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Ah! Twice now the man has followed my lead in ordering! "I've read you've always been a Hank Williams freak," I say, starting the interview again. "When did you first hear him?"

"Twelve or 13," Kristofferson says. "It was on the Grand Old Opry radio show singin' 'Lovesick Blues.' I bought every 78 he ever made. All the Luke the Drifter songs."

Luke the Drifter was Williams' alter ego, whose songs were usually musical monologues. "Remember 'Oh No, Joe'?" I ask Kristofferson. "The Luke the Drifter number about Joseph Stalin?"

He shakes his head. "Never heard it."

"You must have," I say.

"About Stalin?"

"Yeah. It's this great song that warns Joe he better stop messin' with us Yanks." I begin singing, "Quit braggin' about how your bear can bite cuz you're sittin' on a keg of dynamite/Oh no, Joe ... '"

Kristofferson laughs. "Never heard it."

I tell him that he should check out the new Hank Williams box. "I've been listening to a lot of his radio things lately," Kristofferson tells me. "'The Health and Happiness Hour.'" He then says that when he himself was a janitor at Nashville's Columbia recording studios in the mid-'60s, MGM was in the same studio. Williams' widow Audrey would be there all the time rerecording old Hank Williams cuts. "Adding strings to them and stuff?" I ask.

"Yeah," he answers. "Audrey was always trying to make extra records. It was pretty hopeless."

"Now there is a woman with an eternally horrible voice," I say, then ask if Kristofferson remembers the day Hank died.

"Oh yeah," Kristofferson answers, his voice quite soft again. I look from his face to my tape recorder. "I was in high school in San Mateo [Calif.]. I remember a friend calling me up sayin', 'Your hero just died.' At the time, Hank Williams was a pretty unknown quantity. In high school people wouldn't listen to country music. He was never played on popular radio. He was too strong for the popular salad at the time."

Our soup comes. We sip our separate bowls. It's good. "When you took a girl out on a date, what did you listen to?" I ask.

He thinks. "Josh White. Folk music. I remember having a lot of Josh White albums. Johnny Cash. Elvis. I loved the Coasters." I ask him when Dylan showed up on his cultural radar. "I was in the army. I loved him. I read on the back of one of his albums where he said something about Hank Williams being as important as Norman Mailer. At the time country music was still fightin' for respectability and I thought that was a great thing to say."

He sips some soup, then tells me about the time he was a janitor during Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" Nashville sessions. "I saw Dylan sitting out in the studio at the piano, writing all night long by himself. Dark glasses on. All the musicians played cards or Ping-Pong while he was out there writing." I ask if Kristofferson actually "heard" Dylan recording any songs. "Oh yeah. I thought he was the greatest thing. Bob Dylan. It was very exciting. I was the only songwriter allowed in the building. They had police around the studio they had so many people trying to get in."

That surprises me. "They always had cops there, or was it because of Dylan?"

"For him," Kristofferson answers. Then he raises his voice. "Bob Dylan was very important."

"Did you get to talk to him?"

"No! The closest I got was [his manager,] Al Grossman. Even to his wife and his son Jesse. I wouldn't have dared talk to him. I'd have been fired." He then adds, "I got to be friends with a lot of my heroes there -- like Lefty Frizzell. George Jones. Johnny Cash."

"You weren't a kid," I remark.

"No. I turned 30 as a janitor," Kristofferson says soberly. "I was thinking at the time that Hank Williams died when he was 29. All my peers were at least 10 years younger than I was. I felt like an old has-been at the time."

"And Dylan was just a kid," I add.

"Oh yeah. But my friends in Nashville were all young. None of them had been in the army. It was an advantage in one way being older, but in other ways you couldn't help but feel over the hill."

We talk about the A&E network biography of Kristofferson, which he liked. I remark, "It seems the first few years you were a star you were really burning it at both ends."

"For more than a couple of years," he says. "When I started, the last job I had was I'd gone from living 50 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico on an oil rig, and living in a condemned building in Nashville. Now all of a sudden I had people coming to my show like Sam Peckinpah and Barbra Streisand. People were offering me jobs as an actor."

"Did you think of yourself as an actor?"

"I didn't even think of myself as a performer. I remember I had an actor friend -- a close friend from college -- Anthony Zerbe. He sent me a telegram before I started my first movie, 'Cisco Pike.' It said, 'Have a good time. Ignore the camera.' That was the extent of my training."

A bus boy arrives with our food. "Do you have a salsa?" I ask him.

"We don't have salsa," is the answer. "Tabasco?"

"No thanks," I say. "Damn." Kristofferson and I now both behave like hungry male mammals. We eat our food in silence. If one of us were a woman, perhaps the other would be more circumspect about chowing down, but instead we eat in silence for a good long time. My Nipponese quesadilla is excellent -- perhaps it was Pancho Villa who invented sushi! It doesn't dawn on me to ask Kristofferson how his lobster salad is. Instead, I pause in my eating and take issue with one of the man's most famous words of wisdom: "You're famous for the advice, 'Never sleep with anyone crazier than you,'" I say. "But that assumes you're not in the middle of a drought [with] no choice."

Kristofferson smiles. "I also said that you'll break that rule and regret it."

"Was Janis Joplin crazier than you?" I ask.

He thinks a moment and says, "No."

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