Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Getting Drunk With Jesus
    Getting Drunk With Jesus
    Getting Drunk With Jesus
    Ebook102 pages1 hour

    Getting Drunk With Jesus

    By Joey Beret

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    All communities have rules, even if that rule is not to have any rules. Often these rules do not become apparent until they are challenged either unwittingly or by a deliberate quest for change. This is the story of Tommy Jones and his journey into adulthood. Set in a typical South Wales community, it tells of his battles with love, his understanding of desire and above all his need for acceptance and inclusion. The path of Anwen, the object of Tommy's lifelong love, is also followed and we share her own deep angst as she battles to suppress her love for Tommy, for fear of parental and peer retribution. The non-existence of the socially unacceptable is questioned with the failure to acknowledge what really happens after dark in this community whose closeness is its worst enemy. This novel does not attempt to hide, or instigate revolt, but simply asks that the truth be told. The language is unyielding, the thoughts vivid and the imagery sometimes familiar; yet viewed through Tommy's eyes raises new questions where there, by order, should be none.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJoey Beret
    Release dateJun 11, 2014
    ISBN9781311511447
    Getting Drunk With Jesus
    Author

    Joey Beret

    Joey, aka me, is now a bit older than the young man in that picture, i am now happily hitting middle age having battled my way through an eventful and often challenging life. Writing is an important part of my person, as are the books that surround me in my countryside home in West Wales. I am no longer a man of great ambition as i have had a stab at most things that i wanted to explore:music, politics, women, the usual things. I am a happy man with many wonderful friends that i have tagged onto along the way and a scattering of fantastic offspring, as well as a wife with whom i will be honoured to grow old. I would like to think that my written work contains some moments of quality, observation and honesty that will provide some moments of pleasure to the reader and perhaps even capture in words some thoughts that we may share.

    Related to Getting Drunk With Jesus

    Related ebooks

    Cultural Heritage Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      People Are Strange

      Oct 13, 2019

      People Are Strange
      5 min read

    • Article

      Prohibition

      Sep 10, 2021

      It had been ten days since my last fix. I knew what I was going to do was wrong, but unless you knew the yearning that your body exerts, the internal pull which strangles your very soul into submission, then you cannot judge me. Yes, it was wrong. Ye

      15 min read

    • Article

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary

      Jun 17, 2020

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary
      7 min read

    • Article

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary

      Jun 17, 2020

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Art Of Conversation

      Nov 1, 2023

      The Art Of Conversation
      4 min read

    • Article

      SHORT STORY by MARGARET ATWOOD

      Mar 22, 2023

      SHORT STORY by MARGARET ATWOOD
      7 min read

    • Article

      Love Letter ON LOSS

      Sep 17, 2020

      Love Letter ON LOSS
      3 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Nov 1, 2022

      Day after Thanksgiving. I give thanks for Eveto beat the rush of appreciating hernext year and let her sleep inuntil three hundred o’clock.Thank you light on the mountainfor being my star on cloudy nights.Thank you all the guns I’ve never ownedand ki

      6 min read

    • Article

      Just Say Yes

      Jan 1, 2022

      Just Say Yes
      5 min read

    • Article

      SHORT STORY by MARGARET ATWOOD

      Mar 22, 2023

      SHORT STORY by MARGARET ATWOOD
      7 min read

    • Article

      Tessa Castro

      Feb 7, 2024

      IN COMPETITION No 302 you were invited to write a poem called The Doormat. Most of your doormats were metaphorical, but instead of a Welcome doormat, Jenny Jones’s narrator concluded, ‘What I need’s a mat to shout: / “Go Away”, “Be Off”, “Keep Out”!’

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Man I Should Have Married

      Dec 29, 2019

      The Man I Should Have Married
      11 min read

    • Article

      Collins Ferry Landing

      Jul 1, 2020

      for my father Only rivers bottom out like this.Only rivers bottom out with this kind of conviction.Not humans, or, at least, not humans asindisputably human as you were,trapped in consciousness’s surplus, exilic,animalized absurdity, writhing in its

      5 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • Article

      Found At Sea

      Jan 28, 2020

      Found At Sea
      6 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Sep 1, 2023

      How thoughtlesslyI took it, this castiron Aunt Jemima doll hauled from the trunkof my whitefriend’s car. Another of T’s, her Jamaicanhusband’s, mementoshe collected as a joke. Not unlikethose figurinesI recall a college friend once exhibited, who’d b

      6 min read

    • Article

      Lockdown Stories

      Nov 13, 2020

      Lockdown Stories
      6 min read

    • Article

      On Aging

      Mar 1, 2022

      On Aging
      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Getting Drunk With Jesus

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Getting Drunk With Jesus - Joey Beret

      Getting Drunk With Jesus

      By

      Joey Beret

      Copyright 1998 Joey Beret

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      CHAPTER ONE

      If I sit down in silence and listen very hard I can hear the wastage running to the sea; it runs through the man-made tunnel where our canal used to be. A hysterectomy, our valley is no longer going to produce lifelong tales of misery. The canal banks are time trodden, compressed and baked crust firm, but they no longer support our lives, they are as barren as the newlywed wives of our valley. They are as a collar encasing the throat of piped cement that has swallowed our future and our past. Nothing for now will last, as the secrets washing in our canal have been binned: secrets of the virtuous, the parasitic and the sinned. How long should I spend on this towpath? Is it not clear that in its obliqueness, that in its dryness, new crops will never grow, the seeds of the nightshade and the hollyhocks are all that the wind is prepared to blow.

      I could if I wished recount a tale for every strip of this tightly packed and boot worn bank which drew me like a famished rat to a sewer, and it is to where now I return having learnt so much in the city, where all the rodents get poisoned or burned. I remember from here throwing and missing, I remember the faces of the boys, after my first shot had sent off the fish; they were all so annoyed,

      Tommy you cretin.

      Tommy you fool

      Jonesy couldn't hit him with a tank.

      All right then Clarkey next time let's see you do better, and I dropped my stones and ran, like our village fish I fled as he swam, for all of our days in the valley fighting the forever taunting jibes of the boys. The boys from our village and the miners from our pit plotted and planned the downfall with maggots, spinners and worms, but the fish in our canal evaded them all and fled each season to spawn, telling it's offspring to never return as the waters were putrid and wan.

      Was it fair to let the other boys know that the fish was passing and drag them all down with rocks and stones, the hunters of their prey? Why did I do that?

      Why did I not just throw the stone and have done with it?

      Come on now you boys, leave that fish alone, teacher is waiting for you, Ben the Barge gruffed, so they dropped their weapons and ran, as he anxiously pulled at his rod, masturbating with excitement at his find. So I tailed off behind and watched. Ben never caught his fish.

      We would run up to school with hands deep in pockets as if we were in the know, and if only old Ben would have arrived a few seconds later we'd have landed him with every throw.

      Except you Tommy Jones, you’re bound to have missed.

      Fuck you guys.

      I'd like to see a section of this pipe bulging in full flow, suffocating the life from the filth within, no longer hollow. Drowning, strangulation and intoxication all crudely performed within these inverted catalysts, clean, linear and bold of the engineering, that would clean up our valley and take away the dead coal and factory waste and fill in the rat infested hole: our canal. Fill it in, be damned, the shit we're pouring down the valley's gangrenous veins will leave scars where the venom struck so acidicly deep that it rotted the core of your bones; it's just that we no longer have to know. The mutts have somewhere new to foul, and the kids don't come down here now. Where are all the kids? Nobody down here for a grope or a fag, dodging lessons or a short cut home? It seems as though the weeds are just left to grow.

      I shall rise and wander up that lane that slips its way through head height stone walls that hide all except that that is intimate, blowing on the washing line in the wind, and at night the silhouettes from the back bedroom inviting us all to come in. I shall head from the canal to my home, but no welcome awaits me there and I shall walk the streets alone. I don't think I care how many people there are as they stare at my face as that of an unknown.

      I don't think I care that they pretend to have forgotten that I was once part of this, they should treat me better than this, because I know that they know my face. I know that they know why I ran away, and that their guilt cannot be hidden behind shutters, net curtains, dusters or plants as I walk with my head held high. All you have to do is to say hello; I don't want apologies or thanks. Don't try to explain that we were younger then and now of course we know better than that, 'cause given the chance you'd do exactly the same if I was weaker and needed your praise. Come on stop hiding I really don't care unless Anwen is hiding somewhere.

      She'd be the one who'd touch my heart with a glance that says she knows me well. Though times have changed, how fair her looks are still, I'm sure. She would not recognise me. I've been hung by my feet for many a year and my face is now sallow with fear, my eyes protrude like those of a bird but there's no glory in what they conceal. The fear of meeting those I once knew, who loved me for my innocence, and then you, as they, discarded me as a liability who would not endure, as only they knew how, all the way to the bitter end of this life. In that you were wrong, yes in that I will beat you all, as one by one you die without having touched the pain in my cry. I beat you into losing, because I took all you could give and more, and now I'm back to seek revenge just by appearing in your warren of secrecy, bullying and shame. I know the truth behind the lies, and now I'll bugger you all with my infested film covered eyes. Yeah come on out now to greet me boys, I can show you a trick or two. Nothing like a good fat cock you know boys, and this one here's for you.

      The mood of the valley has scarred me forever with my politeness having suffered and all. A nod of good day no longer exists as I stare head high at the wall. And where perhaps in times gone by, like all good Brits, I would have begged pardon for all that was wrong, be it my fault or not at all; those days are gone and you are equally to blame. There is no shame in hearing you repent as I stare and watch you dither, I will not crumble under the weight of your humble apology, I shall accept that you are wrong and walk on, only for you to curse me as I leave you to quiver. I am strong. No plastic smile of comfort shall distort my face when conversation offered sees the speaker fall from grace, and even on the second time of offering, when I understood the first: don't anticipate a burst of laughter as it will not be there. You will be reduced to wringing out your palms or running fingers through your hair.

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1