They couldn’t believe it—maybe I had an extraordinary sense of smell, they pondered. Or perhaps I was gifted with extra-sensory perception. “His eyes must be able to see spots that we can’t see,” they assumed. “Maybe,” he said, “he is able to look in that window somehow, and was able to see the dog dirty the carpet.” She said, “He’s 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.” With that statement, they departed the motel, with only the Voyeur knowing the correct presentation of facts and with a gentle chuckle emerging from within.
Conclusion: My observations indicate that the majority of vacationers spend their time in misery. They fight about money; where to visit; where to eat; where to stay; 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. Most of these people seem to be very content when they are together in the motel’s office, paying for another day at the motel or while picking up literature and brochures.
You can never really determine during their appearances in public that their private life is full of hell and unhappiness. I have pondered why it is absolutely mandatory for people to guard with all secrecy and never let it be known that their personal lives are unhappy and deplorable. This is the “plight of the human corpus,” and I’m sure provides the answer that if the misery of mankind were revealed all together spontaneously, mass genocide might correspondently follow.
SEVEN
A LARGE building complex within walking distance of the Manor House Motel was the Fitzsimons Army Medical Center, where President Dwight D. Eisenhower spent seven weeks recovering from his heart attack in 1955. During the 1960s and ‘70s it served as a temporary home for hundreds of injured Vietnam War veterans. Gerald Foos was only moderately against the war when he first built his observation platform in 1966, but as the war continued, he became deeply disturbed because he frequently saw for himself how painful and humiliating it was for crippled soldiers to have sex, or attempt to have sex, with their wives or girlfriends whenever they rented space for a day or more at his motel. In The Voyeur’s Journal, on June 15, 1970, he wrote:
Checked into Room 4 this white male serviceman, who is in his early twenties and confined to a wheelchair, having lost his right leg in Vietnam. He was accompanied by his wife, also in her early twenties, about 5’3”, slim, and very pretty. She had come from their home in Michigan to visit him, after he had received a brief release from Fitzsimons. They rented the room for five days.
Upon the initial observation, the male subject was still very upset and stressed regarding the loss of his right leg, below the knee, and is experiencing great difficulty in adjusting to his artificial leg. When the subject removed the artificial leg, the stub was completely raw, sore and open, and was causing him great pain and discomfort. . . .
The subject went into great detail expressing how the service and society had forgotten men like him, and that the war in Vietnam was a terrible waste of men and materials. His wife agreed with him, and said, “Why didn’t you go to Canada like Mike did?”
He said, “I definitely would have gone to Canada if I knew beforehand that the service was going to lie and misrepresent the facts, but I was too hung up on home, family, and country and lost perspective of the real issues.”
Later that evening the voyeur from the observation vent observed them in the process of love-making. She opened two bottles of coke and handed him his drink and then she sat on the chair facing him, tucking up her legs, her mini-shift riding up and giving him and the Voyeur a clear view of her curvaceously tapered thighs. She was not wearing any underpants. . . .
The male subject smiled in lewd appreciation, and hoisting his glass in toast, said, “Here’s to what makes the world go round!”
“Sex . . . ?” She smiled.
“No! Money! It’s the one thing people will do almost anything for. What do you think we are at war in Vietnam for? It’s for the god-damned money.”