The Voyeur's Motel Read online

  Since I was about to have dinner with Gerald Foos, I decided to mention Professor Marcus’s book and obtain a copy for him if he had not read it. I thought it would be interesting to get Foos’s twentieth-century reaction to a book that featured a nineteenth-century voyeur. I also hoped that Gerald Foos’s manuscript, when and if I obtained permission to use it, would serve as a kind of sequel to My Secret Life.

  THREE

  AT THE Black Angus restaurant, after ordering a margarita and a sirloin, Foos promised that he would mail me a photocopy of his manuscript, although emphasizing I must be patient. For reasons of privacy, he alone would have to photocopy its hundreds of pages outside his motel, perhaps in the public library; and, since he might face limitations in time and privacy wherever he went, he preferred doing the job in small sections, each section numbering no more than fifteen or twenty pages.

  “I’ll try to mail you the first section in a week,” he said, “but it may take six months or more before you get the entire manuscript. And again, I trust you’ll keep all of this strictly private. There are hundreds of secret stories in these pages, and each lists the names and addresses of the guests, lifted from the registration forms. Donna and I got to know some of these guests personally, those who stayed with us for days at a time, and did lots of communicating with us around the front office. And sometimes we got to hear what was said about us—them talking in their bedrooms, and us listening in the attic. It wasn’t all flattering.”

  I asked Gerald Foos if he ever felt guilty about spying on his guests. While he admitted to constant fear of being found out, he was unwilling to concede that his activities in his motel’s attic brought harm to anyone. First of all, he pointed out, he was indulging his curiosity within the boundaries of his own property, and since his guests were unaware of his voyeurism, they were not affected by it. “Visit any of those old colonial mansions and you’ll probably find listening places and observing holes. This is an old business, people watching, but there’s no invasion of privacy if no one complains.” Repeating what he had told me earlier: “I’ve observed hundreds of guests since owning the Manor House, and none of them knew it.”

  He said that it took him several months to fashion his motel’s viewing vents to “foolproof perfection,” using Room 6 as his laboratory, and Donna as his assistant. He initially considered having two-way mirrors in the ceilings, but dismissed the idea as too obvious and too easily detectable. “I must develop a method that will never result in a guest discovering their existence,” he wrote. “A guest is entitled to his or her privacy and must never know it has been invaded.” He then thought of installing faux ventilators for his viewing pleasure, but first had to hire a metalworker who would fabricate a model of what Foos had in mind—a fourteen-by-six-inch louvered screen containing a dozen slats—and then reproduce eleven more replicas of this model without the metalworker learning the true purpose of his work nor participating in its installation at the motel. Foos himself would have to provide the labor once the louvered screens were completed, although Donna volunteered to help. “I couldn’t let anybody but her help me,” he said, during our dinner.

  One of Donna’s tasks was to stand on a chair or ladder in each of the twelve designated rooms and hold overhead a louvered screen and then attempt to fit it into the fourteen-by-six-inch rectangular-shaped opening in the ceiling that Foos had created earlier using an electric-powered saw.

  Meanwhile, as he lay prone on the attic floor, he extended his hands down through the opening and helped Donna hold the screen in place and then secured it with long screws that penetrated the three-quarter-inch plywood attic floor. He said that all the screws were flat-headed and were firmly secured at the pointed ends into the attic so they could not be tampered with from below by an occupant of a guest room. Three layers of shag carpeting covered the attic floor, and the nails that kept the carpeting in place were covered with rubber tips to deaden the squeaky sounds that might arise from footsteps.

  The openings were placed near the foot of the bed. “The advantageous placement of the vent,” he wrote, “will permit an excellent opportunity for viewing and also hearing discussions of the individual subjects. The vent will be approximately six to eight feet from the subjects.”

  After all of the twelve louvered screens were installed in the designated rooms, Foos asked Donna to visit each room, lie on a bed, and then glance up at the vent as he was staring down at her.

  “Can you see me?” he would call down through the ventilator. If she answered, “Yes,” he would come down to the room and, while standing on a ladder and using his pliers, would attempt to bend the louvered slats at such an angle that would conceal his presence in the attic while maintaining a clear view of the bedroom.

  “This trial-and-error process took us weeks,” Foos continued. “And it was also exhausting—with me constantly going up and down between the attic and rooms, and my hands aching from all those adjustments with my pliers, and Donna, who was helping during her free time from the hospital, was as worn out as I was. But she never complained. She showed much love for me during that time. Why would a woman help with such stuff if it wasn’t for love?”

  Foos said he began watching guests during the winter of 1966, and, while he was often turned-on, there were also occasions when what he saw was so uneventful that he fell asleep, slumbering for hours on the attic’s thick carpeting until Donna would wake him up during one of her periodic visits, usually prior to her leaving for the evening shift at the hospital. Sometimes she came up bringing him a snack, perhaps a piece of fruit or a soda and sandwich—“I’m the only one getting room service at this motel,” he told me with a smile; while at other times, though briefly and infrequently, Donna would accept his invitation to lie down next to him on the rug and watch whenever a particularly engaging erotic interlude was occurring in one of the rooms below.

  “Donna was not a voyeur,” he said, “but rather the devoted wife of a voyeur. And, unlike me, she grew up having a free and healthy attitude about sex, and this included having oral sex and intercourse with me in the attic sometimes during her days off from her nursing job. The attic was an extension of our bedroom,” he continued. “It was a place where we could be alone when the children were around. The doors into the attic were always locked, and only we had the keys. Some couples in their homes installed mirrors on their ceilings, or watched hard-core porno while in bed, but the advantage we had while making love quietly in our attic was the possibility of peeking down on a live sex show taking place just seven or eight feet below us.”

  He went on to say that when Donna was not with him, if he was aroused while watching a performing couple below, he would either masturbate (he kept a hand towel nearby) or he would commit to memory what he saw and recall the stimulating imagery while making love to Donna later. “Even a sexually fulfilling marriage can use a little added spice,” he said.

  After we had left the Black Angus restaurant, at close to 11:00 p.m., Foos continued to talk while driving us back to the Manor House. He mentioned that a very attractive young couple had been staying at the motel for the last few days, and perhaps we would get a look at them tonight. They were from Chicago and had come to Colorado on a skiing vacation and also to visit friends in the Denver area. It was Donna who had greeted them on their arrival and registered them in Room 6. Foos said that whenever Donna was filling in for Viola at the desk, which Donna usually did in the early after­noons before going to work, she would register the more youthful and attractive guests in one of the “viewing rooms,” in deference to him. Room 6 was one such room, while the nine others, lacking facilities for people watching, were issued to couples or individuals who were old or less physically appealing.

  Foos also mentioned that he and Donna were currently building a two-story ranch house with a four-car garage within the grounds of the Aurora country club on East Cedar Avenue. He identified himself as an avid golfer regularly shooting in
the low 80s, while his teenage son, Mark, was much better and potentially a top intercollegiate player.

  As we approached the motel, I began to feel uneasy. I noticed that its large advertising sign near the entranceway at Colfax Avenue displayed a “No Vacancy” notice.

  “That’s good for us,” Foos said, turning his car into the motel’s driveway. “It means we can lock up for the night and not be bothered by late arrivals looking for rooms—and, for our registered guests, there’s a bell and also a buzzer at the front desk that they can use if they need anything.” The buzzer was also equipped to relay muted sounds into the attic, he said, and so at his own discretion he could return to the office promptly and conveniently. He could climb down from the ladder in the utility room, walk across the parking lot, and arrive at the office desk in the smaller building in less than three minutes.

  After he had parked the car next to the office, we were greeted at the door by Viola, who had been on duty all evening. She handed him a pack of mail, credit card receipts, and a few phone messages, and then began briefing him on routine matters, including the maids’ schedules for the rest of the week. They stood talking in front of the counter for several minutes while I sat waiting on a corner sofa. Behind me was a wall covered with framed posters of the Rocky Mountains and downtown Denver, maps of the city and state, and a couple of AAA plaques affirming the cleanliness and comfort of the Manor House Motel.

  Finally, after saying goodnight to his mother-in-law, Foos turned off one of the desk lights and, after beckoning that I follow, he locked the front door. We then crossed the concrete lot, edged between some parked cars, and walked in the direction of the utility room, which was located in the center of the motel’s main building.

  Curtains were drawn across the large windows that fronted each of the twenty-one guest rooms at street level, and the lights glowed behind the curtains of only four or five of these rooms. I could hear the sounds of television coming from some of them, which I assumed did not bode well, knowing the preferred expectations of my host.

  With the aid of his pass key, he gently nudged open the door of the utility room, which on all sides had shelves that were stacked with folded blankets, towels, and linen; while on the floor, next to a washing machine and dryer, were boxes containing bars of soap, bottles of detergent, and furniture polish. Deeper in the room, riveted into a wall, was a wooden ladder painted blue with ten parallel rounded rungs.

  At his direction, after acknowledging his finger-to-lip warning that we maintain silence, I climbed the ladder behind him and paused momentarily at the landing while he went up a few feet farther to unlock the door leading into the attic. After I had followed him inside, and he had locked the door behind me, I saw in the dim light, to my left and right, sloping wooden beams that supported both sides of the motel’s pitched roof; and in the middle of the attic’s narrow floor, which was flanked by horizontal beams, was a carpeted catwalk about three feet wide that ran the full length of the building, extending over the ceilings of the twenty-one guest rooms.

  Walking on the catwalk a few paces behind Foos, and moving in a crouched position so as to avoid hitting my head against one of the crossbeams, I then paused as Foos pointed down toward the light reflecting up from one of the viewing vents lodged within the floor a few feet ahead of us, on the right side of the catwalk. There was also light coming from a few other vents located farther away, but from these I could hear noise coming up from television sets, whereas the vent nearest us was almost soundless—except for the soft murmuring of human voices amid the vibrato of bedsprings.

  I noticed what Foos was doing, and I did the same: I lowered myself to my knees and began to crawl toward the nearby lighted area, and then I stretched my neck to the maximum in order to see as much as I could while peeking down through the vent (nearly butting heads with Foos as I did so)—and finally what I saw was an attractive nude couple spread out on the bed engaged in oral sex.

  I watched for several moments, and then Foos raised his head up from the vent and smiled at me while giving a thumbs-up sign. He then leaned closer to me and whispered that this was the couple from Chicago he had been talking about in the car on our way back from the restaurant.

  Despite an insistent voice in my head telling me to look away, I continued to observe the slender woman performing fellatio on her partner, bending my head farther down for a closer view. As I did so, I failed to notice that my red-striped silk necktie had slipped down through the slats of the louvered screen and was now dangling into the couple’s bedroom within a few yards of the young lady’s head.

  The only reason I became aware of my carelessness was that Gerald Foos had crawled behind me and began grabbing me up by the neck away from the vent, and then, with his free hand, pulled my tie up through the slats so swiftly and quietly that the couple below saw none of it, partly because the woman’s back was to us and the man was absorbed in pleasure with his eyes closed.

  The wide-eyed facial expression of Gerald Foos reflected considerable anxiety and irritation, and, though he said nothing, I felt chastened and embarrassed. If my wayward necktie had betrayed his hideaway, he could have been sued and imprisoned, and the fault would have been entirely mine. My next thought was: Why was I worried about protecting Gerald Foos? What was I doing up here, anyway? Had I become complicit in his strange and distasteful project? When he motioned that we leave the attic, I immediately obliged, following him down the ladder into the utility room, and then into the parking area.

  “You must put away that tie,” he said finally, escorting me toward my room. I nodded, and then wished him a good night.

  FOUR

  FOOS WAS up shortly after dawn on the following day, preparing to operate the morning shift in the office. He later telephoned me asking if I would like to join him for a take-out breakfast at his desk, speaking in a voice devoid of residual pique from our previous evening. When I arrived we shook hands, but he did not comment on the fact that I was not wearing a necktie. Not wearing a tie is, for me, a major concession because, as the son of a prideful tailor, I have enjoyed dressing up in suits and neckties since grade school, and being without a tie induced symptoms of being shorn of my pretense to ele­gance. Nevertheless, after my blunder last night, I reminded myself that I was not on home territory. I was merely a nonpaying guest in a voyeur’s motel.

  “Since we have some privacy here in the office,” Foos said, “I’d like to give you a quick look at my manuscript.” He inserted a key in the lower drawer of his desk and removed a cardboard box containing a four-inch-thick stack of handwritten pages. The yellow-lined pages had been torn out of eight-by-thirteen-inch legal pads, and, although the writing was single-spaced, it was easy to read because of Foos’s excellent penmanship. I leaned across the desk to get a look at the manuscript, and saw its title on the cover page: The Voyeur’s Journal.

  “You probably didn’t notice it last night,” Foos went on, “but there’s a place in the attic where I hide some small-sized pads along with pencils and two flashlights. And when I see or hear something that interests me, I’ll scribble it down, and later, when I’m alone down here in the office, I’ll expand on it. I usually remember things here that I’d forgotten to write when I was up there. As I said, I’ve been working on this journal for almost fifteen years, and as long as nobody knows that I wrote it, I’d be happy for you to read it, and I’ll soon mail you the first section.”

  “Thank you,” I said, but I wondered: Why has he put all of this in writing? Isn’t it enough for a voyeur to experience pleasure and a sense of power without having to write about it? Do voyeurs sometimes need escape from prolonged solitude by exposing themselves to other people (as Foos had done first with his wife, and later me), and then seek a larger audience as an anonymous scrivener of what they’ve witnessed?

  Professor Marcus posed similar questions in his analysis of the Victorian gentleman who wrote My Secret Life.

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bsp; “Though the author frequently states that he is writing only for himself and expresses doubts and hesitations about showing his work to anyone . . . it is clear that none of these protestations is to be taken at face value,” Marcus wrote, adding, “Had he really wanted to keep his secret life a secret he would not have put pen to paper.” The author of My Secret Life, however, might have had other influences.

  “A second reason which he occasionally brings forward is that his work is a cry in the dark,” Marcus wrote, and being “aware of his isolation and of his ignorance of the sexual ideas and behavior of others, he desires to learn about them and to communicate something of himself. . . . He asks whether all men feel and behave as he does, and concludes: ‘I can never know this; my experience if printed may enable others to compare as I cannot.’”

  Professor Marcus went on, “We must grant a certain degree of validity to this assertion, reminding ourselves that in the nineteenth century the novel served just such a function.”

  During the rest of my visit to Aurora, I accompanied Foos into the attic observatory a number of additional times. As I looked through the slats, I saw mostly unhappy people watching television, complaining about minor physical ailments to one ­another, making unhappy references to the jobs they had, and constant complaints about money and the lack of it, the usual stuff that people say every day to one another, if they’re married or otherwise in cohabitation, but is never reported upon or thought about much beyond the one-on-one relationship. To me, without the Voyeur’s charged anticipation of erotic activity, it was tedium without end, the kind acted out in a motel room by normal couples every day of the year, for eternity.

  When I left Denver to return home, I didn’t think I’d ever see the Voyeur again, and certainly had no hope of writing about him. I knew that what he was doing was very illegal (I also wondered how legal my behavior was in doing the same thing under his roof), and I insisted I would not write about him without using his name. He knew this was impossible. We both agreed it was impossible. So I returned to New York. I had a big book to promote.