Tommy was dead, but Billy held on. Though his friend was lost, he had a better, cooler friend in Jesus.

It was a typical spring morning in northeastern Ohio. Sunlight filtered through corpse-gray clouds down onto the soggy ground below. Tommy and Billy were practicing their usual spring pastime, slush fishing. "It's amazing the things you find in the slush," Tommy said, swiping his fishing net along the curb.

"I haven't found anything good since that rusty cigar case back in '98," Billy sighed. "That's when I stopped believing in God."

Everyone has a cross to bear. Especially Brother Stickthrough.

It was a dark, windy April morning when we caught up with Vlad Stickthrough, a monk at the Abbey of Our Tortured Lord some twenty miles southwest of the holy city of Jerusalem. Brother Stickthrough stood over a patch of crabgrass creeping out between the cracks in the dusty ground. Back arched, shoulders hunched, teeth clenched, splintery shaft of wood protruding from his back and chest, he mercilessly drenched the weed with a five dollar bottle of Roundup. "Fucking grow on my ground when I got a chunk of wood stuck through me. I'll show you who deserves to breath my fucking air," he rambled crazily.

Brother Stickthrough wasn't always so bitter and psychotic, nor was he always devoted to the Lord. Let me tell you about the tale of Stickthrough versus Hitler.

"I make no bones about it," says Cactus John, "the Lord speaks through me. Jesus chose me to be His new prophet."

To look at Cactus John, you really wouldn't think him much of a holy man. His arms are a tapestry of obscene tattoos, his breath reeks of Smirnoff, and a Frankenstinian scar pierced with barbed rings wraps around the top of his skull.

"It's my crown of thorns," Cactus John explains to those caught staring.

Truly, there is more to Cactus John than meets the eye. Truly, I thought, there is something altogether unholy about this booze-blooded riffraff.