The Voyeur's Motel Page 13

  “You cannot piss straight if you have an erection,” he explained, “and that’s why so many men prefer the sink, which is about waist-high and offers a wider target area. If I had my way, I’d design a household toilet that was more like the upright urinals you have in the men’s rooms of public buildings. There would still be a bowl in front to sit on, but in the back there would be a wide-sized toilet cover that, after you lifted it up and pushed it back in an upright position, men could piss against it and allow their urine to rebound off it and cascade down into the bowl.”

  But he found it difficult to offer excuses to motel guests whose offensive habits consisted of eating fast food out of containers and then wiping their greasy fingers on the bed linen, and also pet owners who failed to fully wash away the room’s rug stains caused by their urinating and defecating dogs.

  He faced a dilemma whenever a guest approached the registration desk accompanied by a dog. Should he falsely claim that there were no available rooms and therefore lose business to one of the competing motels, all of which were pet friendly? Should he instead assign them to one of his twelve rooms with vents, and then keep a close eye on their animal’s toilet manners?

  The problem with his being a dog’s watchdog was that dogs often seemed to become aware that he was watching from the attic. Being very keen of hearing and sensitive to smell, dogs would frequently point their noses up toward the vents and begin to bark, causing the Voyeur, while leaning over a vent, to freeze in that position and try not to breathe. If a dog continued to bark, and indeed jumped up and down on the bed while balancing its body on its hind legs, the Voyeur would crawl backward as soundlessly as possible, hoping that his retreat would pacify the animal and encourage it to abide by the masters’ admonishments to stop making noise.

  But aside from the presence of pets and bathroom violations, the Voyeur’s main complaint as a motel owner—a complaint he expressed in letters, journal notes, and occasional phone calls—was the conviction that most of what he saw and heard while he spied on his guests were words and phrases and personality traits that were repulsive, misrepresentative, hypocritical, falsely flattering, or completely dishonest.

  “People are basically dishonest and unclean; they cheat and lie and are motivated by self-interest,” he commented, continuing, “They are part of a fantasy world of exaggerators, game players, tricksters, intriguers, thieves, and people in private who are never what they portray themselves as being in public.” The more time he spent in the attic, he insisted, the more disillusioned and misanthropic he became. As a result of his observations, he claimed to have become extremely antisocial, and when he was not in the attic he tried to avoid seeing his guests in the parking area or anywhere around the motel, and in the office he kept his conversations with them to a minimum.

  As the Voyeur’s correspondence and voiced comments kept harking on the familiar theme of his alienation and agony, it occurred to me that he might be approaching something close to a mental breakdown; and I sometimes imagined him in terms of the psychotic anchorman in the 1976 film Network, who implodes: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” I was reminded as well of certain literary works from long ago: John Cheever’s 1947 story in the New Yorker “The Enormous Radio,” in which a couple’s marriage slowly suffers as their newly purchased radio mysteriously allows them to overhear and become affected by the conversations and secrets of their neighboring tenants; and Nathanael West’s 1933 novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, in which an advice-dispensing newspaper columnist becomes an unstable, irascible alcoholic due to his frustrations and sensitivities vis-à-vis his readers’ empty lives and dubious solutions.

  Except, in the Voyeur’s case, I believed his criticisms of other people were expressed without any sense of irony or self-awareness. Here was a snooper in the attic claiming the moral high ground while scrutinizing and judging his guests harshly, and, at the same time, appropriating for himself the right to pry with detachment and immunity.

  And where was I in all this? I was the Voyeur’s pen pal, his confessor, perhaps, or an adjunct to a secret life he chose not to keep completely secret. Maybe he needed me as a confidant in addition to his longtime business partner and wife, Donna. He said that when he first confessed to Donna about his boyhood prowling outside the bedroom of his aunt Katheryn, Donna had been too astonished to reply. She had merely giggled.

  Then she went on to ask, “You really mean you did that as a kid? And isn’t that what is called a ‘Peeping Tom?’” He replied, “No, it’s a trip in my exploration,” and later he expressed to her his desire to buy a motel and convert it into a “laboratory.”

  This was early in their marriage, and, after he had found the motel he wanted, he approached her and asked, “Would you go along with me in this? We would have to keep this a secret—just you and me, and nobody else. This is how it will have to be.” Donna thought for a moment, and then answered, “Of course, and this is how it will be.”

  But obviously the solo relationship with Donna was not enough for him, and in time I was invited into his privacy and through the mail I became an outlet—reading his version of what he saw and what he felt, and also sharing some of the personal grief and sadness he experienced as a family man. He wrote to me about the continuing problems of his teenage daughter, Dianne, and on more than one occasion he unburdened himself in letters and phone calls about his college-age son, Mark, who he said spent three months in jail after he and fellow students were arrested for holding up a restaurant, presumably for drug money.

  “Mark never did drugs in high school, as far as I know,” he told me. “During his first year in college, he did fine. But the second year it seemed he got involved with some real jerks, smart jerks, and they performed an armed robbery. Why? Mark had a brand-new truck, he had all the clothes he wanted, he had all the money he wanted, he had his whole college paid for. And he goes out and commits robbery! Is that a reflection on his family’s values? Is that his dad’s fault? His mother’s fault? Mark had such great potential. He was studying to become a petroleum engineer, where the starting pay is about $200,000 a year. And so he and his friends rob a restaurant! They got forty-seven dollars.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  DUE TO my frequent travels between Italy and the United States during these years, I was sometimes months behind in our correspondence, and it occurred to me often that I would be wise to discontinue. What was the point of all this back-and-forth letter writing? Gerald Foos was not my literary property. He was not a subject I could write about despite my continuing curiosity about how it would end. Would he ever get caught? If he did, what would be the trial strategy of his attorneys? Was he so naive to think that jurors could be convinced to accept his attic as a laboratory in quest of truth? And moreover, if the prosecutors had discovered our correspondence while rummaging through his files, might I be subpoenaed to testify?

  I would do everything possible to avoid this, of course. But even if he continued to avoid detection, he served no purpose to me as a writer because, as mentioned earlier, I insisted on using real names in my articles and books. I was not a fiction writer who made up identities and created situations. I was a nonfiction writer who imagined nothing and gained whatever I got from talking to people and following them around. I hid nothing from my readers—real names and real facts that could be verified, or no story.

  Still, whenever the mail arrived bearing his return address on the envelope, I opened it without delay. And it was with shock and dismay that, after receiving a letter from Gerald, dated March 8, 1985, I learned that Donna was dead. She had died on September 27, 1984. She had been in her late forties and suffering from lupus.

  “It has been almost two years since I’ve had any contact with you,” Gerald’s letter began, and, although I did not perceive an incriminating tone in his words, I wondered why it had taken him a year and a half to pass on the sad news. Maybe he had written me earlier and my house
guest in New York had incorrectly forwarded it to me in Italy. In any case, Donna was dead and Gerald’s letter went on to provide me with additional information: “There is a new woman in my life.”

  I immediately called Gerald from New York to express my condolences about Donna, and then I followed days later with a letter asking about this new woman’s knowledge of the Voyeur as discreetly as I could: “Does your present lady friend have any sense of your interesting past?”

  In time I learned that she did; and, like Donna before her, she not only condoned his snooping but sometimes joined him in the attic to participate. I did not learn this all at once; in fact, it would take dozens of letters, several conversations on the phone, and years of polite inquiry on my part, to piece together a summary of Gerald Foos’s life that extended from my one and only personal visit with him in 1980 to my receiving his letter in 1985 informing me of Donna’s death.

  His “new woman” was a buxom five-foot-four, green-eyed divorcée with reddish hair named Anita Clark, and she was eighteen years his junior. Born in Nebraska to working-class parents, she came with them to Colorado when she was seven. After graduating from high school in Aurora, she held such short-term jobs as a nanny, a nurse’s aid, and a bus girl at a roadside diner. It was at the diner that she met her future husband, a truck driver, whom she married in 1976 when she was twenty-four.

  Three years later the couple was divorced, and, with limited child support and no job, she struggled on her own to raise their two young boys, the older one having been born crippled. One of his legs was missing at the knee, the other at the foot. As he turned five, Anita was living with him and his three-year-old brother on food stamps in a trailer park.

  While taking the boys for a ride in a Radio Flyer wagon one afternoon along East Colfax Avenue, she noticed a man standing on a ladder changing the lettering on the Manor House Motel’s sign near the entranceway. In response to her cheerful greeting, Gerald Foos climbed down and engaged her briefly in conversation. She introduced him to her boys by name—the older one was Jody, the younger one, Will—both having red hair like their mother.

  The boys smiled as Gerald reached down to shake hands. He was disturbed and saddened when he noticed Jody without complete legs. Gerald said nothing but suddenly remembered watching the legless Vietnam veteran struggling to make love at the motel. Anita interrupted Gerald’s lingering silence to say that she had an appointment to keep, and so she excused herself and pulled the wagon forward while Jody and Will turned to wave goodbye.

  Weeks would pass before Gerald would see her again, this time at a pool party in a trailer park to which he had been invited by a male friend who lived there. Gerald did not recognize Anita at first, focusing his attentions mainly on her slender and large-breasted body dripping wet in a swimsuit. His aunt Katheryn had been built along these lines, and so had his high school sweetheart, Barbara White, and his wife, Donna. But even after he had been introduced to Anita by his friend, he had not recalled their earlier meeting along the sidewalk with her children until she herself mentioned it.

  He was also not feeling very sociable on this occasion. He had decided to come to the party at the last minute merely as a distraction from his difficulties with Donna. He and Donna had been quarrelling for weeks. A day earlier she had gone to an attorney to discuss getting a divorce. Gerald had begged her to reconsider, but she had been angry and unforgiving since learning that he had been having an affair that year with a pretty young woman employed with a public relations agency in Denver.

  This had been his first and only extramarital experience in more than twenty years of marriage. He had often desired to stray from his understanding with Donna that he could look, but never touch, and he had even admitted in The Voyeur’s Journal to wanting other women. But oddly it had not been at his initiative, but rather the aggressiveness of the public relations woman, that had drawn him into his first affair. After decades as a spectator, and never a player, he had finally met a woman who apparently had her eye on him.

  To a voyeur this was a novel and intriguing situation. He had not felt so desirable since his star-athlete days in high school. At first he thought he was imagining the PR lady’s interest; it was perhaps a symptom of male fantasy. He could not assume that her friendly manner and well-groomed appearance had anything to do with him personally; after all, it was part of her job to flash a smile and exude amiability while entering motel offices every week and dropping off tourist brochures and information about city-sponsored activities.

  Still, when she proposed to Gerald that they make a date for lunch, or meet some evening for a drink, he began to think differently. In all his time in the attic he had never observed a woman quite like this one. She was a polished professional and was discreetly feminine in dress and manner, and yet she was openly seductive and apparently willing to take risks with a man she knew was married. She had even met Donna on occasion. But she also seemed to know when Donna and Viola, his mother-in-law, were out of the office, and only he was behind the desk to greet and converse with her—a circumstance that did, indeed, lead gradually to their meeting one evening in a cocktail lounge on the other side of town, and then to spending a few hours in bed together at a neighboring motel.

  These meetings went on for months, and for Gerald it was exciting and unique; he was a guest in a motel with an unmarried woman who seemingly wanted nothing more from him than recreational sex and friendship. The sex was mutually satisfying as far as he could tell, although in a physical sense she did not measure up to his ideal. She was a slender woman with small breasts and little muscle tone. She looked better with her clothes on than off. But she was fun and frisky, and he saw no reason why their dalliance could not go on indefinitely—­except that it did end, abruptly, after Donna learned of it.

  Gerald guessed that Donna had been tipped off by one of the wives who co-owned one of the motels he frequented; but no matter, Donna had so much specific information about Gerald’s whereabouts that he made no effort to defend himself. He promised to end the affair immediately and he did. He did not want to lose Donna.

  But she could not be pacified. She was a strong-willed individual whose trust in him had been shattered, and she determinedly proceeded with the divorce settlement that she obtained in 1983. She had already vacated their house on the golf course and resided elsewhere in Aurora. During this time her illness with lupus was worsening, and she was unable to maintain her normal working schedule at the hospital where she had risen to become the director of nursing.

  Gerald reached out to her regularly, still with hopes of reconciliation; but as she remained adamant, he eventually gave up and contacted Anita Clark, the red-haired divorcée with the two young sons.

  Gerald and Anita began to see one another frequently, and in letters to me he described her as a welcomed source of support and reassurance. “She is calm, gentle and very easy-­going,” he wrote. “She has also promised to keep my voyeuristic life a secret.”

  In a later note he characterized himself as a changed man, one of less bereavement and more bravado, “If Anita ever would consider marriage, it will not be from gratitude or devotion but because she has learned to love again, almost against her will. She will need some strong, vigorous thinker, some great man whose will and intellect compels her heart’s homage and without whose company she cannot persuade herself to live. She has now met that person in Gerald L. Foos.”

  On April 20, 1984, Gerald Foos and Anita Clark were married in Las Vegas. After they returned to Aurora she began helping him at the motel and sharing his residence on the municipal golf course. At the motel’s reservation desk she extended equal amounts of courtesy to each arriving guest, but, following Donna’s policy, was selective in assigning the more attractive arrivals to rooms providing viewing opportunities for Gerald.

  She had seen pornographic films before meeting Gerald, but after marrying him she became accustomed to witnessing live performa
nces while reclining with him in the attic, sometimes simultaneously having oral sex or intercourse. She easily adapted to the pleasurable routines that he had practiced in earlier and better times with Donna, and, because Anita had no outside employment, she worked full time at the motel and soon was largely responsible for its daily maintenance and bookkeeping.

  In the absence of Donna and Viola, Anita hired two replacements in the office and also welcomed part-time assistance behind the desk from Gerald’s daughter, Dianne, whenever the latter’s health permitted. In addition, Gerald recruited the services of his estranged son, Mark, wanting him to gain managerial experience at a time when Gerald was thinking of expanding the business—which, in fact, he did in 1987 with the purchase of a second motel for approximately $200,000.

  TWENTY-NINE

  GERALD’S NEXT motel was called the Riviera, and it was located at 9100 East Colfax Avenue, about a ten-minute drive from the Manor House. The Riviera was a two-story building with seventy-two rooms. Gerald installed no more than four faux ventilators in the bedroom ceilings because the motel’s relatively flat roof provided only tight crawling space within the attic; and so the Manor House remained his observational headquarters.

  “Voyeurs are cripples . . . whom God has not blessed,” he wrote. “God said to us, ‘You get to observe at your own risk.’” In another letter, drawn from his memories at sea, he wrote, “The Voyeur is likened to a ship’s chronometer, a continuous unbroken vigilance or sentinel in a state of alert . . . The Voyeur is one that sits up at night, and continually awake at night or day, waiting for the next observation.”

  During the Christmas holiday season of 1991, Gerald and Anita visited New York City, staying at a hotel not far from my home. But I did not see them. I had just finished one book and was busy with another, this one a memoir called A Writer’s Life that took me to Alabama to revisit my student days at the University of Alabama in the early 1950s, and also back to my reporting days in the 1960s when I worked at the New York Times helping to cover such civil rights confrontations as the “Bloody Sunday” incident that occurred in the old Alabama plantation town of Selma, on March 7, 1965.