They say that one day, the Big City will be saved. They speak of this great defender, a brave protector...a guardian angel for this godforsaken place. ‘Saint Jimmy’, they call him. I hear muted mutterings and wishful wishes everywhere I go.
They tell me that he can ease a hungry man’s stomach with his one, all-seeing eye. Or, that he can lift a worried woman’s spirit with but a few sprinkles of his sweet delight. But where was this loveable rogue that everyone was talking about? And why was he still hiding, refusing to come and save all those lost and lonely souls in desperate need of his help?
Perhaps Saint Jimmy lived in the hearts and minds of those who required him most. Perhaps he bunked up with the homeless on the corner, searching for the last remnants of secondhand cigarettes cruelly tossed to the gutter.
Maybe he walked among all those pleasure-seeking pilgrims out on the town, trading tall tales with pretty party girls beneath the dirty neon lights.
Between the back-room brutes fighting bare-knuckle brawlers, the dodgy dealers ducking down darkened alleyways, and the undercover cops in their unmarked vehicles...
...Saint Jimmy had to be somewhere.
He had to be among them.
But alas, as I scoured the blazing backroads and the spiralling spider-like side streets, the spirit of Saint Jimmy would continue to elude me. Like a greasy dessert wrapper dancing in the wind, he was always one step ahead. And always just that little bit out of reach.
Was he some kind of secret shadow dweller? A ghost or a spy perhaps? Did he arrive as a lonely wanderer cast here from another town? A trapped soul of tortuous tumult?
No. Saint Jimmy was ultimately none of these things. For Saint Jimmy was a fraud. A fake! A forger of a phoney legacy. A fictitious fabrication of foolish design.
That’s what I had thought at least.
Until one night, I finally found him...
It was a cold night. An evening of countless perils and pitfalls. But up on the hill, overlooking the nearby streets with its flashing lights and blue painted store-front, a little doughnut shack stood still and undisturbed.
“Saint Jimmy’s” the sparkling sign read, “...saving this great city one sprinkled donut at a time!”
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