From Houston Street on south in New York City they’re rough-drafting the decennial U.S. invasion of privacy and faucet count. It’s called “1980 census dress rehearsal.” You couldn’t ask for any stonier practice field; I’d rather do the annual audit at a sperm bank. Most census forms are mailed, but this is derelict village. Bums concierge it on every other frontstoop, comparing vintages with the nice perception, though not the eloquence or the carte des vins, of M. William Rusher. I know one wipe-out who has sat in his stuffed armchair (next to his end table and his lamp) on a Bowery street divider since late April. Somehow I don’t think his census form will arrive. Not to mention prostitutes and dosehead runaways whose underwear is labeled occupant. And housing. There’re tenement flats so over-partitioned they have walls built across the bathtub. Lose your soap cake and you have to go next door and knock. The final count, south of Houston, will be about as precise as a Romantic poet’s wild surmise.
I’ll play it fair: Census 1980 isn’t all that impertinent: bashful, in fact, when set beside any itemized IRS form. At least you don’t need a receipt for your children. Of course the 1789 Document said “enumeration”—nothing more—but “in such manner as they [Congress] shall by law direct.” (Where was Franklin—flat tire on his sedan chair?—when those over-enabling words were passed?) With a clause like that, by 2010 they’ll ask for info about caloric intake and regularity: the real GNP.
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