Stories from the Census: Southern Hospitality

I hope my mother does not read this blog.

That is to say: I have to admit that sometimes, during the Summer of the Census, the heat just did me in. It addled my brains. It made me make decisions that I would now classify as "poor."

But it was 102 degrees outside all summer, and I was carrying that stupid polyester messenger bag the whole time, and no one ever answered their door, and I was just so damn hot I could have cried.

I knocked on door after door after door. Night came, and morning followed. The fortieth day of enumerating. With a slight delirium settling upon me one afternoon, I banged on one more apartment door and pressed my forehead against a nearby post.

The door swung open, and my eyes met a navel. I gazed upward: a swath of dark skin stretched over a protruding ribcage. Upward again, to crying eagles and Gothic lettering and barbed wire tattooed across a skinny chest and collarbone. Upwards further, to a toothless grin.

"Hey, lady!" said a mildly creepy and very tall man.

I smiled. I showed my badge.

"Census lady!" he said. "Come on in."

Here are things I did not do:

1. Peek my head inside with trepidation
2. Smile and decline sweetly
3. Accept, but then remain safely just inside the doorway
4. Pass GO
5. Collect $200

There was no hemming, hawing, or waffling about like I had done during my first dozen home visits. It was hot and my flesh was melting off of my body. "Oh, thank you!" I said and positively leapt through the doorway into the cold air of the apartment.

I blinked my eyes, adjusting to the dim room. I took in my surroundings, both admiring the decor and formulating an exit strategy should things turn out poorly. Having staked out a secondary exit, I then made a comprehensive mental list of items in the apartment (you know, in case I needed a weapon).

Zebra print rug. Check. Inflatable mattress. Check. Five-foot-tall pyramid built entirely from Red Stripe bottles. Check.

Aaaaand... we're done. That was pretty much it. My new friend, the minimalist, lived a life few could imagine. He also, judging from the delicious smell wafting from the kitchen, was a hell of a cook.

"It smells amazing in here!" I said, peeking over the island into the kitchen. "What are you making?"

"I'm making jambalaya, Miss Lady!" he said. "You want some?" My stomach rumbled.

"There is no way she's saying yes," you may be saying to yourself.

"Yes," I said.

I know! I know. I don't know what I was thinking. I almost never do something my mother would disapprove of. I have watched plenty of terrifying, children-snatching episodes of 20/20 and 48 Hours. I have completed all of the Stranger Danger puzzles in the McGruff workbooks. I have no excuse!

There is no moral to this story except that, when heat-addled and hungry, I make questionable decisions. "Yes, I will take a bite of your potentially-poisoned, delicious-smelling jambalaya, O Half-Naked Red-Stripe-Drinking Stranger," I said. And then I took a bite. Heck, I ate an entire bowlful. It was delicious.

Stories from the Census: Knocking on Heaven's Door

Despite my official U.S. Census Bureau messenger bag and awesome clipboard, not everyone knew exactly what I was doing walking their neighborhoods and knocking on their doors. The following is a list of people that folks mistook me for during my time as an enumerator:

1. Police Officer

2. Apartment Staff Member

3. IRS Agent

4. Washing Machine Mechanic

5. Jehovah’s Witness

6. Resident’s Girlfriend

7. Resident’s Baby Mama

8. FBI Agent

9. Plumber

10. Girl Scout

11. Doctor

12. Salesperson

13. Pool Repair

14. Mormon

Can’t make this stuff up, folks.

Stories from the Census: Orange You Glad You Came In?

I had only been enumerating for a couple of days when I had to make my first Maybe-I’ll-Die, Maybe-I-Won’t judgment call.

I had been assigned to the Yacht Club, an apartment complex I can assure you is (nearly as) sophisticated and swanky as it sounds. The clubhouse is cleverly decorated with buoys and portholes; the sign on the property manager’s office reads “Captain’s Quarters.” In the hundred-degree June heat, I crossed bridges over frothy green ponds and festering streams. I broke through clouds of gnats and mosquitoes. This place was the real deal.

I reached an apartment and took a moment to compose myself. Beads of sweat formed on my forehead and humidity was trickling down my back. The nylon strap of my stupid itchy official messenger bag dug into my shoulder. I sighed and swatted the air. It was barely noon and already miserable. I rapped smartly on the door. “U.S. Census Bureau!” A few moments, and it opened.

“Helloooo,” chirped a little woman with Richard Simmons hair. Her big brown eyes—one looking straight at me, the other resting vaguely on something in the distance—peered out at me from the cool dark of the apartment. “It ees so hot. Will you like to come inside?”

I paused. This is how government workers die, right? One second, an innocent lady is smiling and nodding her curly head at you; the next, her paranoid anarchist brother is leaping out from behind the couch with an ice pick and a psychotic grudge against his former mailman.

Another bead of sweat slid into my eye and blurred my field of vision. I still did not move, but my good eye met hers. Humankind is good, right, at the core? “Sure,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

The apartment was cool, dark, and damp. “Will you like to sit down, please?” she said, gesturing towards the couch. A mustached man nodded toward me and muted the television.

She scurried to the kitchen and pried the lid off of a shiny blue tin. Tissue papers rustled as she fished out tiny tea cookies and put them on a plate. Ice clinked in a glass. A can of orange soda cracked open and fizzled. She scurried back with a little feast and set it on the coffee table. “For you,” she said.

Going through the interview questions as usual, I nibbled on cookies and learned that her accent was Salvadorian. That she lived in the apartment with her father. That she was thirty-five. Finally, I turned to the back page and asked the standard wrap-up questions. “Can you verify your name? Is this the address at which you were living as of April 1, 2010? Is there anyone else who lives here who has not been counted on this survey?”

She stopped. She looked from her mustached father to me to the muted television to the orange soda, back to me. She smiled sheepishly.

“Well, yes.” She blushed. “My boyfriend, he lives here too, usually.”

My business pants were on, of course, and cohabitation is not exactly shocking (thanks, MTV/Friends/sexual revolution/Census questionnaire that offers “Unmarried Partner” as an option). “Okay, we’ll put him on the survey, too.” We started to go through the questions again.

Then, Question 2b. “What is his date of birth?” She giggled. “Well, he’s… 21.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I like younger men,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

I asked the wrap-up questions again. Yes, her name was right. Yes, she was living here on April 1. No, no one else besides the three of them lived here. “Okay, thank you so much for your time,” I said, “and for the cookies!”

She jumped up again, scurrying into the kitchen one more. I heard drawers opening and tissue papers rustling. As I stood to leave, she came back around the bar into the living room. We walked to the door and I turned to say goodbye.

“Here,” she said, pressing a plastic baggie full of tea cookies into my hands. She smiled and nodded enthusiastically, her Richard Simmons curls shaking like little fronds as I walked out of the dark of the apartment and into the blinding, gnatty heat of the afternoon.

Stories from the Census

The thing is, I haven’t always been a grown-up with a full-time job and insurance.

First, I was a baby. And then for a long time, I was a student. I was very good at being a student, and I loved it, and I never wanted to stop, because what if I wasn’t good at anything else? But then the University of Tulsa ejected me from its warm nurturing bosom, and I had to start figuring out how to be a grown-up.

It was what I like to call a “process.”

But if there’s one thing I know about being a grown-up, it’s that it’s very expensive. Money is a must. And as my parents failed to teach me any practical skills for participating in the underground economy (carjacking, drug-dealing, etc.), I had to find some legitimate way of getting my hands on some cash.

Luckily, the year was 2010: the year of the Olympics, an oil spill, a lunar eclipse, and Dwayne Johnson’s breakout role as the tooth fairy in… Tooth Fairy. It was also the year of the 2010 Census.

In short: desperate for work, I passed the Census test (“How would you put the following names in alphabetical order?”) with flying colors and was offered a job as an enumerator (yes, a door-knocker) for the summer.

I soon learned that when you knock on strangers’ doors, strange things can happen. That’s why they’re called strangers. I would like to share a few of those stories with the World Wide Web in the coming weeks. I hope you're ready!

Summer Plans

You ever been in a hammock before? They're real neat new-fangled things you tie up to trees and swing in all summer long. Like this:

We have two very nice, strong hammocks. Only we don't have perfectly-positioned trees. Or hammock stands.

Luckily, Miss Ruby and I have plans to use the hammocks anyway. Like this:

Everyone wins, there's no weight limit, and there's no chance of falling off and hurting yourself.

I Am This Happy

(via)

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Work

Well, three funny things, actually.

Firstly: Tulsa is still recovering from a major blizzard, record amounts of snowfall, and a decided inability to plow its neighborhood streets. With these factors in mind, I decided to park my little car safely on the street half a mile from work and hoof it the rest of the way through the neighborhood.

Secondly: Shortly upon exiting my car, I immediately took a tumble on the icy road. I spilled my lunch all over the street, laughed at myself, and went on my merry way.

Thirdly: A few moments later, I happened upon a car spinning its tires and trying to get out of the middle of the road. I pushed, the tires spun. I pushed harder, the tires spun harder. The driver exited the car. Noting that he was at least 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds, we decided that perhaps he should push and I should hit the gas. Eureka! And jackpot! Off he, too, went on his merry way.

Now, these three things may not seem to be connected or interesting. If I were just going to broadcast three random-- and rather mediocre-- life events to the world, I would be posting mundane facebook status updates, not shaking the dust off of this poor abandoned blog. But as any reader of O. Henry or W. Lechner will attest, everything matters. Everything is connected. And these three events, as I discovered just an hour ago, came together to make for a very interesting revelation.

You see, I wore snow boots to work today. I also brought along a pair of regular shoes to wear around the office. It was time to take of the boots and put on the shoes. I reached into my bag and, with great apprehension, pulled out a lone shoe.

There is only one shoe.

My sweet, sweet, black patent leather shoes, the only shoes I own with ergonomic insoles and non-slip soles, my practical, grown-up, only-shoes-I-wear-all-winter, are now separated.

The left shoe now lies like an abandoned salmon on my office floor, dejectedly beached and no longer even flailing its pathetic little fins as it gapes at me. "Where is my brother?" it asks with its last shuddering flap of a gill, its slowly congealing insides, its dimming eye.

My right shoe, the beautiful black salmon, now lies in one of three places. Revisiting the events of this morning, I imagine it, too...

Waiting patiently in my little car: safely parked half a snowy and freezing mile away.

Lying shivering in the dirty mounds of iced-over snow: which, if we are to believe local meteorologists, will be joined tonight by an additional eight to twelve.

Or, the most vaguely hilarious option: staying warm and dry in the passenger seat of a six-foot-six, 250-pound stranger who has long since exited the neighborhood, my new friend who was happily sent on his merry way just hours, and a lifetime, ago.