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.
Scott Laumann
John Johnston
This laundromat is the only legitimate business on the 2700 block of Downing.
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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."
