I had signed up for the Census on a lark in early Spring. I was unemployed and looking for things to do. “How fun would that be,” I remember thinking to myself, and then forgot about it.

When the U.S. Census field office called me in July, I tentatively accepted the position, unsure as to how this worked in a pandemic. I had my photo taken by a notary. My fingerprints recorded. My background checked. I attended orientation in an outdoor tent on a college baseball field. All of this I did as though I could back out any minute. A week later, I was trained, and they released me onto the streets of Los Angeles in the middle of a pandemic with a bookbag filled with Census forms, two pens, an iPhone with my case list on it, a small bottle of hand sanitizer and two masks.

“I’ll try it for a day,” I thought. Then the job my husband was supposed to start in August was pushed to January due to a spike of new Covid cases in Los Angeles. Suddenly, I was the breadwinner at $25/an hour courtesy of the Federal Census Bureau.

The first week I was sent to canvass my own neighborhood. After living in a neighborhood for 20-plus years you think you know it, but with my Census badge I was able to enter yards and beautiful apartment buildings I have only admired from the sidewalk.

I finally got a glimpse into a row of bungalows that have fascinated me since I moved here, entered an apartment building with a beautiful doorway I have looked at wistfully, and spent a delightful day in a large apartment complex with gorgeous views, which turned out to be Section 8 housing filled with little old ladies.

When someone opens their door, especially in the middle of a pandemic, something kind of magical happens. The scene behind them is a glimpse, a snapshot, of their life. As an enumerator you focus on the person, but it is impossible not to notice whether the studio apartment is bare or stacked to the ceiling with belongings, nor to miss the tell-tale signs of a family with toys on the floor, nor to admire the distressed wood beams in a picturesque cottage.

Being a Census enumerator was like having an all-day pass to everyone’s personal universe. Just being out and walking through the neighborhood was liberating. I had been penned in for months due to the pandemic, and was so grateful whenever someone opened their door that my hungry eyes – desperate for a new scene – absorbed the tableaux in a matter of seconds. Just being out and walking through the neighborhood was liberating.

But being a Census enumerator during a pandemic also had its challenges. I knocked on a lot of doors that would not open. I was eyed through the peep hole of at least eight out of every ten doors I knocked, and more often than not the person on the other side of the door would leave it at that. Folks pretended they weren’t home, or told me to leave through their door or smart doorbell loaded with a camera and microphone that connect to their phones.

A week into the job, my case list changed to a neighborhood just six miles away – one of the poorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles that I had only previously driven through. I walked around this neighborhood for a week in the hot August sun, talking to as many people as possible, most of whom spoke Spanish as their first language.

It was here that I met a woman who taught me to knock loudly on the front door of old apartment buildings without callboxes because eventually someone would come out and let me in. These were old nostalgic apartment buildings built in the 30’s and 40’s, with long hallways peppered with doors to one room units. I interviewed a family of 8 in a building like this. Their children translated while I asked the family for their names, birthdays, where they lived on April 1, do they rent or own, who is related to whom – questions that are just the basics, but feel intrusive when talking to people who are fearful of anyone with a badge from the U.S. Bureau of Anything. I do not remember how many times I asked children to tell their parents there were no questions about citizenship in a Census interview.

Each building I entered was a new universe. Some buildings smelled. Some had worn, dirty carpets in the hallways, others with hardwood floors that echoed as you walked down them. There was a clown painting in the hallway of one building that took me by surprise every time I passed it. In some buildings, folks kept to themselves and did not know their neighbors, even though their front doors faced each other. Others were like micro-communities where everyone knew everyone’s name and chatted easily with each other as they swept the dirt off their welcome mats or watered their potted plants outside their apartments. Others still, knew their neighbors well but would not discuss them with me if I did not find them at home.

Some folks wanted to tell me more than just the basic questions the Census puts together to track population and economic trends, or the race and age of the people who make up our landscape and the languages they speak. Others eyed me with suspicion, or gently closed their door on a warm day when I approached. Those who wanted to talk would tell me they had lived in that apartment for 7 years, or 20 years. That they came from Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico. That their son, sitting behind them in the apartment working on the computer, was in college. Often folks would mention apologetically that their apartment was Section 8 housing (not a Census question).

Housing was uneven in this neighborhood. Like most of LA. buildings were built in disparate decades that ranged from the 1930’s to the 2000’s. Some were cared for, others not, giving the blocks a messy, uneven look. I noticed that one tough looking building could change the feel of a block. Overall, families lived here, and without fail, when someone opened their door, the apartment was clean and neat.

On a particularly tough block I found a of row of the most beautiful and well-cared bungalows I have ever seen. Like everything in that neighborhood, access was restricted, and only granted only if someone felt they could trust you. I was lucky to get in. Brightly painted, with freshly cut green shrubbery in the courtyard, this collection of charming one-story buildings faced each other and ran deep into the block. A birdcage hung at the front door of the first two apartments of both rows, each with a small colorful bird who sang to his counterpart across the walkway all morning. It seemed like the sun shone a little brighter on this part of the block. The people who lived here created an oasis.

I interviewed a young woman there who lived in a 1-bedroom with 6 other family members. When she opened her door, the smell of aromatic food wafted from the kitchen. She patiently and politely answered the questions, which takes about thirty minutes if you are counting seven people.

Driving the six miles home at the end of the day, I watched as the neighborhoods changed. Gradually the sidewalks became cleaner, the buildings were better taken care of, housing was less dense and the trees were taller, greener, older.

Folks in wealthy neighborhoods were not as polite or welcoming. For starters, the majority of them lived behind locked gates to their estates – less of a safety measure, and more of having the means to limit access to their sheltering sphere. On the off chance that you’d catch someone outside, they’d pretend they didn’t live there as they planted a flowering plant in their front yard, or walked out to get their mail. “I really don’t know anything about that,” one man told me after I followed up to ask if he had been “staying” there on “holiday” since April 1^st. I lost count of the number of men who came to the door naked, their hips tucked behind the door, informing me it was an inconvenient time.

I never saw some of the people I interviewed. I would knock on their door and a voice from the other side would say they did not want to open the door because of Covid-19, or my personal favorite, they didn’t feel like getting dressed (always men). Often I could hear them so clearly that we would agree to do the interview through the door. I interviewed one man through the Ring smart doorbell on his doorjam, another through the callbox to his building – authentic pandemic Census experiences. These were the folks I wondered about the most. Did they really ride out the pandemic never setting foot outside their estate, house, one bedroom, or studio apartment? Not even for the basics? How large or small was their world now? When this is all over, what will it take to get them out their front door again?

And then of course there is the stuff you see that you can’t make up. One guy came to the door so baked that when I asked him how many people were living in his apartment on April 1, 2020 he replied, “New Jersey?”

I watched as a woman walked her pig on Normal Ave.

I saw a neighborhood grocery truck vendor whose juvenile chickens were loose on the dirt between the sidewalk and the street. They weren’t penned in or tethered, but somehow they pecked at the same three square feet, never running into the street or down the sidewalk. I must have passed him and his chickens every day for a week.

There are times in a pandemic when life seems to stand still. One night around 8:00 p.m., a young woman was just getting home to her apartment, which was the next address on my case list. I approached her as she opened her door, introduced myself and asked if she would like to spend a few minutes completing her Census interview. “I would,” she said as she turned to look at me. “But I’m going upstairs to pack for my brother’s funeral. It’s not a good time.” And with that, she turned back to the door she had unlocked and let herself into her universe of grief.

My husband, Erik, reminded me of something artist David Hockney said in Shotgun Freeway, a 1995 documentary about Los Angeles by Morgan Neville and Harry Pallenberg. Hockney famously lived on Mullholland Drive with his partner Gregory Evans, both of whom were transplants themselves from their native London. One day as they drove down Mullholland, Gregory complained LA was dull and too aggressive. Hockney replied, “What do you mean? This is the LA I know. Everyone here has a car. They could all be driving down this road looking at these marvelous colors. There are hundreds of LA’s, Gregory. I live in one of them.”

Ten minutes from where I live there is a Latino flea market on Saturday mornings along a busy avenue. Fifty or sixty vendors take part in a microeconomy I previously knew nothing about until I stumbled upon it on a Census shift. I used to think that after 20-plus years I knew Los Angeles pretty well until I canvassed six small neighborhoods over the hot summer weeks and marveled at the colors, the people and the multiple universes I had the privilege to glimpse.

I got a peek, a flash, a sliver of a fraction of the multiverse we call LA. Hockney was onto something, but he was wrong when he said there are hundreds of LA’s. There are thousands, possibly millions of LA’s behind closed doors.