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.