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FRIDAY TYRANT - THE BEST PART OF DELIVERANCE

Probably when you think of

Deliverance

, you think of the top-hick/bottom-chub ass-rape scene that people who don't have anything original to say are wont to mention about at parties or bars. I used to think that too. As far as humiliation goes, it's pretty much humiliation gold. Personally, though, I get annoyed whenever I hear people quote those two lines (that aren't even in the book, bee the dougs): "You sure got a

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yawny

mouth," and "

yawn

like a pig." Whenever I hear someone say that I always think, "That person is probably gay because the thought of gay sex makes him laugh and smile." I can say with certainty that I have never said either of those two lines, nor have I laughed at anybody trying to get me to laugh by saying those two lines. I'm somewhat proud of that. Now I realize why though. I believe it's because my superhuman and prophetic connection with All That Is Good somehow knew that there was something much larger at work here. It's like my body (which is connected to the earth and to James Dickey's buried body) knew before my mind knew and so said to me, "Do not fuck with

Deliverance

." I knew Deliverance was more than a buttfuck joke, but I had never read any Dickey. Via belligerent recommendation, I was directed towards the novel

Deliverance

. I'd always heard Dickey (born in '23) was a sick writer but I just hadn't gotten into him yet (he died in 1997). Sick both as in he was a drunk, and also sick as in "mental" ("mental," though, as in one of the greats). He was appointed poet laureate in 1966 but had also taken things up with writing novels.

Deliverance

, Dickey's biggest and most pot-boilery, follows four men who escape their "city" lives in Atlanta and head for a camping and canoeing trip up in the hills. Four men enter the woods to go down a river, and four entirely different men-things come out (and from different exits). There's nothing to spoil here. You either know what happens or it just doesn't matter because the writing is what gets you. I mean like theme-wise, I guess it's pretty Conradian. It's about a river. It's man up against everything and what everything can do to you if you have to go against it. Seems real. I guess I don't know though. I just sit around and smoke weed in New York and type. I don't really have "a river." BUT it's also about one of the four men getting ass-raped by two mountain hicks and how they kill one of the hicks for doing that but then they get fucking

stalked

by the surviving hick and have to stalk his shit in return. And then kill his ass (Dickey is good at getting you to root for the good guys). But that's not even the best part. I'll leave you with one of the best parts but let me set it up first. The narrator (who's been wounded), has killed the guy who was stalking them and now he is using a rope to lower the corpse down to the river from up on a cliff so they can bury/hide it. Oh, this is neat. When I reread this part below just now, I started hitting my volume down button because I confused the loudness of this writing with music that was not in fact playing on my iTunes. Here you go:

I uncoiled the rope from my belt. I had a lot of it. I didn't believe I had enough to let the body all the way down to the river, but I could let it down some of the way and after that I was sure I could think of something. I dragged the body to the edge of the cliff and put the rope around it and made it as fast as I could, tying square knot after square knot—the only kind I knew, as it is the only kind that most people know—under the armpits. The head lolled and jerked as I tied, and this irritated me more than anything had in a long time; irritated me more than the set of Thad's secretary's—Wilma's—mouth and her tiresome, hectoring personality posing as duty. The wound in the man's throat was not painful-looking, particularly—it was nothing like as gruesome as the hacked-at hole in my side—for it had closed over and clotted, and now looked like nothing more than a deep scratch, almost like a bad shaving cut; it was hard to believe that it went all the way through him and out the back, and that it had killed him; that is was his death itself. I tied the other end of the rope to the tree closest to the edge, and went over and tried to call down to Bobby, but the sound of my voice falling into the abyss frightened me; I knew it would never reach bottom; I could feel the strength and meaning fade from it in the sun that filled the emptiness. There was a kind of crack or fault in the rock, turning green with bushes near the water, and Bobby's face came up through it. There may also have been a little voice with it, something added to the sound of the river and coming up, but if it was there I couldn't make out what it said. I might as well; it was the thing I had prepared. I shoved the body over the edge with my feet, kicking it and rolling it and holding the rope in both hands. Just after it went over it seemed to hitch in the air to get its feet down, and then settled into a long, hard, unsure pull against me. I worked along the line back to the tree and braced against it, paying the invisible weight out hand over hand down the wall. It was hard going; I kept having to take turns of the thin nylon around one wrist and then the other, and then both, oftener and oftener. The coil at my feet wore away as I sweated, and the red rings around my wrists cut deeper, nearing the blood. I began to wish I had taken a turn of rope around the tree before I started, but I had to hold: there was something about just turning loose of the rope and letting the man fall free and then bring up and dangle, that was shocking to me; I would not do that, no matter what. I sweated and braced, and tried to imagine what Bobby was now thinking, seeing a man come down like this, inch by inch; a man who had held a gun on him while another one cornholed him, and would have killed him in an instant. I tried also to imagine, from the different tensions on the rope, what the body was doing and how it was doing it, all under a kind of control, undignified and protected by the red rings on my wrists and my pain and work, kneeling on and then falling away from outcroppings, rocks and protections, dangling, sliding, rolling, but so not falling and bursting apart on the river-rocks like a sack of jellied sticks.

-- EH? Right? Right. GIANCARLO DITRAPANO