Between Rock and a Hard Place

The owner of the only legal business on Mary's block is Julian Leevee, who has operated a nameless laundromat on the western side of the street since 1982. Asked to comment for this article, Leevee says only this: "It can get pretty rough down here. They'll burn you down. They don't give a damn about anything. So as far I'm concerned, there's nothing going on down here. I don't see anyone selling anything. The cops are doing a good job. Let's just drop the whole story."

Denver software engineer Michael Schreiber is more forthcoming. Schreiber owns a two-story apartment building on the eastern side of the block. It's up for sale. He can't seem to find a buyer.

"People come to look at it, and they're afraid to get out of their cars," he says. "I had one woman who had an appointment for me to show her the property, and as soon as she got out of her car, she was approached by a drug dealer asking her if she needed anything. She said, 'I'm not even going to go inside,' and left.

"I can't even keep tenants in there, because the drug dealers scare them off," he continues. "They're just so brazen about it. It's wrong to let it go on like that, but it seems like the people who live on that block, they're either involved in the drugs themselves, or their attitude is 'We leave them alone, they leave us alone.'"

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Mary is the exception. She's a pissed-off lady with a garden hose.

All day long -- and she works long days -- Mary cleans other people's houses. When she returns to her own in the evening, she likes to unwind in her back yard by tending her garden. One night in late June, she was doing just that when her peace was disturbed by a bunch of crackheads smoking out in the alley behind her fence. They were giggling and shouting and turning the air over Mary's garden sickly sweet with the exhaust fumes of burning cocaine paste.

Mary turned the pressure up on the water coursing through her hose, calibrated angle and distance, and then unleashed a high arc of water over the fence, raking her fire back and forth like a helicopter gunner strafing a tree line.

"Get the fuck out of here, you zombies," she shouted.

She has only sprayed a drug dealer once -- the tattooed dope man in the silver car -- and she says she probably won't do it again.

That afternoon, twenty minutes after Mary called non-emergency dispatch, she was sitting on her steps, still waiting for the cops.

"They're getting pretty cavalier about me calling," she said.

Children rode past her yard on bicycles and Big Wheels. Mary greeted them by name.

A beat-to-hell blue station wagon pulled up outside the derelict beauty parlor, and the woman driving it got out and went inside. "That car's always coming around," Mary said. "Check out the signs on the side."

Attached to the car's exterior were placards that read "Funtastic Fun Family Fun Center."

According to Funtastic Fun owner Nathan Elinoff, when the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post raised their joint advertising rates last year, he pulled his ads and devised a new promotional scheme for his indoor amusement park.

"I found a way to advertise, like with bus advertising and taxi-cab advertising. What I do is, if you put our signs on your car, I give you ten free admissions every month," Elinoff says. "I have 350-plus Funtastic Fun cars on the road."

Informed that one of those cars was making frequent stops at a soon-to-be notorious crackhouse, Elinoff replies, "Holy canoli!" He then asks for the car's license-plate number. "I'll be terminating their contract immediately," he says. "That's not cool."

Mary wouldn't describe anything about her block's drug houses as cool, except maybe their turn-of-the-last-century architecture. But then, she had no love for living in Lowry, either. "I wouldn't trade my place now for the dump I was living in out in Lowry, or the fake people out there," she says. "Lowry is where America is hiding its head in the sand. It's all petunias and white people mowing grass. It's not real. At least my block's real."

Sometimes too real.

As Mary waited for the cops, an obese woman wearing nothing above her waist except a grimy, overloaded bra jiggled down the sidewalk like a kid chasing an ice cream truck. "I got five on that," she yelled after a dealer.

"I do go off a bit about the social veneer of our society," Mary said. "But when you don't even have a little veneer, it can be an ugly thing."

More than a half hour after Mary reported the dope man's threat to beat her ass, a lone patrol car turned a corner onto the south end of her street, proceeded by three young boys on bicycles, whistling and yelling an alarm. "5-0! 5-0!"

The children have been hired by the crack slingers to ride patrols around surrounding blocks, racing back to conduct their little Paul Revere rides anytime they see a blue-and-white on its way to Downing.

"By the time we roll through in a police car, nothing obvious is going on," Sergeant Fall says. "They know we're coming long before we get there. Even our undercover cars are pretty well-known, unfortunately."

The police car drove the length of the street once, the officer behind the wheel staring straight ahead. Mary watched him go.

"I understand that crack is like a roach problem," she says. "The cops know if they fumigate this block, the roaches will just reappear somewhere else and continue to multiply.

"But at this point, I don't give a shit. I'm feeling selfish, and I'm ready for the roaches to be off my block."