Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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He then described the motel he had owned for more than ten
years.
The reason for purchasing this motel was to satisfy my
voyeuristic tendencies and compelling interest in all phases of
how people conduct their lives, both socially and sexually.... I
did this purely out of my unlimited curiosity about people and
not as just a deranged voyeur.
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After reading this letter, I put it aside for a few days, undecided
on whether to respond. As a nonfiction writer who insists on
using real names in articles and books, I knew that I could not
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the screen to the plywood floor and rafters with long flathead
screws. He installed three layers of shag carpeting over a
central strip of the attic floor; the nails that kept the carpeting
in place were rubber-tipped, to deaden any squeaks from
footsteps.
After the screens were in place, Foos asked Donna to visit each
room, recline on a bed, and look up at a ventilator as he was
staring down at her. Can you see me? he would call down. If
she said yes, he used pliers to bend the louvres into an angle
that would conceal his presence while maintaining a clear view
of the bed and the bathroom door.
This trial-and-error process took us weeks, Foos continued.
And it was exhaustingwith me constantly going up and
down between the attic and rooms, and my hands aching from
all those adjustments with my pliers.
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coming from some of them, which I assumed did not bode well
for the expectations of my host.
Attached to one wall of the utility room was a wooden ladder
painted blue. After acknowledging his finger-to-lip warning
that we maintain silence, I climbed the ladder behind him. On
a landing, he unlocked a door leading into the attic. After he
had locked the door behind us, I saw, in the dim light, to my
left and right, sloping wooden beams that supported the
motels pitched roof; in the middle of the narrow floor was a
carpeted catwalk about three feet wide, extending over the
ceilings of the twenty-one guest rooms.
Crouching on the catwalk behind Foos, so as to avoid hitting
my head on a beam, I watched as he pointed down toward a
vent in the floor. Light could be seen a few feet ahead of us.
Light also came from a few other vents farther away, but from
these I could hear the noise of televisions. The room below us
was quietexcept for a soft murmuring of voices and the
vibrato of bed springs.
I saw what Foos was doing, and I did the same: I got down on
my knees and crawled toward the lighted louvres. Then I
stretched my neck in order to see as much as I could through
the vent, nearly butting heads with Foos as I did so. Finally, I
saw a naked couple spread out on the bed below, engaged in
oral sex. Foos and I watched for several moments, and then
Foos lifted his head and gave me a thumbs-up sign. He
whispered that it was the skiing couple from Chicago.
Despite an insistent voice in my head telling me to look away, I
continued to observe, bending my head farther down for a
closer view. As I did so, I failed to notice that my necktie had
slipped down through the slats of the louvred screen and was
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If I had not seen the attic viewing platform with my own eyes,
I would have found it hard to believe Fooss account. Indeed,
over the decades since we met, in 1980, I have noticed various
inconsistencies in his story: for instance, the first entries in his
Voyeurs Journal are dated 1966, but the deed of sale for the
Manor House, which I obtained recently from the Arapahoe
County Clerk and Recorders office, shows that he purchased
the place in 1969. And there are other dates in his notes and
journals that dont quite scan. I have no doubt that Foos was an
epic voyeur, but he could sometimes be an inaccurate and
unreliable narrator. I cannot vouch for every detail that he
recounts in his manuscript.
At times, I could almost picture Foos rubbing his hands
together, like a mad scientist in a B movie: I will have the
finest laboratory in the world for observing people in their
natural state, and then begin determining for myself exactly
what goes on behind closed bedroom doors, he wrote.
In an entry dated November 24, 1966, he describes using the
viewing platform for the first time:
Subject #1: Mr. and Mrs. W of southern Colorado.
Description: Approx. 35 year old male, in Denver on
business. 510, 180 pounds, white collar, probably college
educated. Wife 35 years old, 54, 130 lbs, pleasing plump,
dark hair, Italian extraction, educated, 37-28-37.
Activity: Room #10 was rented to this couple at 7 p.m. by
myself. He registered and I noticed he had class and would be a
perfect subject to have the distinction of being #1. After
registration, I immediately left for the observation walkway. It
was tremendous seeing my first subjects, for the initial
observation, enter the room. The subjects were represented to
my vision, clearer than anticipated.... I had a feeling of
tremendous power and exhilaration at my accomplishment. I
had accomplished what other men had only dreamed of doing
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Things did not improve for Gerald Foos with regard to the
second couple he observed. The man and woman were in their
thirties, and they talked about money, drank bourbon, and
went to bed with the covers pulled up to their noses.
The third couple, affluent-looking people in their early fifties,
were more interesting. They were in town to spend
Thanksgiving with their son and their daughter-in-law, whom
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they had not met before and of whom they did not approve.
Foos writes that he observed them discussing their sons
marriage. He noted that the wife unhooked her bra by sliding
the closure around to the front.
She removed her shoes and sprayed the interior of the shoes
with some sort of deodorant.... After the bath, she spent 1
hour preparing her hair in rollers and primping in front of the
mirror. This is a 50 year old woman! Imagine the hours she has
wasted in her lifetime. By this time her husband is asleep and
no sex transpired tonight... .
The next morning at 9 a.m., I observed her giving him oral
sex to completion.
After watching them for two more days, Foos summed up,
Conclusion: Educated, upper-middle-class older couple who
enjoy a tremendous sex life.
Between Thanksgiving and January of his first year as a motel
voyeur, Gerald Foos spent enough time in his attic to observe
guests perform forty-six sex acts, at times alone, at times with a
partner, and, on one occasion, with two partners. Each time,
he summed up his observations in a formal conclusion.
One day in December, two neatly dressed men and a woman
came in and requested a single room. The more vocal of the
two men, who had red hair, explained that his furnace at home
had stopped working and that his wife was freezing. Later,
Foos realized that when the man signed the register he had
listed as his home address a regional vacuum-cleaner store.
Within minutes, Foos was in the attic and had positioned
himself over their room. They were a very polite, very
organized couple with [a] male companion, he wrote. All
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have given him away. Also, he told me, dogs, unlike people,
often seemed to be aware that someone was lurking above.
When Foos was in the attic, dogs often pointed their snouts up
toward the vents and barked.) Before the couple checked out,
Foos returned to the platform to eavesdrop. The woman said
to her husband, Hes just a dumb-idiot manager who probably
keeps all deposits for himself anyway and was just lucky in
pointing out a particular spot on the carpet. Fooss darkly
philosophical conclusion:
My observations indicate that the majority of vacationers
spend their time in misery. They fight about money; where to
visit.... All their aggressions somehow are immeasurably
increased, and this is the time they discover they are not
properly matched. Women especially have a difficult time
adjusting to both the new surroundings and their husbands.
Vacations produce all the anxieties within mankind to come
forward during this time, and to perpetuate the worst of
emotions....
You can never really determine during their appearances in
public that their private life is full of hell and unhappiness....
This is the plight of the human corpus, and Im sure provides
the answer that if the misery of mankind were revealed all
together spontaneously, mass genocide might correspondently
follow.
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His artificial leg was attached just below the knee, the stub raw
and sore. In the evening, Foos watched as the wife opened two
bottles of cola, and her husband made a toast:
Heres to what makes the world go around!
Sex... ? She smiled.
No! Money! Its the one thing people will do almost
anything for. What do you think we are at war in Vietnam for.
It is the god-damned money.
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The subject stopped eating and looked around the room, and
then went to the window and looked out. Apparently he knew
someone shouted S.O.B., but couldnt determine from which
direction the insult came. He went to the window and looked
out for the second time and pondered the situation for a few
minutes, and then continued with his animalistic eating habits.
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by books, and what might be called the life of the mind, and
the life that was not manual labor or farming or housework,
but seemed in its specialness to transcend these activities.
Some of Fooss reminiscences offer glimpses of what he would
become: The town was truly a rural paradise; even into the
1920s, some 2,000 farms averaging 80 acres each. He
continued, describing his childhood:
I am very curious about everything and everyone I see...
and so I have felt invisible also, as a child feels himself invisible,
beneath the radar of adult supervision. The consequence of so
much unsupervised freedom was that I became precociously
independent.
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not notify the police. In the past, he had reported drug dealing
in his motel when he saw it, but the police took no action,
because he could not identify himself as an eyewitness to his
complaints.
One afternoon, Foos saw the man in Room 10 sell drugs to a
few young boys. This incensed him. He wrote in the journal,
After the male subject left the room that afternoon, the voyeur
entered his room.... The voyeur, without any guilt, silently
flushed all the remaining drugs and marijuana down the toilet.
He had flushed motel guests drugs several times before, with
no repercussions.
This time, the man in Room
10 accused his girlfriend of
stealing the drugs. The journal continues:
After fighting and arguing for about one hour, the scene
below the voyeur turned to violence. The male subject grabbed
the female subject by the neck and strangled her until she fell
unconscious to the floor. The male subject, then in a panic,
picked up all his things and fled the vicinity of the motel.
The voyeur... without doubt... could see the chest of the
female subject moving, which indicated to the voyeur that she
was still alive and therefore O.K. So, the voyeur was convinced
in his own mind that the female subject had survived the
strangulation assault and would be all right, and he swiftly
departed the observation platform for the evening.
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The next morning, a maid ran into the motel office and said
that a woman was dead in Room 10. Foos wrote that he
immediately called the police. When officers arrived, he gave
them the drug dealers name, his description, and his licenseplate number. He did not say that he had witnessed the
murder.
Foos wrote, The voyeur had finally come to grips with his
own morality and would have to forever suffer in silence, but
he would never condemn his conduct or behavior in this
situation.
The next day, the police returned and told Foos that the drug
dealer had been using a fake name and had been driving a
stolen car.
I came upon this account in Fooss typescript a few years after
Id visited him in Auroraand nearly six years after the
murder. I was shocked, and surprised that Foos had not
mentioned the incident to me earlier. It almost seemed as if he
regarded it as just another day in the attic. But, as I thought
about it, his responsethe observation that he really didnt
exist as far as the male and female subjects were
concernedwas consistent with his sense of himself as a
fractured individual. He was also desperately protective of his
secret life in the attic. If the police had grilled him and decided
that he knew more than he was telling, they might have
obtained a search warrant, and the consequences could have
been catastrophic.
I called Foos right away to ask about the situation. I wanted to
find out whether he realized that, in addition to witnessing a
murder, he might have, in some way, caused it.
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left of the Manor House Motel was a plot of flat land enclosed
by a chain-link fence.
That is what Gerald and Anita Foos saw, four months later,
when I paid a visit to the site with them. They hadnt known
that the motel was being razed, and there were tears in Anitas
eyes as she parked their car near the fence.
Seems that everything is gone, Foos said, opening the car
door and, with the aid of his cane, stepping out. The couple
walked arm in arm through the fences open gate.
I hope we can find something to take home, Foos said,
walking slowly, with his head down, searching for a memento
or two that might be added to his collectionsperhaps a
doorknob or a room number. But the demolition crew had
pulverized everything. Finally, Foos bent and picked up two
chunks of green-painted stone that had lined the walkway
along the parking area (he had painted the stones himself) and
a strip of electrical wiring from the red neon sign that had
spelled out the motels name.
Its too bad we didnt get here earlier, he said. We might
have gotten a piece of that sign.
They walked slowly around the lot for fifteen minutes, keeping
their heads down. It was a hot day, and Foos was perspiring.
Lets go home, Anita said.
Yes, he agreed, turning toward the gate. Ive seen enough.
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILIANO PONZI; ANIMATION BY VINCENZO LODIGIANI
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Gay Talese is the author of thirteen books, among them The Bridge: The
Building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and Frank Sinatra Has a
Cold, which includes photographs by the late Phil Stern.
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