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Health & Fitness

The non-death of a local legend

Using new media to service local lore

One of the remarkable things Patch does for the East End is to give us a true sense of community -- daily, consistently and on-line -- in a way that real life, with its time and space limitations, cannot quite deliver.

Several of us were reminded of this (on Memorial Day, no less) when one of Regent Square’s most enduring street characters turned out to have been not seen for five days.

Everybody in these parts is familiar with Jimmy “Multi-layer” Mularkey because they see him walking all day long in way too many clothes along South Braddock and Forbes. But if people start telling you they actually know Jimmy, get it in writing.

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His mysterious quasi-homeless routine has been running for decades in Regent Square’s doorways, bus shelters, back seats of parked cars and storerooms of various dining establishments.

Back when he was living truly outdoors in all seasons with only the clothes on his back, it was startling to see where he sometimes spent the night when it was 5 degrees or 90 degrees. It was just as startling to see people cruise up to the bus stop at Forbes and Braddock, where he spent his mornings, and hand him a huge bag of Wendy’s or Burger King.

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Crawford Murton never tires of recounting the afternoon that a stunning Fox Chapel housewife motored up in an Audi convertible, plucked Jimmy off a barstool in Ryan’s, took him for a drive in the cemetery, and brought him back a half-four later with a big smile on his face. This is the last dependably reported instance of Jimmy having smiled.

Some are dumbstruck when he wanders in to an establishment in the evening and whips the lawyers and accountants playing “Jeopardy” on TV. Others marvel that he pronounces “Mubarek” and “Muammar Gaddafi” better than Brian Williams.

Those of us who hand him a cigarette or two or a few bucks occasionally were cheered last year when he told us he’d gotten a free apartment in Squirrel Hill from “some do-gooder priest.” His current beef is that, sure, he gets to walk downhill from Squirrel Hill every day to his “territory,” but that it’s uphill -- “completely uphill!”-- returning home at the end of a long day on the streets.

All this became poignant late Saturday when the main-line media reported a body had been found at the Subway on Penn Avenue. That hasn’t really been Jimmy’s “patch” (if I may use the term here), since Jake’s closed. But still.

We took to our phones and Facebook and collectively determined that nobody had seem Jim since Tuesday.

But because of Patch and other hyper-local media and messaging systems, we also understood that we have the tools at our fingertips to quickly and effectively behave like a community and look out for one of our own.

Better still, it’s a feature of communities -- whether virtual or actual -- that they’re populated by all kinds of people who have all kinds of talents, often at extremely expert levels.

So it was, by noon on Memorial Day, we were able to run down the facts. One of us got to a morgue attendant and then was able to spread the happy news that the stiff at Subway’s dumpster was not Jimmy -- not this time, at least.

It’s a cinch that Jimmy Mularkey will never read this. He doesn’t believe in computers any more than he does manicures or income taxes.

But if you see him in the next few days, say “hi” and understand that he’s smarter than you, way tougher than you could hope to be, has more admirers than you’ll have in a lifetime, and that he’s a stone, authentic original.

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