“Sometimes her husband was there, my Uncle Charley, usually deep in sleep. He drank a lot, and I could count on him not waking up. Once, I did see them having sex, and it made me upset. I was jealous. She was mine, I thought. I’d seen more of her body than he had. I always thought of him as a rough character who didn’t treat her right. I was in love with her.”
I continued listening, without comment, although I was surprised by Gerald Foos’s candor. I had known him for barely a half hour, and already he was unburdening himself to me on matters of his masturbatory fixations and origins as a voyeur. As a journalist and purveyor of my own curiosity, I do not recall meeting anyone who required less of me than he did. It had taken me years to gain the trust of mafia lieutenant Bill Bonanno, the subject of my book Honor Thy Father, years of writing letters, visiting his lawyer, having dinner with him “off the record.” Eventually I gained his confidence, convinced him to break the mafia code of silence, and came to know his wife and children. But Gerald Foos had no such hesitation. He did all the talking while I, his safely signed confidant, sat in the car listening. The car was his confessional.
“I didn’t have sex in high school,” he went on, “but in those days hardly anyone did. I met my future wife there, as I said, but Donna and I didn’t date. She was two years behind me. She was studious, and quiet, and pretty enough, but I was interested in one of the cheerleaders for our football team. I was a star running back. For about two years I actually went steady with this cheerleader, a beautiful girl named Barbara White. Her parents ran a diner on the main street. No sex, as I said, but we did lots of hugging and kissing after school in the front seat of my ’48 Ford pickup. One night we were parked behind the pump house, on the northern end of town, and I tried pulling off her shoes. I wanted to see her feet. She had lovely hands, and a slender body—she was still wearing her cheerleader’s uniform—and I just wanted to see and hold her feet. She didn’t like it. When I persisted, she got real mad and jumped out of the truck. She then ripped off the chain around her neck and threw my ring at me.
“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.”