“Here’s a rookie card of Michael Jordan,” Gerald said, adding that he purchased it at a flea market years ago from an ill-informed trader for only twenty dollars. Gerald then held up a card showing the baseball player Alex Rodriguez and admitted that it had dropped in value in recent years. “Here’s a guy—excuse my English—but he just pisses me off, because if he would have stayed away from steroids he would have probably been the greatest player in the world.”
After raising and praising the card of Hank Aaron, and then of Jackie Robinson, and then of the Detroit Lions’ Hall of Fame running back Barry Sanders, who played during the 1990s, Gerald held a card that had come with a box of Cracker Jack candy, showing the Pittsburgh Pirates’ shortstop from the early 1900s, Honus Wagner. In one corner of the room were dozens of football helmets autographed by NFL stars—Joe Montana, Jim Brown, Len Dawson—and on the other side of the room, lined along four wooden shelves, were two hundred autographed baseballs that Gerald said were worth more than their weight in gold. Among the signatures were those of Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Barry Bonds, Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, and Pete Rose. (“He should be in the Hall of Fame.”) Each ball was mounted on a small wooden stand with a brass plaque bearing the name of the player who signed the ball, and each ball was covered with a plastic globe that was slightly larger than the ball and protected it from fingerprints and other marks.
Neatly stacked on shelves above the rows of baseballs were dozens of Wheaties boxes, the covers of each featuring a famous athlete, among them John Elway of the Denver Broncos, Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Jerry Rice of the San Francisco 49ers. Some of these unopened cereal boxes, such as the one with Lou Gehrig on the cover, were decades old.
“There must be generations of worms living in some of those boxes,” I said.
“Yes, and that makes them more valuable,” Gerald replied, with a smile.
THIRTY-THREE
UPSTAIRS, SEATED across from me in the living room, Gerald answered some questions.
“How would you like to be described in the press after you go public with your story?” I asked.
“I hope I’m not described as just some pervert or ‘Peeping Tom,’” he said. “I think of myself as a ‘pioneering sex researcher.’” He said he felt qualified to be called a pioneer because he had observed and written about thousands of people who were never aware of being watched, and therefore his research was more “authentic and true to life” than, for example, the material coming from the Masters & Johnson Institute, where the findings were drawn from volunteering participants.
“Why does your writing in The Voyeur’s Journal so often switch back and forth between the first and third person?”
“Because I felt that I was different individuals,” he said. “When I was downstairs in the office, I was Gerald the Businessman. When I was up on the observation platform, I was Gerald the Voyeur.”
“Did you ever think of filming or tape-recording your guests?”
“No,” he said, explaining that to be caught with such equipment would have been easily incriminating, and using it was also impractical. There were often long stretches of time when not enough was happening in the bedrooms to justify the use of a camera or a recording device in the attic. In any case, he never considered the use of such equipment.
Later I asked Foos if he had heard of Erin Andrews, the television sportscaster who was secretly filmed coming out of the shower in her hotel room by a stalker who had altered the peephole in her door. The man, who then posted nude footage of Andrews on the Internet, was convicted of a felony and served thirty months in prison. Andrews sued him and the hotel for $75 million in damages to compensate for the “horror, shame, and humiliation” she suffered. In February 2016, a judge awarded her $55 million.
Foos had been following the case on the news; his take did not surprise me. “While I’ve said that most men are voyeurs, there are some voyeurs—like this creep in the Fox Sports case—who are beneath contempt,” he told me. “Again, he is a product of the new technology, exposing his prey on the Internet, and doing something that has nothing in common with what I did. I exposed no one. What this guy did was ruthless and vengeful. If I were a member of the jury, I’d unhesitatingly vote to convict.”
Back in his living room Foos added, “All I needed up there was lots of patience and the ability to describe in my Voyeur’s Journal the situations and trends that I saw below.”