When once you have acquired a Zen master, you've got one for all eternity--or at least for the rest of your life. And so, the teachings, the direct transmission of the Dharma, the arguments and disagreements that I have had from and with Bill Weaver (died 1987), beginning in December of 1964 when I was barely twenty-two years old, have virtually directed my life, and absorbed my interests and attention ever since. Bill was of the Heroic Generation. He smoked too much, drank too much, and lived life down to the nub. During World War II he was a reconnaissance scout, spending the war behind enemy lines in Germany, blowing up bridges and sabotaging railroads. At the end of the war he was among the first to arrive at Dachau, Belsen, and Auschwitz, sniping out the SS Guards before the Red Cross got there: "Never believe," he said when I asked him to summarize the reality of the concentration camps, "that those stories about the hot lead enemas are not true." He also once said that the thing he found hardest to fathom about Nazis ("a space I cannot make") was how they could pick an infant up by the heels and dash its brains out against a wall. But that was history that I only found about later. What mattered to me, first of all, was his profound knowledge of the Sutras, the Vedas and the Tantras, and his ability to quote them extensively from memory and to compare and elucidate them. Second of all, his philosophy of wisdom-through-drugs and generally getting high was exactly mine and that of my little sangha of friends. And thirdly but not lastly, his total understanding and appreciation of me made him my dearest friend. He was straight, married, with daughters who are still my most esteemed friends; but, though I think he didn't quite see how I got there, he was perfectly accepting of my gay sexual orientation. Only, when I insisted that it was natural to me and far more of a turn-on for me than anything I had ever experienced with girls, he said, as much wonderingly as disagreeing with me (He and all his womenfolk were never tired of telling me, admiringly, that I was a male-male, without an effeminate bone in my body), "But still, you must admit that the greater the polarity, the greater the intensity." At which I loudly hooted, emphatically asserting that the last thing I wanted from another stud like me (my frankly narcissistic preference) was any kind of dumb-ass, dip-shit polarized difference. "What I want to have sex with," I said, and, in those days, meant, "is an identical twin." Uproarious laughter. Those were good days.