Contrary to the 2,000-year-old rumor spread far and wide
by a one Mr. Plutarch, Great Pan is far from dead. He is
simply tired of topping the usual worshipers—be they
female or male. Animal, vegetable, or mineral…
“Yea, verily, thus,” Pan yawns as a grove
of olive trees pushes and shoves its way up through the
buckling dirt. A feat considering we are deep in what’s
left of the wet green forests that straddle the fictitious
line called the California-Oregon border. It is his not
so subtle hint to us to move this prologue to our story
along.
We smile and pluck at our lyre as kindly as we can. Rather
than risk divine ire, we will whisper this aside over our
strummings: The last 40 years have been a near-timeless
orgy of love-ins and Earth Days and Ren-faires and Wiccan
circles and over-40 pervert play-parties and the occasional
Mardi Gras and lesbian potluck. But nary a good ass-fucking
of the god. Whereas once upon a time, his woolly butt fur
flew, for many a year it’s barely rustled. Until last
May Day among the Faeries.
The faeries? you ask. Pixies and sprites? No, Radical
Faeries, we reply. More Puck than Pixie. Late twentieth-century
gender essentialists who believe that there is a royal way
to the rutting you call gay and name it the third path and
themselves the third gender. Usually found with dicks and
in skirts. Often living in forests in huts and lean-tos
and rambling ramshackle farms…
At this, Great Pan coughs and scratches his thigh. He
flicks a flea our way. He is in love and we are jealous
and we miss the comforts of our old haunts in Arcadia. It
is too wet here. We have embellished when we should have
abridged.
So we must confess that only some of the Faeries believe
what we have said they all did. Most notably their Queen
Mother, Harry Hay. But she is now with that old goat Socrates
and those boys he picks up at the gym in an eternal round
of discourse and dinner and dessert in that upscale suburb
in the afterlife we once called the Elysian Fields. The
remaining earthbound Faeries actually try hard to live well
with the land and often live well off the land. Not easy
in your day and age, we might add. They don’t live
in huts or lean-tos or rambling ramshackle farms all year
long. Well, not many of them.
It’s a nice life, if you like eating beans of all
manner and in all shapes cooked by a tousled-haired reed
of a man high on hemp and wearing nothing but a pink apron
with a sheer ruffled border and pumps.
A second flea. Yes, we are bitter. But wise. We will move
on.
O Muse, tell us of the clash of arms and woolly thighs
and dicks and mouths and holes more dark and deep that Cerberus’
snarling maw, of the love between a God and his boy, a Ganymede
even Almighty Zeus might strain to lift Olymposward…
A third flea. We will leave the epic poetry to the dead
before we join their shadowy ranks.
It was the first day of the month of May, a day when Faeries
and other earth spirits love to make merry. Usually around
a big thick pole that they wrap tight with long strong ropy
ribbons. Round and round the tight wood they twist till
all fall down flushed and red in the head and fuck in the
ripe furrows of the freshly and firmly plowed earth. Rich
and moist dirt that clumps in hot soft balls of…
Wait…
You, over there. Behind the ferns. Yes, you. The one in
the T-shirt that says “I’m Cuckoo for Metafiction’s
Cocoa-Puffs.” Why aren’t you sitting with the
rest of the listeners? You’re distracting us from
our rhapsody. What? You’re Arthur. Greetings, Arthur.
What? The Arthur? What an odd accent you people of Oregon
have. It sounds like you said “Ahthor.” We believe
we’ve met that god once before. Very nice. Egyptian
fellow. But you look nothing like him. Especially when you’re
making that rude gesture with your finger. Really now. Come
on, Arthur of Oregon, come over and sit with the others.
Ow! That was no flea. That was a rock, you pale imitation
of a Theban cur. Fine, fine, fine! We shall give you our
back. Next time it’s the evil eye. Everyone else,
unevil eyes on the lyre.
Except you. Yes, you dear. Hand us that wineskin. Rage
has left us parched.
Thank you.
Yes, fine. A fine day it was a year ago. The first of
May. May Day. And Pan was in a foul mood like we are now.
He hadn’t been hit by a rock thrown by an uppity troglodyte
in a too-tight T-shirt. No, he was just tired of topping.
And he wanted to get fucked.
Great Pan had looked high among the immortals to no avail,
not even the teensiest bit of cosmic tail. Dionysos’
Bacchantes are very possessive of the god’s divine
wand. Thor only does hard-core S/M scenes and it has to
include his hammer. Loki is a voyeur and spends all his
time at the end of the world watching the serpent suck its
own tail. Jehovah is a chronic masturbator since he loves
no other gods but he. Zeus is once again hobnobbing, literally,
among the mortals as a producer of boy-bands. Ganymedes
galore to hold his cup and ride his lightning-fast love
bolt. And Coyote and Pan are still not speaking from the
last time. Coyote had promised to do him and good and ended
up detaching his dick—as usual to get a bit of sleep—and
wandered off when he awoke, leaving it to fuck the Great
God Pan for a solid year straight. He still walks bowlegged
from that.
Did you feel that? We think that was a flea. You didn’t
see Arthur throw a pebble? No? Okay. Onward and upward with
the prologue.
And, of course, Ganesha is the greatest lay above or below,
but he is so swamped with the prayers of a very troubled
and good-luck-hungry planet, especially the plaintive late-night
solicitations of lonely writers, that he and Pan now have
to book even a fuck-buddy romp a decade in advance.
That date has been set. See, we’ve carved it here
on the back of our lyre. But that still left Pan unfucked.
It was time for the great god to look low among the mortals.
And May Day is also known as Beltane. There is no better
day in all the High Heathen Holy Days for getting your divine
freak on. So he came to the Faeries in the hopes that one
of these wild things would want to shag a furry ass. After
all, he’d heard that Hermes had been bragging all
over Olympos about finding a flock that loved to worship
the Horned God, even his hole, some especially the hole.
It was like these mortals took for truth every rite in that
comic book of horrors, the Malleus Maleficarum,
said Hermes. Day after day of daisy chains. Night after
night of beauties bowing to kiss his asshole. Neo-pagans,
they were called. Not all alike. Not able to get along for
long. But almost as wild a roll in the hay as the priests
of Christianity’s middle age and the inquisitors of
the Counter Reformation. And the Faeries were the funkiest
of all.
Of which we now know he meant hygiene.
Yes, that was indeed a flea. Two, to be exact. Our prologue
is done.
Now to tell of the night Max Feybear fucked a god.
When all is said and done—and we’ll pluck
away to get us there—Max is a nice boy, a good boy.
Saul Pinkus is the name on his birth certificate. And he
kept it all the years he lived in his parents’ properly
progressive, intellectually observant Jewish home on the
Upper West Side of Manhattan. And for four years of college.
And then another year and a half. Until he had a dream in
graduate school. He was attending NYU, if you really must
know. It was an amazing dream. A dream in which a god Max
hadn’t believed in since babyhood told him personally
to go west, young man. Leave sociology, the Academy, New
York behind and wander among the wild and wily goyim of
the West. And perhaps it was the fact that the Lord God
Himself told him. Or the endorphins released by the ropes
and cuffs and the hood. He was on a date when the dream
came. Dreams don’t give a flying succulent fig about
when and where they happen. We blame the god of dreams for
that. Morpheus has always thought he is as clever a prankster
as Hermes. And as cute. But hanging back in the shadows
for eternity hasn’t done wonders for his love life.
So now he really lets mortals and immortals alike have it
with the dreams.
But that’s not the point. Oh, how we stray in a
language whose poetry is obsessed with free verse.
The point is, whether from the stature of the deity or
the strength of the chemicals, Saul heeded the dream and
came West. Max Feybear was born. And here, in the forests
of western Oregon, Max ended up and here Pan ended up, too
and in time, with a little help from the great god, Max
finally ended up in Pan.
Pretty sketchy, we confess. We’ve asked Max more
about his past, his dream, his years lost wandering in this
wilderness. All he says is for us to wait. Someone else
is writing his tale. Philip somebody. No, that’s not
right. Phillip? Philip? Fillip? Phillips. That’s it.
Ian Phillips. Whoever he may be.
What? We can’t hear you, Arthur, because we have
our back turned.
Can any of you, kind listeners, tell us what Arthur’s
shouting?
Oh, Ian Phillips with one “l.” Isn’t
Arthur the eavesdropping know-it-all?!
Ow!!!
Stop that, you faux-Corinthian pillow-biter. Here, take
this rock and throw it back at him. We’ve a story
to sing. But wait. Once more, rage leaves us as dry as the
nether lips of an old whore. The wineskin.
Thank you.
Of where and why Max Feybear came, we know not much. Enough
for a simple quatrain at best. Or a doozy of a couplet.
But this we can tell: how he looked and how Pan came to
him that May Eve.
The night before May Day.
April 30.
Walpurgisnacht, for any homesick German witches
who’ve joined us here in the wet wilds of western
Oregon.
Once again, the wineskin.
Thank you.
Of charms and a Max, I now sing.
Both sets of his grandparents worried, when they saw the
blue eyes, blond hair, and the thin nose, in that very order,
appear on their baby boy, that a Cossack had gotten in their
bloodline during one of the pogroms their own grandparents
had fled. And wherever these features came from, they grew
all the more pronounced as Max grew into them. All five
and a half feet and two hundred and some pounds of him.
Today, the clear paleness of his skin makes the once-cornflower
blue in his eyes look like the glowing otherworldly color
that follows in the sky after sunset and the thick wave
of his dirty blond beard that washes down to his broad chest
draws the eye to his slender nose, the only hairless outcropping
on his face before the eye continues up and across his bald
forehead and lands in more hair, shorter than the beard
but even more tousled. And this disarray isn’t the
result of overuse of hairstyling products. He isn’t
that kind of faygeleh, as he likes to call his kindred.
Nor is it from neglect. He isn’t that kind of faygeleh,
either. It’s simply that, like Max himself, his hair
is prolific and very willful.
In fact, it grows thickly about his face and dick and nowhere
else. Just little tiny hairs along his solid arms and sturdy
legs and a few around his stand-at-attention nipples and
his sinkhole of a belly button. But his wide back and his
ample butt and almost all of his impressive gut are bare.
When we first saw him naked, we could tell by the angle
of Pan’s dick, for that was all that hadn’t
shifted its shape, that the god was pleased with his fey
bear. But to us, Max looked like a lion shorn like a poodle.
Or as Max likes to scold himself, and he rarely talks to
himself in any other way, he looks like some creature out
of Dr. Seuss with a thyroid problem.
How do we know all that? you ask. Well, it’s not
like Max doesn’t love to talk about himself and his
woes. Of course, we can relate. Each of you knows how much
we hate this forest. But that’s not how we know what
Max thinks. Not at all. Like Pan or any other immortal worth
the ichor in their veins, we can read the minds of mortals.
Trust us, it’s usually less interesting than it sounds.
Especially after the fourth or fifth millennia.
But mind read, we can. And mind read, Pan did that May
Eve when he spied Max, a few long, warm hours before sunset,
wandering through the woods.
In less than a second, the Great God Pan sized him up and
discovered within the young man a top that few boys were
wise enough to bend over for because they saw only a beard
or a belly attached to a pair of full but bitter lips. But
Pan read on. He also learned of Max’s dream, his odyssey,
and his mad love for a Faerie named Titania, who unlike
Circe, the sorceress queen in Odysseus’ own wandering
tale, didn’t bother to turn Max into a pig. Titania
thought Max a pig on first sight. Still, no one else but
this boy would do for Max. Who amongst us has not had a
doomed obsession or two? Eh? Let them cast the first stone.
No one. Not even you, Arthur? Good. And so Pan took that
very shape to get the very fucking he’d been so tirelessly
seeking.
But why? you ask. Why does Pan need to shapeshift when
Hermes gets fucked right and left and up and down and sideways
and slantways by tricking everyone into thinking he’s
Pan?
“Yea, verily, what a fuss,” says Pan. “Because
I can, kids! I am a god. Zeus gets to do golden showers
with Danaë. Or that fly-by snatching of Ganymede. While
Poseidon lets Demeter know he’s hung like a horse.
And no seahorse, mind you. So why not a bit of trickery
for little ol’ great me to get a good fuck.”
Why, yes indeed, o Pan! Nothing like the love-starved man
eating out his forbidden fruit. And devour you he did! Hades
himself couldn’t have licked you cleaner to the bone.
Lean in to hear us. Closer. Actually, Pan never shapeshifts
when he tops mortals. He’s tried but he’s usually
rebuffed. The worshipers want the whole horned-god experience.
But bottoming, well, that’s never been done with a
mortal before. Never done well, that is. He’s become
very sensitive about the tail as a result. Everybody’s
eager to put the pipes of Pan to their lips, but most mortals,
save a sanctimonious US senator or two when they’re
imagining the happier sex lives of others, find the tail
a cunt-drying dick-shriveling turnoff.
So it was to be with Max.
But the first night, Pan searched out the mind of Max’s
beloved, read it, and became him down to the small mole
on his right inner thigh.
There Pan stood in the clearing, posing himself with the
perfectionist care of a cinematographer, forcing the slanting
late-afternoon sun to light the exact portion of his naked
body when he willed it. He toweled his dry body to draw
Max’s gaze his way. Nothing. He kept changing the
color of the towel to catch his eye. He felt a flicker when
he made the towel of golden silk. Then he waited. He wanted
Max to think he’d come upon Titania after skinny-dipping
in the trickle that the Faeries call a stream.
Max stopped on the path to the itsy-bitsy brook. A flash
caught his eye. Like sunlight on water but hovering midair.
He stared into the open heart of the grove. Again a flash
of light. Pan had thrown down the towel. This time it was
the sun reflecting off Titania’s eyes. For Pan knew
that Titania’s eyes are the first thing to catch your
attention about the boy. They glint, no matter the time
of day, like small, overly polished stones. Common riverbed
stones that appear to be precious because of their flashy
sheen. It is the only subtle clue of his talent with artifice.
For Titania has willed himself to become a diva in the world
of opera. A gay diva. No, wait. We’ve told the obvious
when we meant to tell the truth. An openly gay diva. In
fact, the world’s greatest countertenor, despite the
hindrances that he cannot read music and is lost in the
wilds of Oregon. Whether he will or won’t, I leave
for others to tell. Perhaps this Ian Phillips with one “l”
fellow.
You think he will, Arthur?
Good.
Better him than me.
The second thing about Titania to catch your eye is what
you most remember about him when you come to dislike him,
as many have and will: his regality. Though he is small
and lithe, he has the commanding bearing of a prince. Like
in a 1930s film. Like Errol Flynn. Or Douglas Fairbanks.
Senior or Junior. A beautiful and proud face. Aristocratic.
And when he’s had a few lines of coke, the jutting
jaw and thin lips, made all the more pouty by the tirelessly
clipped beard, and the haughtier and haughtier heights of
his arching eyebrows take on a queenly tone. He is Titania,
after all. Like the true Queen of the Faeries, the un-Radical
and immortal ones, that is. Our cousin, Puck, serves at
her and King Oberon’s court. She let me drink wine
from her cupped hands. An exquisite beauty, indeed.
Max’s Titania, too. On the beauty part. Yes, I grant
you it’s a self-conscious choice of name. Behind his
back, Titania’s name is simply, Her Majesty The Baby.
For he is twenty, if a day. But still it shows his wise
estimation of his assets and his ambitions among the Faerie
folk. And he does have one particular asset that all who
enjoy such pleasures would be happy to have spread across
their faces or wrapped around their dicks.
This is the third thing about Titania that those who love
to look at him never forget. Max had seen it dipped into
and arising from countless hot tubs and beds. He dreamed
of caressing and kissing and then entering it night after
night. Now, lo and behold, it was rising to greet him on
the path, for Titania had bent over to arrange his towel.
Max stopped, gulping for air like he’d been punched
in the gut. And, well, to be honest, on a cosmic level he
had. He was so befuddled by the beautiful bottom before
him he didn’t know which burned more from his blushing,
his forehead or his foreskin.
Titania did not turn. He hadn’t noticed Max’s
approach. Max didn’t know whether to turn and come
back or stay and cough. What would be polite? What would
prolong the view? Then the testosterone boiling in his balls
goaded him to speak.
“Any more hair in there and you could grow a tail.”
Max watched the skin on Titania’s back gather as
he cringed.
“I think it’s sexy,” Max stammered as
Titania turned toward him. “Honest. Very animal.”
“And what of this beast?” Pan said, mimicking
perfectly the imperious tone Titania always took with Max,
as he stroked his long, red, upturned dick.
“It can bite me any day.”
“Always the droll one, eh, Maxie?”
Max grimaced. He hated that name. Mostly because Titania
always followed it with “Pud” and then a pause
and “Not!”
But Titania surprised him. “Perhaps you should suck
out its venom, Max.”
Max, now firmly convinced he was dreaming and in a race
to touch Titania before he woke, ran up to the naked boy
and dropped to his knees, gripped the stiff dick, and rammed
it in his mouth. He closed his eyes and sucked, moaning
so enthusiastically that he drowned out the loud daytime
drone of bees and wasps and flies and grasshoppers and beetles
and even cicadas.
“Max,” Titania said quietly, taken aback by
the ferociousness of his desperation. “Max. Max!”
The moaning and then Max stopped.
“Arise, Max, and strip before me. All who worship
me must be naked.”
Max was truly startled. He hadn’t awoken and now
Titania, the very Titania who’d always ridiculed Max’s
dick size to punish him for his all too obvious desire of
the Faerie Queen, wanted to see him naked. Wanted to watch
him undress.
He stood very slowly and looked into Titania’s eyes.
He’d never looked at them, at him, this close and
for this long. They were a brilliant hazel. Like small,
polished pieces of the stone called tiger’s-eye. The
very eyes of the Great God Pan himself. For earlier we said
only Pan’s dick retained its true shape. Wrong. All
wrong. We blame the wine. And our desire to forget this
place and our lingering year in it. His eyes, too, remained
Pan’s own. And Max looked into them as deeply as he
could. There was no mockery in them. Titania was even smiling
at him. He nodded his head as an encouragement for Max to
get on with the show. So Max stripped down until he was
naked, too.
And since we’ve already described how he looked once
before we won’t do it again. But we will repeat that
great Pan was pleased with what he saw.
For the dick pointing right at him was as solid and as
earnest as the man who bore it. And it would fit quite nicely
in this little rounded ass he’d fashioned. It was
perfect.
In fact, Pan said in Titania’s voice just that. “Perfect.”
In the hopes the man, who had always judged his dick either
in the eyes of others or from on high as he perched over
his gut to determine its measure and thus his own, would
hear the genuine praise of a god and realize the god meant
him, all of him.
But Max was too amazed and aroused to be standing dick-to-dick
with Titania. He heard nothing but his own blood wildly
pulsing. Until Titania stepped even closer to him and took
hold of his dick. Max nearly came but fought off the orgasm
by straining to hear each syllable Titania spoke.
“Rather than you suck me, I’d like you to fuck
me. Are you up for it, my good stud?”
Max whispered his answer: “If I let my dick have
any more blood, my brain will die.”
“We can’t have that, can we? You are a man
with many impressively large organs, Max Feybear. I want
to make the most of them all.”
Out of the glittering sunlit air appeared a condom and
several packets of lube. Titania snatched them before Max
fully understood what just happened. He handed them to Max
before turning himself and dropping onto the outstretched
towel. He leaned forward onto his elbows and turned his
head and gave a lecherous smile Great Pan perfected millennia
ago.
Once more, Max quickly fell to knees and dropped his head
till he was a breath away from the crack between Titania’s
asscheeks. To the god who had started him on the travels
that led him to this very moment, he offered up a silent
prayer. Then he inhaled. He smelled all that was ripe and
delicious about the earth. The loam carved by the stream.
Clumps of black dirt, pushed up by seedlings beneath old
trees. Roasted nuts and still-warm fresh-baked bread.
Max sat back and smiled. He didn’t know what else
to do. Then he tore open the condom and struggled to find
which way to roll it down so the lubed side was facing out.
Next he attempted to unfurl it over his swelling head. It
was a snug fit and his fingers trembled but he did it. Now
to twist and twist the tops of the lube off. And finally
to lube his dick and Titania’s hole. Where the other
two lube packets came from, he didn’t know but he
was grateful for them.
He slid his cockhead inside Titania with a shout. And was
nearly whooping by the time he’d pushed himself as
far as his dick could go.
Then he fucked him and he fucked him and he fucked him.
Three separate times: three minutes the first time, thirty
minutes the second, and three hours the last. Max’s
well-milked dick shot invisible sperm that third time, but
he huffed and puffed to keep pumping into the sweating and
growling and laughing Titania, who sat atop him now just
as he himself lay atop the softest bed of moss. And with
his last grunt of lust, Max passed out from elation as much
as exhaustion, long before he could see Pan retake his form
or tuck Max into his bed on the bottom bunk in the far bedroom
of a rambling ramshackle farmhouse.
Poor Max. He didn’t know he’d been paid the
highest compliment by being played by a god. And so he was
left stunned—as too many of us have been when shunned
on the street or in the thicket by a sheet-burningly good
one-night stand—after he came up behind Titania, also
on his way to a lunch of lentils and more lentils, and goosed
him and said sweetly into his ear, “Hey, Fuzzy Butt,”
only to have Titania turn and say before he slapped Max
hard and stormed away: “Listen you bear of a berdache,
I don’t care if you were We’wha herself, or
in your case, Wee-Wee. It shan’t come to pass. Not
now. Not never. So, kind sir, please fuck off and die!”
Everyone, with feeling: Poor Max!
Yea, verily, thus it was no great surprise, to us at least,
that Max paid no attention whatsoever when later the divine
manifested in front of his own very downcast eyes.
“Greetings, lover,” Pan shouted as he leapt
from behind a tree and before Max.
Max was unfazed. All he could think of was Titania’s
withering exit hours before. “Oh, nice costume. The
talent show’s over in the barn,” he said glumly.
“Costume?” Pan laughed.
“Oh. I’m sorry.” Max actually looked
Pan over from hoof to horn. “Are you one of the witches
from San Francisco?”
“I love San Francisco. But I’m not from there.
I love witches, too. But I’m no witch. What about
you? Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”
“I’m bad to the broom,” Max said with
a dramatic pout.
Pan laughed even louder, finally startling Max with his
snorts and whinnies.
“Yes, you are,” said the stranger and stranger
creature. “And you certainly know how to make the
most of that broom handle of yours.” He placed his
hand, surprisingly muscular for the long fingers, over Max’s
crotch. “Can I have another ride?”
Max gasped at this latest display of West Coast forwardness.
“Another? I don’t remember the first.”
“Allow me to reintroduce myself.” Pan shifted
into the shape of the beloved Titania, naked and hard and
then with a quick turn, bent over and, grabbing his asscheeks,
showed Max his hairy hole, and then, staying in the same
position, returned to his true godlike form. “I am
the Great God Pan.”
“Oh fuck,” Max shrieked. “No way. No,
no way. This only happens in Latin American literature.”
Pan now laughed so loud the forest rang with the shrill
wail of pipes and the staccato bleats of a flock of singing
goats.
Before Max could flee in a panic, the god grabbed him and
pulled him, struggling all the way, into a deep kiss. He
let go of the mortal only when the calm of exhaustion had
overtaken every cell Max’s brain still had any remaining
communication with and possible command over.
What Max could not or would not remember of their happy
rutting, Pan told him between tight hugs and long kisses.
And then Great Pan asked him for another go and Max was
forced to take a backward glance at the sex life he’d
known before now.
If he subtracted all the millions of times he’d jerked
himself off, the dried cum of his lovers and tricks would
have made a minuscule pillar of salt. Some sinner he was.
He looked at it and compared it to others’ burning
plains of Sodom and Gomorrah. The disparity froze him. Now
a god wanted him for a fuck buddy. And to take him to Greece.
Of course, with my luck, thought Max, it would be Pan and
not Apollo. But he was a god and he wanted him. Who else
did? Certainly not Titania.
“Okay,” Max said, punctuating his assent with
the stagy huff of resignation. “But on one condition.
You give me a year and a day to make up my mind about going
with you to Greece. We can meet here every Saturday night
until then and I’ll fuck your divine brains out.”
The forest roared with delight.
Why did Pan agree to such a bargain? you ask. Simple. Max
is a great fuck. You do the math. Take every lousy human
lay you’ve ever had and divide that whopper by the
fucks that still make your pubic hair quiver. The remainder,
in Pan’s case, equals Max.
And so for the next six days, Pan roamed the world fucking
his worshipers with renewed vigor. The curls along his inner
thighs singed. And on the seventh day, he returned to turn
the other cheek.
Yes, my dears, we pagans have a few golden rules of our
own.
And each week Titania ignored Max. Fucked with every Faerie
save Max. And come Saturday night, Max would faithfully
slump off into the woods to have his blue balls painted
red. The red of cum bombs bursting in woolly hair. But the
first condition had given way to a second. They always do.
From their first Saturday night together as Pan and man,
Max always made the same demand of the god: he may take
his true form, except the ass and tail. Especially the tail.
His divine hind quarters must always look exactly, down
to its very down, like the smooth, small, round and bouncy
butt of the sluttiest countertenor in all Faeriedom. That,
and no kissing.
No way! you cry foul. What? You thought just because a
fat boy knows the searing bite of ridicule’s arrows
he would see beyond the goatish ass and tail to the welcoming
hole of the god within. That a boy who’s spent every
day looking at his own flesh, willing some to slough off
in his sleep, would somehow be unable to count every hair
on the ass of another.
And what’s more, you thought just because Pan is
a god he can’t have poor taste?
Zeus the Goose! (Forgive us, Lord of Olympos, it rhymes
better than swan in this barbarian tongue.) What do you
people remember of your ancestors’ tales?
Hand me that wineskin.
Thank you.
And so we wait now for the high noon of May Day and its
mayhem. A year and a day has passed. How you ask is that
possible? The earth travels round the sun and this year
leapt along for an extra day. Ah ha! you say. Easy for you
to exclaim. You listeners experience our interminable year
but in a second. We had to sit here each Saturday night
while Great Pan returned to this dank—delightful—place
to woo a boy with hidden charms. And each Saturday night
as we played our gayest tunes for ass-plowing, we prayed
that this dithering queen would make the right choice and
fall for the right man—or God in our woebegone case—and
we could hightail it home.
Home again, home again to Arcady. Hey diddle diddle hee
hee hee.
That’s ancient Greek for Will he or won’t he?
A flea. We shall quit while we still have a head.
Hush. High noon and a mortal approach. Will it be a wavering
boy or a resolute man?
Oh my. All bets are off. It’s someone we’ve
never seen. Oh my oh my. Our skills are at hymning, not
reporting. We can’t do hexameter on the spot like
this. You there. Arthur. Yes, you. The one in the T-shirt
that says “Third Person Omniscient.” We see
you behind that pine. What’s that? Ahthor? Yes, Arthur.
We’ve sung that part already. What, you are a writer?
Then where’s your stylus and tablet? Under your arm?
Won’t that melt the clay? A lap top? What nursery
rhyme babble is that? Oh, yes, yes, the virtual tablet.
Very well, Ahthor. Can you help us out with the reportage?
We’ll throw in some epic flourishes afterwards.
It would be an honor, Mr. Tumnus.
Listen hear, mortal, he was a faun. Strict teetotalers,
the whole prissy lot of them. We’re a satyr. Horny
and hard-drinking all the way. Silenus, if you must know
a name.
An honor, Mr. Silenus. Hey, aren’t you the drinking
buddy of Dionysos?
That was thousands of years ago. We split up after he decided
only he could enjoy the worship of his groupies.
Ah, I see.
Really? How? Were you hiding under a Maenad then?
No, I was just sympathizing.
Well, stop it and get on with the story. That listener
over there has stopped touching themself. We shall go and
help them. But first, hand us the wineskin.
Thank you. I’ll keep this.
All right then, my dear Silenus, let me introduce you and
the boys and girls and girlie boys and boyie girls and either/ors
and neither/nors to the boy who is approaching. He is the
Faerie known as Nux Vomica.
What a name. The Faeries have some of the best.
His means the seed of the strychnine tree. In a pinch,
a very small one, it helps digestion.
But this Nux is already very easy to swallow.
And that’s not why he chose this name, either.
Nux is a bit of a punk. Or so he’d like to think.
And he has to wear his wildness in his name because all
who see him see only a gentle-looking beauty. With green
doe-eyes, if does had green eyes. But not like a cartoon
animal. A real deer. They are large and liquid. A small
nose, too. You’re not aware of it until it ends. Not
with a cutesy-pie upturn. It just ends. And it’s small
for his wide face. Wide, not round. His chin and jaw are
not part of a perfect circle. And there, above the point
where chin and jaws collide, are lips you want to kiss as
much as fall asleep on. And every one of these features
under a crazy mop of dreadlocks, each tip dyed blond, that
he keeps under a tan kerchief an old Russian grandmother
might wear, leaving his hair to fan out behind him like
a mane.
With each step closer, you realize he is tall, with a slender
build and large hands that make him seem less slender. You
reappraise him and see the sinew in the long curves of his
chest and arms and legs. He wears a brown camouflage tank
top that makes it almost down to his olive drawstring pants.
When he stands on one hip you can see the jutting cut of
muscles beneath the clear skin there. His obliques. From
each side, they draw your eye toward his nature trail and
beneath the pants, where your gaze waits for any hint of
his dick and balls to surface in the material as he walks.
As he does, you are teased, but not rewarded. And then,
at the end of his pants, you see his long feet in Birkenstocks.
As I said, he thinks he’s a punk. The only punk ever
to wear Birkenstocks until Johnny Rotten lands in a retirement
home.
The Great God Pan sees him, too. He pauses from polishing
his Syrinx with the long hair of one of his fairest attendants.
“Son, I’d change Syrinx to pipes. People will
think I’m wiping down a hypodermic or a car or some
odd piece out of a computer.”
Good idea, my Lord Pan.
The Great God Pan sees him, too. He pauses from polishing
his pipes with the long hair of one of his fairest attendants.
He lets go of the hair and then the tight bundle of reeds
and stands up from his moss-covered throne of stones. With
the maddening farsight of god, he knows that Max will never
come now. Poor Max has chosen to chase a shadow. Pan hopes
that the boy will come to a better end than sweet Orpheus.
The god blinks back a tear. He is surprised, even slightly
embarrassed, that after so many loves and so many years
this loss is able to sting his heart. He gives a snort.
Shakes his head and blinks again. The tears are clouding
his view of the beautiful boy.
The tears are clouding his view of the beautiful boy.
The tears…
Lord Pan, forgive me but the Muse tells me that this is
your cue from the Kosmos to go and enchant Nux. On today’s
walk, he’s managed to remember his lighter, but he’s
forgotten the joint and will be wandering back to Cocks
Crow Farm soon. That and Lord Ganesha says if you two hook
up to bring him along on your date next month. He’s
been able to push it up nine years.
“Thank you, Arthur,” Pan says with a little
tug to the narrator’s beard as he walks past him toward
Nux, who is standing still in the middle of the path, staring
with great intensity at the forest’s canopy.
Pan circles the boy. The boy never flinches, never notices.
Pan walks around him a third time, slowly assessing and
then esteeming, his dick curving like his lips as he leers.
Great Pan is very pleased with his prey, caught it would
seem in a hemp net of his own smoking. Pan stops before
the boy, still straining to look up at the tops of the trees,
balancing on his unsteady toes much like his admirer’s
dick, twitching as it wobbles from one fat ball to the other.
The horny god reaches behind Nux’s head and pulls
the kerchief over his face and away, letting the dreads
fall wherever gravity tugs them. He runs his long fingers
through them and speaks in a hoarse coo so the boy will
feel his breath before he hears the words:
“I see you are part wild beast as well.”
Nux falls back to earth. He looks Pan squarely in the eyes.
Two eyes just like his. But different. No goatlike slits.
It’s their colors. Each similar but different from
the other. Each alive. The commingling greens and browns
and golds and faint grays shift in the brilliance of their
hues faster than the presence or absence of sunlight as
it falls through the branches overhead could effect. Nux’s
remain their steady luminous green. The color of new shoots
of grass awash in their first rain. He blinks and watches
Pan sniff the air about his face until the broad hook of
the nose and the longest curls of the beard brush the boy’s
skin.
“And I smell it, too,” says the god.
Nux laughs easily. As if this were an ordinary interchange
among the oldest of friends.
“You remind me of someone.”
“I do.”
“Yes. Someone very beautiful.”
The boy grows still, almost tense. The god is uncertain.
Either Nux is offended or touched.
“A shepherd boy I loved very much.”
“What was his name?” Nux asks. There is a minute
upturn at the edge of his lips. A shy, halting smile. Pan
sighs. The boy has been moved by the praise of the god.
“Daphnis.”
“That’s a funny name for a boy.”
“So is Nux.”
“How did you know my name?” Nux protests.
“A god knows these things.”
“A god?” Nux punctuates this by rolling his
eyes. It is a come-on line worthy of a singles bar far from
this isolated clearing in an old forest.
“Yes. A god. Ever fuck a god before?”
“No. Well. No. Wait, yeah, some guys who claimed
to be gods…”
“But it was like making love to a marble statue.
No matter how good the drugs.” With the word “drugs,”
Pan gives Nux a knowing wink.
“Yeah, kinda. Now that you mention it.”
“We’ve all fallen for them, baby.” He
lowers his head and shakes it slowly. The tight ringlets
of hair bounce first against one horn and then the other.
“Hey, wait. I recognize you.”
“You do?” Pan says as he looks up.
“Omigod.” Nux draws out every syllable.
“Yes.”
“You’re him. Cernuttios.”
“Who?!” The god’s question comes out
too shrilly, like a child trying to play a flute for the
first time.
“The Horned God!”
“Whoa there, studlet,” Pan says as he composes
himself. He gives the boy’s nipple a gentle tweak
through his shirt. “You make the old man sound like
a box of cereal. His name is Cernunnos. Herne to his hunting
buddies. But I am Pan.”
“The Pan?”
“Is there any other?”
“I guess so.”
Pan bleats in amazement.
“I swear I already met The Pan at a gathering in
Tennessee. He looked a bit like you except he was a lot
less hairy and no tail and his hooves had little golden
wingy tattoos on them. He actually had a lot of gold on
him.”
There is a wild snort. Pan digs in the wet dirt with one
of his hooves. “Dad, you old fucker,” he whispers
under his hot breath. To Nux, he says, “That was Hermes
doing me to get laid…”
“Man, did he. He and Thumper disappeared for the
rest of the gathering.”
“Yes, all creation knows. But on the thigh of Zeus
himself I swear to you I am the real deal. The Great God
Pan.”
“Cool.”
“Cool?”
“Yeah, cool. You’re way hotter anyway.”
It is the great god’s turn to fidget.
“You know,” says Nux, “I’ve heard
about you since I was a kid. You’re the musician who
loves to fuck.”
“What musician doesn’t.”
“I thought you were all horny for chicks, you know.
But like you just asked me to fuck you. Are you gay or what?”
“Or what. Is that what the cool kids are calling
bisexuals these days?”
Nux grins. He is less stoned than Pan has thought. “Could
be. I never thought of it. I’m gay.”
Pan smiles. This boy is younger than Titania and new to
so many things. He is charmed by how he announces the familiar
and obvious to navigate his way through their seduction.
“Bully for you. You wear it well.”
“And you?”
“I’m a god.”
“A gay one?”
“Orientations are for mortals, sweet boy.”
Pan tugs at the knot in the drawstrings.
“Like Trix are for kids.”
Great Pan brays and pulls the knot free.
“Back to cereal. Someone has the munchies.”
“Has anyone told you you look kinda like the leatherguy
in The Village People?”
He brays again and lets go of the string. The pants fall.
Nux’s uncircumcised cock lolls on his heavy balls,
like a fat slug in a parka chillin’ on a beanbag,
which is word-for-word how Nux likes to describe them when
hooking up online.
“No one who’s lived to tell another.”
Nux laughs too and steps out of his pants without ever
looking away from Pan. His dick is starting to swell. “I
mean it in the good way. You know, you’re superhairy
and sexy and I bet you’d kick ass in leather.”
“This tail and these hooves in leather. You’re
high, my friend. I’d look like a circus animal.”
“Nope. You’d look hot.” At this, Nux
kicks off one Birkenstock. His dick bobs when he does it.
“And I could make you a killer pair of chaps that
would make you think different.” The other shoe flies
away.
“You could?”
“I could.” And if Nux didn’t want so
urgently to rub his face deep in the thick wool about Pan’s
inner thighs, sniffing all the while he rolls his face and
extended tongue closer and closer to Pan’s impressive
and still-growing godhood, he would spend a minute or two
explaining to the god that he works above a leather shop
back in San Francisco, cobbling together, along with several
other designer-in-training fags like himself and a several
more Asian mothers and grandmothers, all manner of S/M-inspired
haberdashery. Instead he pulls off his shirt.
“Maybe you should take my measurements.”
“Right on. But I’ll have to use my hands. No
tape.” Nux holds up his open palms before Pan. The
god’s skin slightly burns, darkening from the ruddy
browns the sun has dyed it over the thousands of years to
the black of a boar’s hide, as he tries to stop himself
from flinching before the sexy innocent. The boy has no
idea he’s hitting Pan at point-blank range with a
double-whammy of the Old World’s evil eye. This one
knows nothing about the Old World, and, for once, Pan finds
this ignorance exciting. They can be each other’s
New World. Let the exploration begin, he thinks.
“No problem. Start with the inseam.”
Nux drops to his knees in the middle of the path. The cool
dirt and grit of broken rock and stone soften under the
tufts of dense moss the god invites to grow beneath Nux.
It is an hour after noon, if that. The hottest part of the
day is to come. But all is cool in the grove. The shadows
of branches and leaves high above dance over the boy’s
face as he looks up at the god.
Great Pan is giving him his wickedest grin as he wags
his dick in his face. It slaps against his lips then chin
then cheek then nose then…Nux takes it with both hands
and deep throats what he can of the mythic prick that fathered
the horse-hung Priapus. Pan rests his weight on the back
of his muscular legs, thrusting more of his dick into Nux’s
mouth. The boy’s dreads bounce about his head as he
sputters and gags, but neither will stop. Neither want to
stop.
Until the mortal must breathe.
Nux pulls Pan’s dick out of his mouth and leaves
it to bob in the air while he gasps, wiping at the edge
of his eyes, his mouth, with the back of his hands. He is
laughing while he coughs.
“How,” the god pants, winded himself, his brown
skin red and glistening, “can one so young be so good
at so ancient an art?”
“Passion and practice,” says Nux as he weaves
his fingers into the hair of Pan’s thighs.
The boy closes his eyes and inhales and follows the scent
until he is nuzzling in the wild-smelling crook where inner
thighs and balls come together. He sniffs out burning candles
made of musk and ambergris and just-broken ancient oak casks
of dark red wines and the underbellies of a thousand little
mushrooms and laughing mouths washed in streams of cum and
imperfect beards wetted with spunk and wiry-haired cunts
soaked in their own juices.
Nux sticks out his tongue and lets it rasp over the hairs
to this side and that. He laps upwards, like at fast-melting
ice cream, and comes to Pan’s balls. They are large,
drooping, sagging under their own weight of fat and hair,
big like a bull’s; the Minotaur has nothing on Pan.
The god’s throaty bleatings inspire Nux to keep tonguing
and sucking them. Until, by accident at first and then intention,
his throbbing tongue strays up the underside of Pan’s
dick. Over lone kinky hairs and long snaking veins and the
thick ring of foreskin hooding the swollen head, each cleft
and curve of it strained to definition by the glut of burning
blood.
The boy opens his eyes and smiles at the narrow pinched
eye in the beet-red face. He licks it again and again while
he jerks the length of the dick in a fist made of two hands.
“Blow,” shouts Silenus from the midst of the
growing chorus of huddling nymphs and Faeries and witches
and satyrs and druids and dryads and deadheads and, yes
it is, Puck. Silenus’ beard and lips are stained a
faint shade of purple. The empty wineskin is tented over
his erection. He is happily caressing a very ample breast
with one hand and dandling quite hairy balls with the other.
“Blow,” he sings, “blow, o blow, you fat
pipes of Pan. Blow o blow.”
“Blow, o blow,” chant those around him until
they fall silent, eating whatever flowering fruits they
are drawn to: those showy ones, all reddening flesh, or
the delicate dark, pink, hidden ones.
Nux swallows the great god in time to the dying song and
when there is nothing but a muffled and humming stillness
in his ears he pulls away, letting his tongue drag after
the skyward-curving dick until he gives it a final lick
with just the tip. He stands and wipes his lips, never unlocking
eyes with Pan. Nux begins to stroke his own dick and the
god’s wild eyes are drawn down to it. The slug in
the parka has pushed off its hood. And grown to twice its
girth since it got off its beanbag. It is one mean, really
fat dick.
“You’ve got me so hot,” Nux says, halting
his hand at the base of his dick and gripping it till it
swells to the very edge of physics’ laws.
Pan almost crows as he imagines that inside him. “Really,”
he whispers, “an old horndog like me.” He never
once looks up from Nux’s dick.
“Yeah. God yeah. I really wanna fuck you. Now.”
Pan holds a golden bowl in his hands. “Then you will
need this.”
“It’s empty,” the boy strains to observe
as he keeps stroking his dick.
“This is ambrosia,” Pan says and lifts a tiny
dollop on the end of his finger. He holds it out to the
boy’s lips. To watch them part. The expert tongue
licks his finger clean. The lips return to their sensuous
embrace. He smiles to hear him moan.
Pan takes the empty finger and dips it in the bowl. “This
is honey.” He brings it to the boy again who licks
it away. The god smiles anew to hear him hum.
“This is sea water.” His finger is slick. Pan
laughs to see the boy’s face pucker as the salt and
sweet combine in his mouth.
“This is my own ambrosia. You are a more shortsighted
people. You call it pre-cum. So boring a name for such a
delight.” He rubs two fingers over his dickhead. He
nearly howls when Nux sucks them both into his mouth.
“You must mix all of these to fuck the ass of a god,”
he says while he stirs the bowl with one finger. “But
only take a little or you will slip more than you will slide.”
Pan hands the bowl to Nux and turns to the nearest tree.
It is a tall pine. He whispers something to it and then
bends forward to grip its trunk.
There is a wail and a groan or two in the vast pile that
was once their onlookers. Pan twists his head back to give
Nux a wink. The boy stands holding the bowl. With a quick
dip of his horns, the god encourages him to begin.
The boy looks as stiff as his dick.
“What has happened to the beautiful creature so eager
to fuck my ass? Well, go on, my Nux. Anoint that fat dick
of yours.”
Nux drags his fingers once around the bowl. As he does,
the god stares at him with a deeply furrowed brow.
“Sweet child, your concern for my well-being is touching.
If I were a mortal, I would be scrounging in my pocket or
bag right now for a condom while you lubed yourself up.
But I am not a mortal. You cannot kill me. You can break
my heart. But you cannot kill me.” For a moment, he
looks truly ancient. He shakes his head and his leer returns.
“So finish playing with your dick and fuck my hole.”
The boy nods and puts the bowl down. He takes his two slimy
fingers and touches the head of his dick. He visibly shudders.
“Feels good?”
Nux nods more enthusiastically.
“Imagine what it will feel like when you’re
inside me?”
Nux refuses to waste a moment on imagination. He seeks
knowledge. He rubs the Olympian lube all over his cock until
it shimmers. Pan sighs contentedly and leans into the tree,
arching his ass up to welcome a boy and his dick.
As Nux marches the few excited steps toward Pan, he lets
his eyes lead him up the hind legs of an enormous goat,
but with the matted fur of a sheep in the dead of winter,
until the sinew of the animal gives way to the broad curves
of muscle and fat in a well-made man, the hair grows thinner
as it comes to the cleft between the cheeks, and there above
it all is the fat brush of a tail. It flicks enticingly
and Nux grabs the Great God Pan’s ass with each hand,
spreading it to reveal an even more flirtatious hole, winking
wildly, against which he places the slick swollen head of
his wide dick and pushes.
Pan bellows for joy.
He makes a menagerie of sounds as Nux fucks him: he whinnies
for each deep thrust in; he yelps for each long pull out;
he grunts whenever there are quick rapid pumps; he brays
for every splendid ram that starts outside his hole and
ends at the base of his throat; he gives an unearthly squealing
snarl for all the side-to-side rockings.
All about the woods the pipes are playing and the earth
is rumbling to the pounding of Pan against the pine tree.
Pound, pound, pound.
Somehow the sun is six hours farther to the west than when
Nux plunged into Pan. And these six hours have been filled
with sex, which is fitting since six in Latin is sextus.
I don’t know why that’s important to tell you
for no one has been listening to me for any of that time.
Everyone is writhing in piles over here or over there and
in the middle, Pan hugs a tree while Nux fucks him like
the god he is.
The boy’s lips are moving frantically. He’s
trying to shout but I can’t hear over the quaking
of the earth. Wait, now he’s yelling clearly:
“I’m gonna come!”
He grabs hold of Pan’s tail and bucks against the
god. His dreads flail about his head while he stands on
his toes. Every muscle clenches and is thrown into relief
and still Nux bangs on as he calls out a prayer more ancient
and sacred than the oldest temples on earth.
At last he grows still and collapses atop Pan, wrapping
his arms around his broad chest and pushing his dick even
deeper inside him.
Now it is the Lord of the Wild’s turn to give thanks.
For Great Pan has never been so alive.
His cum hits the bark of the tree. The wood hisses and
buckles and grows. A big fat cone drops on Nux’s head
with a declarative thunk. He shouts and slips out of Pan
and the god echoes him. Another cone falls on Pan’s
arching back. Then a third but when this hits his horns
it bursts with a slow-motion explosion of white petals.
Then another and another. And with each new shot of Pan’s
cum, the old pine spurts higher and higher, its cones fall
from farther and farther, many exploding in midair. The
air is soon clotted with the drift of white petals and a
pungent tang.
Nux has forgotten the ache in his head and laughs and spins
about in the flowery rain until he grows dizzy and collapses
with a plop on the petal-strewn moss. All the while Pan
keeps coming until the entire forest roars. Satyrs and nymphs
and dryads and deadheads and dozens of Faeries encircling
Puck all shout at once and pipes shrill and goats sing out
what sound like hallelujahs.
The wilds grow quiet when the sun starts to droop behind
the tops of the westernmost trees. The air is electric and
still, save for a sigh or purr or warbling or two. Until
Nux breaks the post-coital calm with a laugh that starts
deep in his belly.
“Ohmigod,” he says. Each syllable preceded
and followed by a laugh.
“Omiboy,” answers Pan, still hugging the now
enormous tree.
“Omifuckingod that rocked.” He brushes petals
from his cheeks and forehead. “Can we do it again?”
He rolls back and forth across the moss and dirt and flowers,
humming what sounds like Handel’s “Hallelujah
Chorus.”
“Now?” Pan coughs. He is still winded from
laughing and coming. He turns and looks down at his new
beloved, his own eyes squinting from both his smile and
the light of the setting sun.
“Hell yeah.”
“Ever been to Greece?” Pan says as he pats
the tree goodbye and walks toward the boy.
“Nope.”
“Want to go to my place and really fuck like crazy?”
The great god nudges Nux’s butt with the tip of his
hoof.
“Cherry. Cherry bomb.”
“That’s a yes?”
“Fuck yes.” Nux laughs anew, grabbing fistfuls
of dirt and petals and moss, hurling them above him, letting
them rain back over his glimmering body.
“Then away we go, my wild thing,” says Pan
as he scoops the boy up into his brawny arms.
In the blink of an eye, my eye in fact, they are gone and…
Thanks, Arthur. Watch the hands and legs, hoovesss coming
through. Thanks, thanks, thanks. Make way for the second-combing
of Homer. Thanks, Arthur. Not blad for a journaliss. I’ll
take it from here. Wanna wineskin? It’s dry as an
old widow’s dugs, alas. Not bad for sucking but nothing
comes out. You, however, look like the kinda man who thucks
things hanging lower to the glound. Eh, Ahthor?
But, Mr. Silenus…
No, no. My turnee. For pluckee and singee. Home again,
home ‘gain to Arcady. Hey diddle diddle hee hee hee.
Tha’s ancient Geek for Wait for me!
Just like that, it’s over? you says.
Just like this! Click your hoovesss together three times
and repeat: There’s no place like home; there’s
no plates lack home; there’s no play like ho…
Okay, then…well, boys and girls and girlie boys and
boyie girls and either/ors and neither/nors, the god and
the boy and the satyr have split. But The Arthur is still
here and I’m the only one left it seems who hasn’t
come and until I do, my fingers are twitching to tap out
a story or two more. So stay if you will, go if you must,
I understand. The heat from rutting is starting to cool;
this forest is damp; we’ve sat here a long time. But
the rest of you stretch, jog in place, stretch some more.
Do a toe-touch. Do a knee bend; that’s it. Now pull
up a moss-covered rock or log, take a deep breath, grab
a partner or three or just yourself, and listen:
©2003 Ian Philips - Contributor's
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