The Voyeur's Motel Page 2

  “I didn’t follow her home,” he said. “I knew it was over. She saw me the next day in school and tried to say something, but it didn’t matter. I had lost her trust. I could not win it back. Our romance was over. I was sad, confused, and a little frustrated. It was near the end of my senior year. I needed to get away. I didn’t know anything about people. I decided to join the Navy.”

  Gerald Foos said that he spent the next four years serving in the Mediterranean and the Far East, during which time he trained as an underwater demolition specialist, and, while on shore leave, enlarged his knowledge of sex under the guidance of bar girls. “My voyeuristic attitude relaxed,” Gerald later wrote. “There were a few occasions when I became a voyeur again, but usually I was participating in as many sexual adventures as ­possible during those years. This was a learning and experiencing time for me, and I was taking advantage of my travels with the Navy to discover as much as was possible. I was aboard ship for two years traveling from port to port and visiting every house of prostitution from the Mediterranean area to the Far East. This was excellent, but I was still searching for answers and wanted to know the complex question of what goes on in privacy. My absolute solution to happiness was to be able to ­invade the privacy of others without their knowing it.”

  But he also kept masturbating to remembrances of his aunt Katheryn, he said, adding, “There’s a particular image of her, standing nude in her bedroom while fondling one of her porcelain dolls, that always remains in my head, and probably always will.”

  His comment reminded me of the well-known scene in the 1941 film Citizen Kane, in which Mr. Bernstein (played by ­Everett Sloane) is reminiscing to a reporter: “A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in and on it, there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on and she was carrying a white parasol and I only saw her for one second and she didn’t see me at all—but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”

  Shortly before Gerald Foos’s discharge from the Navy in 1958, while he was visiting his parents in Ault, his mother said that she had recently met on Main Street one of his fellow students from high school—Donna Strong, who was now studying nursing in Denver. Gerald contacted Donna immediately (his cheerleader friend, Barbara, was already married) and soon Gerald and Donna began a relationship that led to their own marriage in 1960.

  By this time Donna had a full-time nursing job at a hospital in the suburban community of Aurora, while Gerald was working as a field auditor in the Denver headquarters of ­Conoco. He said he was miserably employed, sitting in a cubicle each day helping to keep records of the inventory levels of oil tanks in Colorado and neighboring states. His primary escape from the tedium came during his nighttime “voyeuristic excursions” around Aurora, where he and Donna rented a third-floor apartment not far from her hospital. Often on foot, although sometimes in a car, he would cruise through neighborhoods and take advantage of certain people that he knew to be casual about lowering their window shades, or were otherwise lax about preventing intrusive views into their bedrooms. He said that he made no secret of his voyeurism to Donna.

  “Even before our marriage I told her I was obsessively curious about people, and that I liked to watch them when they didn’t know I was watching,” he said. “I told her that I found this exciting, and it gave me a feeling of power, and I said there were lots of men like me out there.” She seemed to understand this, he said, and she certainly wasn’t shocked by his admissions, adding, “I think her being a nurse made it easier for me. Donna and most nurses are very open-minded people. They’ve seen it all—death, disease, pain, disorders of every kind, and it takes a lot to shock a nurse. At least Donna wasn’t shocked.” Not only that, he went on, but she even accompanied him a few times on his voyeuristic excursions, and, after an evening of sharing scenes of foreplay or lovemaking, which she found interesting if not stimulating, she asked, “Do you keep notes on what you see?” “Never thought about it,” he answered. “Maybe you should,” she said. “I’ll think about it,” he said; and soon he started keeping a journal that, by the 1970s, would become several hundred pages in length, with nearly all of his notations centered on what he saw (and sometimes what Donna saw with him) after they had jointly purchased the Manor House Motel, on 12700 East Colfax Avenue in Aurora.

  “We’re now getting close to our motel,” Gerald Foos said, as he continued to drive along East Colfax Avenue, passing through a white working-class neighborhood of many low-level buildings—stores, single-family residences, a trailer park, a Burger King, an auto repair shop, and an old Fox cinema house that reminded Foos of one of his favorite films, The Last Picture Show. Colfax was a major thoroughfare, the main east-west street in the area. Especially on its stretch in Denver, Colfax was a notorious drag, once called by Playboy the “longest, wickedest street in America.” Gerald said that there were 250 motels along Colfax, and we also drove past the two-story Riviera Motel that Foos expressed interest in owning someday (he said he had initially visited the Riviera as a Peeping Tom, prowling along its pathways and the lighted windows of its ground-floor rooms); but instead he decided to buy the single-story Manor House because it had a pitched roof that was elevated in the center to about six feet—high enough for him to walk across the attic floor in a standing position; and, if he created inconspicuous openings in the ceilings of the guest rooms, he would be able to survey the scenes below.

  And so he soon approached the Manor House’s owner, an elderly man in failing health named Edward Green, and Foos rightly surmised that Mr. Green was eager to sell—and thus Foos promptly acquired the property for $145,000. As a down payment Foos said he contributed about $25,000 that he had saved from his paternal grandfather’s will and another $20,000 from the sale of a house in Aurora that Donna and he had bought during their third year of marriage.

  “Donna wasn’t happy-happy about giving up our house and living in the manager’s quarters of the motel,” he said, “but I promised her that we’d buy another house as soon as we could afford it. I also agreed that Donna wasn’t going to give up her nursing career, which she loved, to work full-time behind a reception desk. So that’s when I brought her mother, Viola, into the picture, to help us run the place. Donna’s father had abandoned the family when Donna was a girl. He was a talented musician and also a skilled carpenter, but he drank. After we got married, he’d occasionally show up and beg her for loans that he never paid back. Once I remember him coming to our third-floor apartment, and Donna giving him every dollar in her purse, more than fifty dollars I believe. After he left, I took my binoculars and watched from the third-floor window as he crossed the street and headed into the nearest liquor store.”

  Foos slowed down on East Colfax Avenue, made a right turn onto Scranton Street, and then a left into the parking area of the Manor House Motel, a brick building neatly painted green that had orange doors leading into each of its twenty-one guest rooms.

  “Looks like we’re pretty booked up,” he said, looking through the windshield and noticing that nearly all the white-lined spaces in front of the orange doors were occupied by ­vehicles. He then parked next to a smaller adjacent building, one consisting of a two-room office, the family quarters, and, farther back, three separate rooms with orange doors numbered “22,” “23,” and “24,” each having a sitting area and a small kitchen.

  As I followed behind Foos, who was carrying my luggage, we were greeted in the office by his wife Donna, a petite, blue-eyed blonde dressed in her nurse’s uniform. After shaking hands, she explained that she was on her way to the hospital, working the night shift, but she looked forward to seeing me in the morning. Her mother, Viola, a gray-haired, bespectacled woman who was at a desk speaking on a telephone, waved and smiled in my direction, and waved again as I headed out
the door with Foos, walking along a narrow stone pathway in the direction of where I would be staying, Room 24, at the far end of the smaller building.

  “This place is quieter than usual,” Foos said. “Neither of our children is living here now. Our son, Mark, is a freshman at the Colorado School of Mines, and Dianne, who was born with a respiratory ailment, had to drop out of high school to be treated at a clinic in the hospital. Donna visits her all the time between rounds, and I also get over there regularly, usually in the mornings.”

  Foos dropped my luggage in front of Room 24 and, after opening the door with the key, switched on the air conditioner and placed my luggage near the closet.

  “Why don’t you unpack and make yourself comfortable for a while,” he said, “and in an hour I’ll call and we’ll go out to this great new restaurant, the Black Angus. After that, we can come back and take a little tour of the attic.”

  TWO

  AFTER HE had handed me the room key and left, and I had finished unpacking, I began making notes of my impressions of Gerald Foos and what he had told me in the car. Even when I’m not planning to publish anything, I usually keep a written account of my daily travels and encounters with people, together with expense receipts and other documents that may be needed later for tax purposes. In what was once a wine cellar in my New York brownstone, but now serves as my workspace and storage area, there are dozens of cardboard boxes and metal cabinets filled with folders containing such material, all of it arranged in chronological order from recent days back to the mid-1950s, when I started working for the Times. It was the paper of record and I was a man of record. Sometimes I go back and review old records merely to refresh my memory on minor personal matters, and sometimes the material will prove to be professionally useful—as I suspected my information about Gerald Foos would be if he allowed me to publicly identify him.

  Meanwhile, my main interest in him was not really dependent on having access to his attic. What could I see in his attic that I had not already seen as the researching writer of Thy Neighbor’s Wife and a frequenter of Sandstone’s swinging couples’ ballroom? But what I hoped to gain during this visit to Colorado was his permission to read the hundreds of pages that he claimed to have written during the last fifteen years as a clandestine chronicler.

  While I assumed that his account centered on what brought him sexual excitement, it was also possible that he observed and noted things that existed beyond, or in addition to, his anticipated desires. A voyeur is motivated by anticipation; he quietly invests endless hours in the hope of seeing what he hopes to see. And yet for every erotic episode he witnesses, he might be privy to multitudes of mundane and, at times, stupendously boring moments representing the daily human routine of ordinariness—of people defecating, channel surfing, snoring, primping in front of a mirror, and doing other things too tediously real for today’s reality television. No one is more underpaid on an hourly basis than a voyeur.

  But in addition to all this, there are times when a voyeur inadvertently serves as a social historian. This point is made in a book I had read recently called The Other Victorians. It was written by Steven Marcus, a biographer, essayist, and professor of literature at Columbia University. One of the main characters in Marcus’s book is a nineteenth-century English gentleman who was born into an affluent upper-middle-class family and apparently overcompensated for his repressive upbringing by having voyeuristic experiences, as well as directly intimate ones, with a vast number of women—servant girls, courtesans, other men’s wives (while having a wife of his own), and at least one marchioness. Professor Marcus described this gentleman as leading a life of “stable promiscuity.”

  Beginning in the mid-1880s, this individual began writing a sexual memoir about his liaisons and voyeuristic recollections, and a few decades later his efforts had expanded into an eleven-volume work of more than 4,000 pages. He called it My Secret Life.

  While he concealed his identity as its author, he did arrange for it to be privately published in Amsterdam, and from there it gradually achieved notoriety as pirated editions and excerpts were circulated through the literary underground of Europe and the United States. By the mid-twentieth century, as obscenity laws became less oppressive, an American edition of My Secret Life was legally published for the first time, in 1966, by Grove Press, and it was commended by Professor Marcus as a work containing important insights and facts relevant to the social history of that period.

  “In addition to presenting such facts,” Marcus wrote, “My Secret Life shows us that amid and underneath the world of Victorian England as we know it—and as it tended to represent itself to itself—a real, secret social life was being conducted, the secret life of sexuality. Every day, everywhere, people were meeting, encountering one another, coming together, and moving on. And although it is true that the Victorians could not help but know of this, almost no one was reporting on it; the social history of their own sexual experiences was not part of the Victorians’ official consciousness of themselves or of their society.”

  Since the anonymous author of My Secret Life pays special attention to London’s prostitutes, often presenting them as well-rewarded pragmatists responding to the desires of the ­marketplace—one prostitute had several servants and a brougham, and earned between fifty and seventy pounds a week—Marcus suggests that the author’s sentiments and scenes drawn from the “underbelly of the Victorian world” stood in contrast to the more “positive values” promoted by the era’s novelists. “What Dickens does, of course, is to suppress any references to prostitutes and to censor his report on the language of the dockside,” Marcus wrote, adding, “The first thing we learn, then, from such scenes (and there are hundreds of them in My Secret Life) is what did not get into the Victorian novel, what was by common consent and convention left out or suppressed.”

  What is also learned from the author of My Secret Life is much about personal hygiene and toilet habits as practiced by the Victorians. Before the mid-1800s, few public toilets existed in the city, and, in such places as Hampton Court Park, men and women would relieve their bladders in the bushes, and, in the evenings, also in the streets.

  “The police took no notice of such trifles,” wrote the author, “provided it was not done in the greater thoroughfare (although I have seen at night women do it openly in the gutters in the Strand); in the particular street I have seen them pissing almost in rows; yet they mostly went in twos to do that job, for a woman likes a screen, one usually standing up till the other has finished, and then taking her turn.”

  He also reported that women did not wear undergarments, but, alas, sometime in the mid-1900s “more and more this fashion of wearing drawers seems to be spreading . . . whether lady, servant, or whore, they all wear them. I find they hinder those comfortable chance feels of bum and cunt.”

  The author’s obsessive curiosity about women, their bodies and bodily functions, which began during his youth in the 1820s when he was surrounded by maidservants—one of whom laughingly “put her hand outside my trousers, gave my doodle a gentle pinch and kissed me”—continued throughout his lifetime and prompted him to write: “Some men—and I am one—are insatiable and could look at a cunt without taking their eyes off for a month.”

  Professor Marcus adds, “Another form that this impulse takes is his desire to see other people copulating; and in his later maturity he goes to great lengths and considerable expenditure to assure himself the experience of such sights. His chief visual obsession, however, is his need to see, look at, inspect, examine, and contemplate . . .” As the author himself put it: “Man cannot see too much of human nature.”

  While at times the author tried to restrict his attentions to a single woman—beginning with his first wife, for example, when he was twenty-six—his efforts were invariably subverted by the sight of someone new. His wife was wealthier than he was, and as he grew to become financially dependent on her she became increasingly critical
of him—“She checked my smile, sneered at my past, moaned over my future . . . was loathsome to me in bed. Long I strove to do my duty, and be faithful, yet to such a pitch did my disgust at length go, that laying by her side, I had wet dreams nightly, sooner than relieve myself in her.”

  Five years after her death, when he was probably in his early forties, his memoir suggests that he had taken another wife and aspired to remain faithful to her. “For fifteen months, I have been contented with one woman. I love her devotedly. I would die to make her happy. . . . I have fucked at home with fury and repetition, so that no sperm should be left to rise my prick to stiffness when away from home; fucked indeed till advised by my doctor that it was as bad for her as for me.” But later, with resignation, he concluded, “All is useless. The desire for change seems invincible. . . . It is constantly on me, depresses me, and I must yield.”

  Although his marital relationships did not produce offspring, Professor Marcus came to believe, after reading the eleven-volume memoir, that the author “impregnated women of various kinds—servants, respectable women with whom he had affairs, courtesans whom he briefly kept. A few of these had children, the largest number procured abortion, which seems to have been fairly easy to arrange in the England of the time (he does not report on this in detail).”

  Marcus also cited quotes from the author of My Secret Life that I thought applicable to my current subject of interest, Gerald Foos.

  “Why,” asked the author, “is it abominable for anyone to look at a man and woman fucking when every man, woman, and child would do so if they had the opportunity? Is copulation an improper thing to do; if not, why is it disgraceful to look at its being done?”