[charlene]

PART TWO:
Three years ago, I saw him tape an episode of Austin City Limits, and for the first time that I'd ever noticed, he seemed nervous and had trouble remembering some of the lines to his songs.

Now, I hadn't been so bold as to go and land my chopper on Kris-tofferson's lawn, but because life is funny and life is good, Kris and I had met by then and become friends. And backstage that evening was the first time he apologized to me in advance for his porous memory.

"My memory's not that good," he said. "I don't like it, but you can't go back and undo the concussions. The doctors say the concussions I had playing football and boxing have added up to me not remembering everything I should, so don't be surprised if I go blank on something," he warned me, his eyes searching mine.

An hour later, he told me the same thing again.

Backstage in Sacramento, I struck up a conversation with a big, friendly guy named Bucky Kahler.

"What's your connection to Kris?" I asked.

"I'm his best friend," Bucky beamed. "Since the fifth grade, when he moved from Brownsville to San Mateo. We did everything together, including football and boxing. It's the concussions from football that are hurting him now."

"I know he was a Golden Gloves boxer, but did you see him get tagged a lot?"

"I tagged him a few times myself," Bucky says. (And from the looks of him, he learned how to use his mitts.) "Tagged him hard. I wish I hadn't, but I did. We just didn't know."

Kris loved his early life in the Rio Grande Valley and credits those years with teaching him how to see the world. "South Texas seemed like the Garden of Eden," he told me recently. "I loved the flowers and the orchards and the ruby-red grapefruits. Brownsville was more Mexico than Texas, and that I loved.

"My mother once took me to a big parade for Jose Lopez, a guy from Brownsville who'd won the Medal of Honor. There was a lot of prejudice against Mexicans then, and at this whole parade we were the only Anglos in the audience. I'll never forget it. That was the kind of thing my parents did that gave me a sense of what I should do. That day affected the way I've lived every day since.

"And along the way, I felt like it was my duty, whether people wanted to hear what I had to say about the Contras or nukes or not, that it was my responsibility to speak up, and if I didn't live up to it I wouldn't be doing what God wanted me to do. A lot of people probably think I'm a Marxist or something," he says, laughing. "Hell, I'm not even a good Democrat. I don't much care for politics. It's about doing what you think is right.

"There was a thing Blake said that always rang with me: 'If he who is organized by the Divine for spiritual communion should refuse and bury his various talent in the earth, even though he should want natural bread, sorrow and desperation shall pursue him throughout life, and after death, shame and confusion are faced to eternity.' "

(It must be noted that the man with the fading memory recited Blake perfectly.)

"So if you're given the tools, you have a responsibility to use them," he says. "I'm doing what I'm cut out to do, the best thing I can do, until they throw dirt on me."

"I'm seventy-seven," he says. "For my family, I'm getting close to the end of the line. But I got a little wear left on these boots and I'm in no rush to get there."

On his feet that night in Sacramento, at the golf course outside Austin, and nearly every other time I've seen him, Kristofferson has been wearing the same pair of beat-up cowboy boots.

"They've brought me lots of luck."

A lot of people don't end up thinking they've been lucky.

"Why wouldn't I feel lucky? So many good things have happened in my life it makes me feel like someone else was writing the script."

So, after all these years, did your song come true? Did you beat the devil?

"I guess maybe I did. I'm pleased to find that I'm just grateful for the way my life has been. Lisa and I have been married for thirty-three years, the people who are my heroes ended up being my friends, and I've got eight children who love me. I don't know how much more I could want."

For a couple decades now, Kris has meant to publish his memoirs, to write his life down in what would be an epic book. The press releases from various publishing houses have noted that Kristofferson, being more than enough of a writer himself, would be writing "without benefit of a coauthor." The last release, from 2003, quoted him with regard to the prospect of telling his life story: "William Blake said, 'The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom.' We'll see."

The last anyone heard, the book was supposed to have come out in 2005. Since then, the publisher has kept a respectful silence. Lisa says that Kris would still like to write the book, someday.

On Oscar night this year, the phone rang. It was Kris. All the excitement from Hollywood on the television had him thinking back on that part of his life. He has been in ninety-three films. "One benefit of my memory slipping is I don't remember all my movies. So I'm really enjoying watching lots of them again. My favorites are A Star Is Born with Barbra Streisand and the one with, um, you know, he's nominated tonight … McConaughey! … where I played the badass sheriff. It's called … it's called …

"Lone Star!"

Years ago, I wrote a Christmas novel called When Angels Sing, and I used Kris as inspiration for a character called the Colonel, a retired Air Force pilot who is emotionally estranged from his son. Last year, a film based on the book went into production, to a great extent because both Kris and Willie agreed to act in it.

The love Kris feels for Willie cannot be overstated.

"Willie had been the hero of serious songwriters in Nashville," he's told me. "We knew all his songs. I remember waiting at his farm where he lived outside of Nashville. I went there and just waited, but I never saw him. The first time I met Willie was in Mexico, on the set of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Willie came down to visit. I had him play some songs for Sam Peckinpah. When Willie played, Bob Dylan was in the room, and Bob was so knocked out that he asked Willie to keep playing, and Willie played all day long on the floor in the room.

"He's the great artist of our lifetime. You and I will never meet another artist like him… . Willie will be the last to go. I'm not sure he's meant to die, ever."

When it comes to expressions of love, Kris's mind is as clear as a bright-blue sky. And because your heroes sometimes become your friends, one day I found myself on the set of this movie with Kristofferson, Harry Connick Jr., Connie Britton, Willie, and a supporting cast of Texas music greats. In the scene, the family was singing Christmas carols at a holiday gathering, and Kris, as the Colonel, kept forgetting the final line of an emotional exchange with Connick's character, Michael. It was actually one word he was forgetting, and it was very moving to watch him search his mind for it, take after take. "Michael, I'm not …" he'd say, then he'd go blank, cuss himself, and we'd start again. "Michael, I'm not … Michael, I'm not …" As his frustration grew, I decided to write the word he was forgetting on the palm of my hand, where he could see it, as a spur to memory—the way Lisa stands nearby him with a prompter, to remind him of the words he himself once dreamed up that are now leaving him. But on the last take, without looking at me, the word came to him.

"Michael, I'm not senile!" Kristofferson said.

Then he turned to me. "Nothing to it," he said.