What happens to all your stuff when you die?

In the spring of 1990 Ray Johnson visited my house in Port Washington, New York. By then, he had been living in nearby Locust Valley for twenty-two years in self-imposed exile from New York City. He left shortly after Andy Warhol was shot, Robert Kennedy was assassinated and he himself was mugged. The afternoon he came had been preceded by several days of mail--articles, drawings and photocopies of works he had asked me to send along to people I'd never heard of before.

Dressed in a navy T-shirt and dungarees, bald and smiling, Ray Johnson was not what I'd expected. He appeared with a rose vase as a gift, stoppered with a Taittinger champagne cork. Extremely curious--but purposeful, and, as I was to learn, deadpan by design. It was, after all, a vase for a Rose. Ray wanted only black coffee and we sat drinking cups of the stuff in my kitchen. Our conversation roamed from his exegesis on synchronicity, the Dadaists, and an oral history on the "exquisite corpse," to a meeting with art critic Robert Pincus-Witten at Gagosian Gallery. Ray showed a group of collages to Pincus-Witten, on the floor of the gallery, beneath one of Warhol's Elvis silkscreens then showing at Gagosian. Ray told me: "Andy gave me that." I don't know if Ray felt the Warhol silkscreen was stolen from him, or if he wanted it back. I had my doubts about both. I couldn't imagine a legal battle. I was to find out Ray was more interested in the social geometry, the correspondance of this one-on-one exhibition o f his work and Warhol's, than in possessions. We talked on about the New York Correspondence School, the waters around Long Island, writing (he typed on an old manual), his house--I imagined a warehouse of sorts--and death. I ventured to ask: "What happens to all your stuff when you die?"