Enlightenment,” thought Penman, “is to rush” — recalling what some Dharma guy had said in a book.

Only practice, no gain.

I sure can practice, thought Penman.

Then he turned, saw the green horse on his desk, and felt a rush of love.

“Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” he cried aloud.

It was clear and obvious that the tall Chinese babe had indeed presented him with a jade horse. A real jade horse, not some piece of crap made in a factory in Taiwan where they paid the workers thirteen cents an hour.

He held the green stallion in his hands for a moment, feeling its power and weight, which had to be at least three pounds. He kissed it. All over. From snout to haunches. At the same time he suppressed an urge to hurl it against the wall with all his might. The impulse grew stronger and stronger, surging throughout his body. But Penman remained calm, letting the waves of vexation splash themselves out.

©2007 Michael Disend

Living in San Francisco, Michael Disend is the author of legendary novel, Stomping the Goyim, originally Published in 1969, and reprinted by Green Integer.