Cicadas for Christ

I was thirteen when I discovered that Father John looked exactly like what would happen if a grocery store manager moonlighted as a priest.

Same round face. Same thick mustache. Same general aura of I should be checking produce prices instead of delivering homilies.

Like he’d clocked out at Kroger and clocked into the Kingdom of Heaven.

So naturally, I started calling him every John variation I could think of.

John the Baptist. Long John Silver. Johnny Carson. Johnny Bench. Elton John. Jimmy John. Papa John. Johnny Five. Johnny Mnemonic. Johnny Bravo. John Cena, which was awkward, because you could not see him during Mass. Father John Misty. Father John Wick.

He answered to none of them.

I collected John variations like baseball cards. He collected my infractions like evidence.

Yes, John Wick came out in 2014. Several of those arrived decades after I stopped being an altar boy. I have had forty years to punch up this material and I am not leaving money on the table.

I never stopped adding to the list. He never stopped not answering.

Though I like to imagine that once, in a tired moment, somebody said “Papa John” and his head turned before he could stop it, and he had to go sit alone in the rectory about it.

He didn’t find any of this amusing.

Which should have been my first clue that I wasn’t cut out for the altar boy life.

But my dad had dreams. Dreams of his son serving God. Dreams of respectability. Dreams that did not involve me getting suspended for climbing a fence and riding somebody else’s horse.

Yeah. That happened two months earlier.

Last day of seventh grade. Field Day.

Field Day, for the record, is when a school admits it has run out of curriculum and releases the children into a parking lot with ribbons.

Joe and I decided the private farm next to our school looked more interesting than three-legged races. We scaled that fence in our altar boy robes, these burlap nightmares with rope belts that made us look like medieval peasants who had given up on hygiene.

And then we rode a horse.

Just climbed right up. In full religious regalia. On somebody else’s property.

I want to be clear that there was no plan. No destination. Two boys dressed like tiny friars, riding a horse we did not own, at a walking pace, going nowhere, on the last day of school. It was less a crime and more a Renaissance painting.

My mom had to pick me up from the principal’s office. I was still wearing the burlap sack of shame.

“This is your chance to redeem yourself,” my dad said that summer.

“Be good. Be respectful. Be… normal.”

I was, and I want this on the record early, none of those things.

Cut to eighth grade. August. Cicada season.

If you’ve never experienced a Cincinnati cicada invasion, imagine a thousand chainsaws having nervous breakdowns. For three months. Nonstop.

The ground crunched. They covered everything. Cars. Mailboxes. Slower relatives. You learned to check your shoulders before leaving the house the way other people check their pockets.

And Joe and I had to walk through this biblical plague to get communion supplies from the Monastery.

The Monastery was not an ancient stone cathedral. It was a beige office building where you would expect to renew a license, not restock the Blood of Christ.

We knocked. Sister Rosemary answered.

Picture a tiny version of the Grim Reaper, but with hair shaped exactly like a human brain. Every fold. Every wrinkle. Perfectly sculpted onto her skull.

I have thought about that hair my entire adult life. No barber takes that order on purpose. That hair was an act of God, and not one of the friendly ones.

“Father John sent us,” I said.

Inside, the Body and Blood of Christ sat on a folding table. Hosts in Ziploc bags. Wine in what appeared to be a Burger King promotional cup from the Renaissance.

Sit with the logistics of that. The actual sacraments, the centerpiece of two thousand years of theology, stored like somebody’s bowling league snacks.

Joe grabbed the wine. Took a sip. His eyes lit up.

“Ohhhh, dis PEEEE-no GREEEEE-jee-oh! Like-a Mario! Like-a Luigi! Like-a Buddy LaRosa’s, 347-1111!”

Pure eighth-grade Italian stereotype. Every commercial we had ever seen, mashed into one horrifying accent.

“You’re gonna like da way it tastes. I guarantee it.”

“We’ll leave the light on for you,” I added, because somehow Motel 6 felt relevant.

Sister Brain-Hair stared at us. I could see smoke coming off her cerebral cortex. The folds were working.

“Sister,” I said, attempting to restore dignity to the situation, “do you have any French onion dip for these?”

I held up the Ziploc bag of communion wafers. Like I was requesting condiments at a 7-Eleven.

The silence that followed wasn’t just quiet. It was the sound of my altar boy career dying in real time.

There is only one move available to you at thirteen.

You double down.

“The hosts seem a little dry,” I explained.

Sister Rosemary did not blink. I’m not certain she had the equipment for it. She handed over the supplies the way you hand a verdict to a bailiff, and she closed that door with a softness that was somehow worse than slamming it.

The walk back to the church was maybe four hundred yards.

It took us thirty minutes.

Because somewhere on that shrieking, crunching stretch of Cincinnati sidewalk, holding the Body of Christ in a sandwich bag, one of us, and history has protected the guilty on this, said:

“What if we put them on us?”

That’s when we decided to cover ourselves in cicadas.

I can’t explain the logic. There was no logic. Just two kids who had already broken the fourth wall of appropriate behavior and decided to burn the whole theater down.

Here’s what I can tell you about applying cicadas to your own body: they cooperate. That’s the horrifying part. You don’t have to catch them. You stand still in August and present yourself, and they arrive, like you posted a vacancy.

And burlap? Nature’s Velcro.

Those robes were engineered by God, decades in advance, for this exact stupidity. Every hooked little leg found purchase. They settled in. They got comfortable. A few of them, I swear, began to sing.

We did quality control on each other. Joe adjusted one on my shoulder like a corsage. I pointed out a bare patch on his hood. We took it seriously, is what I’m telling you.

The way we had never once taken the actual job.

Then we picked the sacraments back up, two boys in burlap, upholstered in screaming insects, and we walked back into the church.

A thing you should know about a Catholic church on an August morning.

It is never empty.

There are the devout. The daily faithful. The early arrivers scattered through the pews like chess pieces God is still deciding how to use.

They heard us before they saw us.

You do not sneak anywhere wearing this many cicadas. We came through those doors buzzing like a downed power line in vestments. Cicadas crawling out of our sleeves. Buzzing around our heads. Extras from a very specific plague.

A pew creaked. A grown man two rows back made the sound of a tire losing air. That strangled snort of an adult trying desperately not to laugh in church.

Heads turned, then whipped back, then shoulders started shaking in that silent rhythmic way that means the battle is being lost.

They were trying not to laugh. In church. Because of me.

I had done that.

My career was dying in front of God and everybody, and some little pilot light in my chest kicked on for the first time in my life and whispered:

more.

Remember that pilot light. Everything I do from here, every stage and lanyard and rented van, is me trying to get back to that exact moment in that exact room.

We made it as far as the sacristy.

Johnny Five took one look at us.

His face cycled through the five stages of grief in about three seconds. Denial: a long prayerful blink, hoping we were a vision. Anger: the mustache moving independently of the man. Bargaining: a glance at the crucifix, some silent negotiation. Depression: the exhale of a man reviewing every decision that led him to this building. And then acceptance.

“What,” he said slowly, “is this?”

A cicada fell out of my collar. It landed between us and buzzed once, like it wanted to answer.

“We got the hosts, Johnny Five.”

And that was it. The end.

“You’re done.”

Not just done with altar boy duties. Done with church. Done with trying to fit into the mold my dad had built for me.

Here’s the part I left out of this story for thirty years.

My dad picked me up.

Not my mom. Him. In the middle of a workday, in the good car, still wearing the tie.

I got in and put the robe on my lap, and there were still two cicadas in it, and one of them came off in the car somewhere around Montgomery Road and started up under the seat, and neither of us said anything about it.

He didn’t yell.

He drove with both hands on the wheel at ten and two, and at the light before our street he did this thing with his jaw where he’d push it forward and to the left, which was the entire emotional range available to that man and which I would not learn to read for another twenty years.

And then he said one sentence, to the windshield, not to me:

“I just wanted them to see you the way I do.”

Green light. Home. Dinner. Never spoke of it again.

I was thirteen and I heard that as a complaint.

I was forty-five before I understood it was a compliment with nowhere to go.

The cicadas kept showing up for weeks. Every Sunday you’d hear one or two buzzing around during Mass. Somewhere over the pulpit, mid-homily, a survivor would kick on like a tiny chainsaw, and the whole parish would tense, and Father John would pause.

And I promise you that inside that pause he was thinking one word, and the word was my name.

My dad was devastated. Not because of the cicadas. Because his last hope of having a normal son had just crawled out of my sleeve and flown into the holy water font.

The cicadas taught me something the catechism never did.

God does have a sense of humor.

He just doesn’t always share it with His representatives on Earth.

And I stand by the question. Those hosts were dry.