The Voyeur's Motel Read online

  In 1993 I was invited to write for the New Yorker by Tina Brown as a writer at large, and one of the many subjects I discussed with the magazine’s newly appointed editor was the story of the Voyeur and his motel. Tina was amazed and interested in the story, but I couldn’t get Gerald to commit to going public, so it was a nonstarter. It had been over a decade since he had first reached out to me; since I don’t keep secrets from my readers, and because I doubted Gerald would ever agree to using his name in print, I didn’t think the story would ever be published.

  It was while I was in Alabama in 1996, doing follow-up research for A Writer’s Life, that I received word from Gerald Foos saying that his motel-owning days were over. He was now in his early sixties, and his knees and back were so afflicted with arthritis that it was exceedingly painful for him to climb the ladder and crawl around the attic prior to positioning himself over the louvered apertures.

  Anita and I retired on November 1, 1996, selling our last motel, the Riviera Motel, and previously selling the Manor House Motel in August, 1996.

  There was something declamatory, nostalgic, and somewhat heartbreaking about the termination and cessation of the function of the observation laboratory located in both motels. Therefore, I feel I can never return to that protected space, that sacred ground, where only truth and honesty was observed and prevailed. But I feel confident that I have accumulated sufficient physical intensity to continue onward with my life without the presence of the motels and their respective observation labs.

  He said that he sold both motels to Korean-born residents of Denver—“they’re the only people who have money around here”—and that prior to the sale he had personally removed the observation vents and covered the holes in the ceilings “to protect the new owners’ integrity and business interests, without prejudice.”

  He and Anita bought a ranch in Cherokee Park in the Rockies, intending to spend almost as much time there as at their home on the Aurora golf course. He could sometimes walk freely along the fairway without a cane, but his ailing back prevented him from playing the game; and so he and Anita devoted much of their leisure time to fishing together on a nearby lake, or taking motor trips around the region and frequently through the agricultural areas of northern Colorado where Gerald had grown up.

  I pulled up in front of a farmhouse, knocked on the door, and, after a teenaged boy had opened it, I explained that I was born in this house. After some conversation, he invited me in. I couldn’t remember much because the house had been remodeled, and the only visible memory were the steps leading upstairs. I stood near the kitchen window where my mother used to peek out on tiptoe, and name every bird that visited the feeder, and other birds by their song. I remember thinking at the time: there are bird-­watchers, there are star-gazers, and there are people like me who watch people.

  He missed his motels very much, although he tried to convince himself that it was not his arthritis alone that had prompted their sale. The motel business as he had known it would soon be a declining enterprise, he believed. When he began in the 1960s, moral standards were still quite restrictive, and, because of it, the tryst trade was inclined to patronize such places as the Manor House— although he insisted that he ran his business more responsibly than did most of the “no questions asked” innkeepers who operated along East Colfax Avenue and elsewhere in Aurora. He not only asked questions in trying to verify the identity of incoming guests but also, at opportune moments, he lifted his binoculars and gazed through the office window toward the rows of parked cars, noting on his pad the license plate numbers of each vehicle.

  But, in any case, the Manor House and other small motels that had traditionally drawn numbers of cautious lovers—“hot sheet” guests, swingers, homosexuals, interracial couples, adulterers, adulteresses, and others preferring to rendezvous in places where they could walk directly from their cars into their rooms without having to pass through lobbies and use elevators—were people who at this time were just as likely to register in prominent hotels and well-appointed franchise motels, most of which had rooms with television sets offering pornographic programs.

  Of course, none knew better than Gerald the difference between TV porn and seeing it live from an attic, and this is what he most missed after selling his motels. Often when he drove his car past the Manor House and the Riviera, he would pause along the curb at East Colfax Avenue and, as the engine idled, he would sit staring from afar at what he had long known so intimately and over which he had once presided, in the words of his journal, as “the World’s Greatest Voyeur.”

  He could recall not only the specific positions and angles of multitudes of prone bodies but also their names and their room numbers and what was so special and memorable about them—the lovely pair of lesbian schoolteachers from Vallejo, California; the Colorado married couple in bed with the young stud they employed in their vacuum cleaner distributorship; the beautiful vibrator lady from Mississippi who worked briefly as a Manor House chambermaid; the mystifying Miss America candidate from Oakland who slept in Room 5 with her husband for two weeks without having sex; the suburban mother who enjoyed lusty matinee meetings with a doctor before returning home to dinner with her two young children and her handsome husband; and the happy and horny husband and wife from Wichita, Kansas, about whom the Voyeur wrote in his journal, “I wish they had stayed longer.”

  Reels of these and similar images rotated through his mind with clarity almost every day and night, undiminished by the passage of time. He remembered the voice of a woman who had called the Manor House more than thirty years ago, in the early summer of 1967, requesting a room for four days.

  She said she would soon fly into Denver from Los Angeles, adding that when she had previously stayed at the Manor House the management picked up its guests at the airport. Although this had been a courtesy provided by a previous owner, Gerald told her that he would meet her. His viewing platform in the attic was then in its second year of operation.

  At baggage claim he greeted a well-groomed brunette in her early twenties who wore a flowered cotton dress with white gloves and was traveling with a single large leather suitcase. In the car she explained that she had earned a master’s degree in education but was thinking of attending the University of Colorado Law School. She wanted to specialize in inheritance litigation, and she went on to elaborate in a clipped and lecture-like manner: “A great fortune is sure to be divided. Death will make it necessary, and surviving heirs will demand it. And distant relatives will urge their claims for a share and very often the law aids their requests. And that is where I want to make an entrance in their lives.”

  Since this was Gerald’s first outside meeting with a guest prior to check-in, he was curious but reticent, wanting to behave properly while chauffeuring her toward what was certainly not proper. Forthcoming as she was about her career aspirations, he did not want to risk offending her with such personal questions as whether or not she was married, or even if she had friends in the Denver area. It was enough that he was interested in what she was saying about the law and other subjects, such as capital punishment—which she declared she opposed, and which he was pleased to tell her that he did also.

  After he had pulled into the parking area, and Donna, who was then still his wife, had booked her a room, Gerald headed directly up to the attic and wrote down what he saw.

  She finally slipped off her lace petticoat, then un-hooded her bra, and her breasts were unusually large, the kind that remain hidden in a tight bra and want to escape. After an hour of thinking quietly to herself while unpacking, and organizing her things, she finally lay nude on the bed and began a routine of teasing masturbation. During orgasm she stretched her legs out and up, and raised her torso.

  The Voyeur masturbated to orgasm along with her.

  The next day she and the Voyeur had a brief chat in the office before she took a taxi to the campus, and later that night before going to bed she again mas
turbated. She did this at least once every day during her four-day visit, and each time the Voyeur joined her.

  When she checked out, Donna hired a driver to take her to the airport while the Voyeur remained in the attic. He did not want to say goodbye. He wanted to retain how he preferred to see her, in the nude, giving pleasure to herself and to him as well. She never telephoned again for a reservation, and he never knew what happened to her; but as far as he was concerned, she was forever his guest, his unaware object of desire, a link in a loop of lovely women whom he had once observed when younger and now reflected on during his emeritus years as a dislodged voyeur.

  It might suggest a prolonged fantasized harem on his part but what was fantastic to him was that it had all been real—not drawn from his imagination, but rather what he himself had witnessed. His observations were a veritable slice of life that reaffirmed how incomplete was the picture of people seen functioning and posturing daily in such places as shopping malls, rail terminals, sports stadiums, office buildings, restaurants, churches, concert halls, and college campuses.

  For more than thirty years he had been privy to other people’s privacy, but now, although myriad secret scenes remained engraved in his mind, he had lost forever the sense of wonder and excitation that used to precede each guest’s entrance into a bedroom—the sound of a key turning a lock, the sight of a woman’s foot crossing the threshold, the conversation of a couple while they unpacked their luggage, the unhinging of a brassiere, the bathroom visit, the removal of clothing, the lowering of the bedsheets, and, if those were indeed wooing words that he heard, his burning desire to see what would happen next.

  He could only guess, of course, and that had been part of the thrill, the not knowing until after it had happened, as well as the surprises and disappointments that were part of the bargain. But whatever he saw nurtured his desire to see more. He was an addictive spectator. His occupation was anticipation. And it was from this that he had retired when he sold his motels.

  THIRTY

  BETWEEN 1998 and 2003, I was spending lots of time in China and elsewhere in Asia, following the fortunes of the Chinese women’s national soccer team and one of its players, Liu Ying, a principal character in the book I was working on, A Writer’s Life.

  During this time, and through the following decade, I had more or less forgotten about my voyeur pen pal in Aurora, a city I had never heard of before receiving his first letter in 1980; and after he had sold his motels, my interest in Aurora had entirely vanished—until I surprisingly saw it mentioned on the front page of the New York Times, on July 21, 2012.

  Under the main headline was a report that a twenty-four-year-old graduate student in neuroscience from the University of Colorado in Denver had fatally shot twelve people, and wounded seventy others, in an Aurora movie theater prior to the midnight screening of a Batman sequel called The Dark Knight Rises. The shooter was identified as James E. Holmes, a product of a middle-class community in San Diego, whose parents were described in the Times as “really, really nice people” and whose mother was a registered nurse.

  The Aurora police said that Holmes, dressed in black and with his hair dyed orange and red, fired randomly at audience members while using an AR-15 assault rifle, a Remington shotgun, and a .40-caliber Glock handgun. Many 911 calls from the theater alerted the police, who soon caught Holmes near his parked car and took him into custody. He later admitted that he had installed incendiary and chemical devices and trip wires in his unit within an Aurora apartment building.

  After quickly reviewing the Times’s article and seeing that Gerald Foos’s name was not listed among those who had been killed or injured, I finally contacted him by phone after a patient operator had tracked him down at a new address. Foos agreed that he and Anita were fortunate in not attending the screening of The Dark Knight Rises, but they had attended movies at the theater many times, and he said that he knew what the shooter’s apartment looked like.

  “It’s the same third-floor apartment on Seventeenth and Paris Street that I’d rented a few years ago for my son, Mark,” Foos said. “We’d had many heart-to-heart talks there. After I moved my son into another neighborhood, this guy apparently replaced him, although we don’t ever recall running into this guy whose picture is now all over the news.”

  A week or so after the call, Gerald Foos was again corresponding with me, and in one of his first letters he described exploring Aurora in the aftermath of the tragedy.

  As I drove past the Aurora Mall and the 16 Cinema multiplex, where the shooting took place, and is still under police investigation, I noticed the cluster of flowers and teddy bears that people had placed along the ground in memory of the victims. This is a new area of the city—lots of shining windows and beautiful buildings: the county courthouse is here, the police station is here, the library is here. Why the killings here?

  Haven’t the people of Aurora treated their fellow men with enough kindness and consideration, so that the sword of Damocles was lowered on us? Or were the killings just a natural occurrence in our society, which we tolerate?

  In another letter, he wrote:

  I feel terribly uncomfortable in today’s world and society. As the Voyeur I felt particularly overpowering on the observation platform, but now, as Gerald, I do not feel that way anymore. Gerald feels restless in his expansive home, and the feelings of his disappearing youth are present in his mind. As he looks in the mirror above his bathroom vanity, he notices the age in his eyes, and the grey hair on his head and beard. He plans to dye his hair, and after he does he sees it as a sham, an untruth that he is attempting to permeate on anyone that he may meet today. In applying the dye he is doing what the Voyeur always stood against—any attempt to subvert reality, substance, the truth, and instead Gerald is resorting to an artificial illusion that his fellow men may accept as the truth.

  In his car Gerald drives through Aurora, and as he approaches East Colfax Avenue he notices the Mexican development that exists just east and west of the Manor House Motel. East of the Riviera Motel, there is now mostly Asian businesses, which took the place of the businesses he used to know. This disturbs him, the knowledge that the people he used to know have either moved away or died. He knows no one on the street or business here. He feels lost and without a city anymore. The barbershop is gone. The gas station is gone. And now the Voyeur and Gerald are separate entities, completely disconnected since their tenure in the observation platform has ended.

  At a street corner, Gerald stops his car as the traffic light turns red. While pausing, he looks up through the windshield and sees a camera overlooking the intersection. He knows that his picture has just been taken, and so has the license plate of his car.

  Proceeding on to the local bank, where he stops to make a deposit, he passes under another camera that scans the parking lot, and another camera hangs over the entranceway. Inside the bank, as he stands in front of the teller and makes his deposit, he is photographed once more by a camera posted in the ceiling.

  Later, while visiting a grocery store, one of the few stores that Gerald has known from previous years and where the manager is a friend, he asks his friend, while pointing up to a camera: “What do you do with those tapes that are changed every day?” The manager says, “They’re for our security, as you know, but the police, the FBI and the IRS also make use of them, and we never know why. All we know is that almost everything we do is on record.”

  Gerald gets back in his car, and while returning home he thinks about all the changes that he and the Voyeur have lived through since opening the Manor House Motel more than thirty years ago. Now the private lives of public figures are exposed in the media almost every day, and even the head of the CIA, General David Petraeus, can’t keep his secret sex life out of the headlines. The media is now in the Peeping Tom business, but the biggest Peeping Tom of all is the U.S. Government, which keeps an eye on our daily lives through its use of security cameras, th
e internet, our credit cards, our bank records, our cell phones, I-phones, GPS info, our airline passenger tickets, the wire taps, and whatever else.

  Perhaps you may be thinking, why is this of interest to Gerald Foos?

  Because it is possible that someday the FBI will show up and say, “Gerald Foos, we have evidence that you’ve been watching people from your observation platform. What are you, some kind of pervert?”

  And then Gerald Foos will respond: “And what about you, Big Brother? For years you’ve been watching me every­where I go.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  DURING THE early spring of 2013, I received a phone call in New York from Gerald Foos saying that he was finally ready to go public with his story. Eighteen years had passed since he had disposed of his motels, and, while he could not be sure of the legal outcome, he believed that the statute of limitations would now protect him from invasion-of-privacy lawsuits that might be filed by former guests of the Manor House and Riviera motels.

  He also was approaching the age of eighty, he reminded me, and if he did not share his journal material with readers now, he might not be around long enough to do so in the future. So he suggested that I fly out to see him soon.

  Within a month, after I had cleared my calendar for a four-day visit, I met Gerald Foos for breakfast in the bar lobby of the Embassy Suites hotel near the Denver International Airport.

  As he spotted me at one of the tables and called out to me by name, I recognized him mainly by his voice—a loud and familiar voice that I had become accustomed to hearing during our decades of communicating by phone. Otherwise, there was little similarity between this elderly man I saw coming toward me and the Gerald Foos I had last seen in 1980.