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.

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 masturbated. 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.