Ceramic Monkey Saltshaker

Kensington, CA, 2000

Wandering the souks of Fes in 1994, I bought a fez for my dear friend Richard Kohn.

Rick was an anachronism, fiercely beloved by his friends. A PhD in Tibetan Studies, he also possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of fine cigars, haberdashery, bebop jazz, caviar, and film noir. And he was a brilliant documentarian. His 1987 film “Lord of the Dance, Destroyer of Illusion,” was a poetic visual journey through an ancient Tibetan dance ritual, narrated by Richard Gere.

In 1995, Rick was diagnosed with cancer. A year before the disease took his life, he gave me this salt-and-pepper set. The pepper shaker got broken somehow. I don’t recall.

A few days after Rick died, his wife Marianne and I were sitting at her kitchen table in Kensington. “My friends ask me if they can do anything, if there is anything I want,” she said despondently. “But there’s nothing they can do.” She raised her voice. “I want my husband back.”

At that instant, we heard a crash in the living room. Marianne and I looked at each other, dumbfounded. We stood, traversed the dining room, and saw Rick’s most prized headwear—a vintage explorer’s pith helmet—resting on the living room floor. It was overturned, like a Buddhist begging bowl. Beside it lay an antique Nepali hotel ledger, splayed open to a sign-in page with a single name inscribed: mine. I’d written it there years ago, as a joke.

Nothing evident could have dislodged these objects from their place of display: a high, broad shelf in the room’s enormous bookcase. The object placed next to the helmet—the Moroccan fez—remained unmoved.

We will never know if my friend was indulging in a final bit of monkey business during his journey through the bardo, that mysterious interregnum between death and rebirth. But the following day a solicitation letter, addressed to Rick, arrived from a book club neither Marianne nor I had ever heard of. A membership card was enclosed, admitting Richard Kohn into “The Reincarnation Library.”