Interview by Jerry Hopkins

Of Jerry Hopkins’ almost thirty odd books (and some are very odd indeed), he’s best known for No One Here Gets Out Alive, the Jim Morrison biography which Oliver Stone filmed as The Doors. My favorite is Extreme Cuisine, in which he explored culinary delights from Vietnamese bull’s penis to human placenta (he diced and sautéed his son Nick’s and served it to guests. Don’t worry, Nick survived childhood; he designed this website). In 2005 Periplus Editions published Jerry’s Bangkok Babylon: The Real-Life Exploits of Bangkok’s Legendary Expatriates are often Stranger than Fiction. One of the twenty-five portraits is oddly familiar...it’s titled The Collector: Jason Schoonover. It’s available at this link: www.asiabooks.com/browse/search.asp?keyword=bangkok+babylon&type=title

How many men who are now fifty years old or older got their first exposure to “sex” in the pages of National Geographic magazine? Thousands? Millions?

Now, answer me this: how many of those men went beyond the photographs of bare-breasted natives and read the stories as well and became explorers and adventurers?

Jason Schoonover may be one of the few. He, like the generation that followed that bought Playboy for the articles (or so they said), admits he enjoyed the illustrations—the only other “soft porn” available to him at the time was in the lingerie section of the Canadian Sears catalog—but he swears that he read every issue of the Geographic ever published, leading, eventually, to a career tramping some of the most remote parts of the world and membership as a Fellow in the world-renowned Explorers Club.

A native of Saskatchewan, born in 1946, Jason (originally Harvey; he changed his name later because he hated Harvey), was the son of a man who delivered milk and ran the local livery stable. “The family farm et cetera failed when I was four and my father moved onward and upward to becoming a horrendous drunk, rising all the way to skid row in his later years, a total failure at everything.” He and his sister, he says, thus effectively were raised by their mother, a second grade school teacher.

They lived in Carrot River, a frontier town (pop. 900), in a house heated by a wood-burning stove, water fetched in buckets from the well, “where wheat field meet a virgin birch, pine and poplar forest that runs north eight hundred miles to the Barren Land’s tree line. It was in that boreal forest beginning two blocks from our home that I fell in love with Nature and the outdoors and where I feel most at home.” Following four years of English Literature and History at Simon Fraser University outside Vancouver, he became a popular radio personality and started freelancing for newspapers, magazines, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as well as stage, writing, directing and producing retired Prime Minister Diefenbaker’s 80^th birthday gala at Saskatoon’s Centennial Auditorium. He also owned and operated Saskatoon’s first taped music DJ operation, investing his profits in income-producing real estate, founding Schoonover Properties in 1975. Since 1977, he boasts, he’s been “gainfully unemployed,” his travels to more than fifty countries paid for by the revenue from his rental properties. Most are in Saskatoon’s prime university area, all managed by a professional company that does that sort of thing.

In 1978, on his first solo trip around the world, he says, “I found myself staying in a dollar-a-day room just inside the jungle in a village in Sri Lanka. Like out of a movie—no kidding—drums were beating in the distance in the jungle night. I asked the owner what they were. ‘Devil dance, sar,’ he replied. ‘Devil dance? Is it possible to see it?’’ ‘Of course, sar. I’ll be happy to take you.’”

For the next two months, Jason assembled a collection of ninety-seven masks, costumes, drums, whistles, bells, and other ritual paraphernalia, along with sound recordings and photos. He sold the fully documented collection to the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology and when the Smithsonian Institution asked him to assemble a similar collection, he jumped at the chance to make this his new career, moving to Bangkok.

From 1978 to 1985, Jason sold a dozen collections to a half-dozen museums around the world, from Germany to Japan, some under contract, other times on speculation, also selling to individual collectors and antiquity and primitive art shops across the US and Canada. His contracts now secure in Sri Lanka, most of these items were devil dance artifacts, although one collection focused on Tantric Buddhist and folk trappings from Nepal, Tibet, and Assam, and another that included masks from Indonesia.

“I remember an Indonesian mask I paid $5 for that I sold as part of a collection for $175—so the profits were good.”

Still, he concluded that the market was thin. “There were three hundred and fifty ethnological museums in the world but only two handfuls had any money, and many of them were already stocked with Asian ethnography or the curators had other interests. Once I had filled the existing holes, those markets dried up.” It was time for another career change.

So he invented an alter ego named Lee Rivers and wrote a novel called The Bangkok Collection, published in Canada in 1988, republished world-wide a year later by Bantam in New York as Thai Gold. “River’s specialties are eastern antiquities, exotic women, and high-priced danger,” the American edition crowed on its back cover. The bearded author’s photo showed him in a snakeskin jacket and the paperback mentioned memberships in The Explorers Club of New York and the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand. He was single, the blurb continued, and “lives comfortably out of a burgundy Samsonite and a khaki knapsack and can most often be found somewhere in Asia.”

Indiana Jones, step back! There’s a new guy in town, and this one—Lee Rivers—was, by Jason’s admission, taller and more courageous than himself, but not quite as smart. Maybe that explains why in the book and in a sequel, Opium Dream, published in Thailand in 2002, Rivers has a running dialog with his penis, an appendage he calls Ol’ Thunder. A third novel, The Manila Galleon, was to be published in 2004.

Despite, or maybe because of, outrageous characters and plots, the novels were pretty good. One reviewer called Opium Dream, a story that takes Rivers to Afghanistan and the long-lost burial site of Kublai Khan, “a fast paced Robert Ludlum-meets-Steven Spielberg romp,” an opinion not far off the mark. Once the reader made the leap of faith required by many novels (and films) in this genre, Dream, like its predecessor, was an action-packed fun ride from Saigon to Cairo that, unlike many others in the field, made few mistakes; most fiction set in this region was so riddled with glaring errors it was clear the authors spent only a little time there or were hurrying to meet a deadline. By 2003, Jason had been a visitor or part-time resident of Asia for twenty-five years and was proud that the descriptions of culture and place, from the Golden Triangle to Afghanistan, invariably rang true.

Jason continued to divide his time between Thailand and Toontown, as he called it, where he shared his home in the same upper middle class university neighborhood with Su Hattori, an Intensive Care Unity supervisor and researcher he often calls the Imperial Dragon Lady.

“Old, quality character homes and doctors, lawyers, professors and businessman, and even a few artists, predominate on either side of the boulevard,” he said. “We’re one block from the river and the position where local gal Joni Mitchell stood while painting the cover art for her second album, Clouds. We have 2,575 square feet, which is a bit small, but only because of all the anthro junk.” Much about a man’s character is revealed by such stuff when it’s used to feather his nest. By his own description, Jason’s home is more like a pack rat’s than a bird’s.

“Guests are usually agape at our house because it’s like living in an anthropological museum,” he says. “Where tribal art doesn’t cover the walls and floors, there’s original prairie art and a series of Kama Sutra renditions on wafers of elephant ivory. One room features over eighty authentic masks. We have Neolithic stone tools from Laos and Burma; a bronze age axe head from Vietnam; textiles from several hill tribes; framed tropical insects; a collection of about a dozen 2,500-year-old Mother Goddess terra-cottas from Sri Lanka; basket work from several Southeast Asian tribes, including four over four feet tall; king cobra and alligator skins; shields and spears framing the fireplace. Sherpa walking sticks; Buddhist statues; a dozen-piece collection of Vietnamese water puppets; and dinosaur bones. And nothing is new or “touristo,” although he insists nothing is really valuable and the security system in his home is to discourage kids from trashing his place while swiping his stereo.

“Collecting is in my bones. I’ve never thrown anything away, from my Boy Scout hat to the baseball glove I got in Grade Four to the beads on the Cree moccasins I wore in Grade Six. Elvis’s and the Beatles’ first album covers are pinned to the ceiling of the guest room where a net on the wall displays more than a hundred and twenty-five antique fishing lures. “I’m a collector of damned near everything. Ethnography just doesn’t command the prices that archaeological artifacts do and I don’t move in that market, for which I have ethical misgivings.

“Unlike centuries old stone carvings, ethnographic items are rarely over a hundred years old, most often just a few years or decades, and invariably still in production. For example, a new mask can easily be carved to replace the one I acquired for a museum where the hardware and software—the documentation—of the cult will be safe and saved for posterity. If the 20^th century was a steamroller on these subcultures, this one will flatten them completely within the next couple of decades, highlighting the urgency that they find refuge in museums or the fact of their existence will be lost forever.”

Jason’s story sounds like one he might have read in his beloved National Geographic. When he talks of other valued possessions in his home, he begins to sound like an article in Outside or Guns & Ammo. “Our flatwater and whitewater experiences in our seventeen-foot, six-inch Kevlar Hellman canoe with ash trim and laminated twenty-six-ounce paddles wholly tune me up for another year,” he says. “But I also love drinking beer and fishing and own an old tub with a steering wheel and a thirty-five-year old thirty-three-horse Johnson. Stomping around stubble fields and golden-leafed forests soaking up the rich autumn aromas while stalking game birds with my .12-gauge Remington 1000 semi-automatic shogun is another enormous pleasure. I also have a backup Winchester 2200 .12 gauge pump which is a piece of crap, but solves bear problems canoeing; ; a Mossberg .16 gauge model 190 shotgun for grouse which is more of a collector’s item, the gauge not having adequate punching power; a beautiful fitting and smooth lever-action Savage .243 for deer; an Enfield .30-.06 for bigger game like elk and moose; a .22 Cooey semi-automatic for popping the heads of grouse; and, finally, my old single-“shot” bee-bee gun my dad gave me when I was five, and which rests proudly at the top of the rack. I shoot for the table, not the wall. There’s nothing as delicious—and healthy—as sizzling Bambi steaks. . . .”

He’s also a gastronomical adventurer. Once when the geese he was hunting didn’t come, “I got bored and when a crow flew over, I blasted it. Crow tastes and has the texture of a tire—and I even slow-roasted it—like a steel-belted Michelin 206/60 R-15 off our Nissan 240SX.” Of a record grasshopper year on the prairies, he said, “Many people thought I was nuts sweeping them into my specimen net. Straight into the boiling water and they turn red like lobsters and have such a delicate, delicious flavor!”

In Thailand, his life is somewhat more confined, austere, but the image of a man thumping his chest like one of Dian Fossey’s gorillas remains. In Bangkok, he stays in small guest house rooms, where he boils his drinking water on a hotplate, eats many of his meals on the street, wears rumpled safari suits and cheap Hawaiian shirts (always in sandals and shorts), but he also roams afield, returning to Sri Lanka for more devil dancing, crewing on a friend’s yacht in a race in the Andaman Sea. He calls himself a “half-time expat” and makes it clear that as much as “I absolutely love Canada’s fabulous summers and autumns,” which he spends in the outdoors, that at the first sign of snow and cold—both “four letter words”—he runs “shrieking in terror to the airport and a plane back to that beautiful sauna that is Asia.”

“Thailand is simply the most beautiful, exotic country on the planet, and the only one that’s truly and wholly livable. If it weren’t for Thailand, life on this planet, with its too, too restrictive cultures, would be unbearable. Although Canada is sheer heaven in summer, it’s seven shades of hell in the winter. Islam is disturbing; Hinduism is an eye-roller; and Christianity has been a 2,000-year scourge on Western Civilization. The prissy, politically correct part of our Western culture disgusts me.

“Thailand, on the other hand, with its tranquil, laissez faire Buddhism and lazy pace has its mind wide open, the way the rest of the world should be in so, so many ways. Thailand has perfect—hot!—weather and beaches and beautiful jungle and fascinating hill tribes and, hell, the whole culture is focused on pleasure, such as with its incredible cuisine and massages. I never really knew what the word ‘exotic’ meant until I came to Thailand. Plus, it attracts the most fascinating, adventurous people in the world—outside of New York City—and they all end up washing back drinks at the Foreign Correspondents Club. Other people who live their dreams live here. I can relate to that."

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