Bangkok Babylon by Jerry Hopkins

Author:Jerry Hopkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780804840774
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

Romancing the Stones

You have to like a guy who openly admits that for years he dealt in smuggled Southeast Asian antiquities, and also is a painter who says his first influence and mentor was a Dutch Boy house paint color chart.

Richard Diran was given that book of paint samples by his father before he could read and write, and it launched the first of his several careers. (I'll get to the stolen Cambodian and Burmese statuary and gold Buddha figures in a minute.) His father likely did that to keep the kid quiet, but Richard says today that he remembers reacting to the colors emotionally; some made him weep with joy, others made him nauseous.

His father was the manager of the Cow Palace, which despite its rustic and somewhat corny name was, during the 1960s, San Francisco's largest auditorium, where the Beatles played their first West Coast concert and the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater for president (both in 1964). It also was home of the Roller Derby, where Billy Graham held his crusades, Bob Hope told jokes and a 625-pound wrestler named Haystack Calhoun threw his weight around. Richard, then a teenager, had his father's permission to enter the dressing rooms, where he probably made a pain in the ass of himself, if his description of his school days is accurate.

He says he was a “complete freakin' washout” in class, had to repeat the fifth grade, got kicked out of the public school system in the seventh grade for something he says was much more innocuous than things he got away with (which he will not talk about), and then got drummed out of a Catholic school after a priest wouldn't hear his confession because he wasn't a Catholic and Richard told the man to do something anatomically impossible with himself.

The public school system was next, and what he remembers best about his time in it are the summer vacations. For one of these, in 1966 when he was sixteen, without telling their parents, he and a friend, fifteen, planned a trip to the Galapagos Islands; there was one boat a month from Ecuador (then administrating the islands first made famous by Charles Darwin), it dropped you off and picked you up a month later.

“No fuckin' way!' is what our parents said, even though we had our own money,” Richard recalls. “So, dig this: when we said we were going anyway, they said they'd give each of us a thousand dollars if we promised not to go any farther than Guatemala. Far fuckin' out, right?”

For two hundred dollars they bought a seven-year-old Ford woody and drove to Mexico City where they met the president of the National Charos Association, who gave them each a pearl-handled, chrome-plated .38 Smith & Wesson pistol and hundreds of rounds in Zapata style ammo belts. No wonder they were stopped by police. Producing the Charos friend's card, they were released and as they continued south, they used the pistols to shoot game, cooking it over a wood fire, using the car antenna as a spit.

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