By Linda Peal White

Michael Jackson? His daddy was doing the tipping then, girl. He was young, had to be about fifteen years ago. They was chicken people, but we introduced them to pork. Lemme tell you, if they come uptown, they come to the Rendezvous. Anybody who’s somebody who comes to Memphis gonna come to the Rendezvous. All good people, though.

This story was originally to be about barbecue, specifically Charlie Vergos’s barbecue. But now I feel moved to write about Mr. Vergos himself, the life he has surrounded himself with and the welcome he offers to everyone who walks through the wrought-iron doors leading to the basement of his famous (and there is no other word for it) Rendezvous.

“There ain’t nothing to the blessed thing,” Mr. Charlie says as he tears off a rib and hands it to me for a taste – no formality, no napkin even, just eat it. “People like ribs, they want to gnaw on a bone once in a while, but they [and here I guess he means the media, the others who have written about his restaurant] got to make a simple thing hard.” I see that as he leads me through the process of barbecuing the Rendezvous way. “Give me a side,” he says and holds up the slab of meat. Here’s a man who’s comfortable with meat. Not a delicate man. Holding the side of ribs he uses his fingers and hands to indicate the find quality of the pork. “We leave the membrane on, you see.”

Yes. That’s all there is to it. They start with the best pork ribs they can find. In an enormous oven they thaw them and cook them first with steam. He showed me himself. “Move out of the way,” he says to the man cooking. He reaches for the hose hooked to the old brick oven, opens the doors, and squirts the sides of pork just like you would your petunias in the heat of the summer. Swoosh. Steam, smoke, whatever you want to call it, heads to the ceiling, but not before putting a sting to my nose and watering my eyes. We are all crying now. The man in the back, the cook, says after fourteen years he’s never gotten used to the smoke.

There’s a tin can full of liquid resting on a homemade shelf. It has what looks like a miniature mop in it. Now the secret, I think. What’s that?

“Part vinegar, part water.”

Fifty-fifty? I ask.

“I don’t know – I guess,” he replies.

What kind of vinegar?

“Any kind we got.”

He moves the now thawed and steamed pork ribs down nearer the charcoal flame in the oven and slaps some vinegar and water on them. “That’s it,” he says.

That’s it? I ask. But when do you turn them; what’s the timing? I direct this to the cook – I think maybe Mr. Charlie is keeping something from me. But the response is, “I just know when. When they look like they are ready.”

Mr. Charlie Vergos has owned the Rendezvous for forty-six years – owned and run it. He’s Greek. His dad was in the business and used to run an L&N Roundhouse back then on Jackson Street. “That’s like a café lunchroom, specials, counters, black on one side, white on the other,” He says. John Vergos came to this country in 1905. Mr. Charlie talks about him a lot. “The way we got started first, we got this little ol’ place downtown called Wimpy’s with a steamtable and whatnot. We sold open-faced sandwiches and hot dogs. This was my first place. I had a partner in those days, but we dissolved the partnership, just wasn’t enough room for us both to make a living.” His first landlord, over on the November Sixth Street Alley, 1934 (named for the date the Tennessee Valley Authority came to Memphis), was Mr. Abe Plough, an early city leader. Mr. Abe of Memphis fame, that is, inventor of St. Joseph’s aspirin and father of Schering-Plough, Inc. This noted philanthropist gave Charlie Vergos free rent for a year, as well as a little piece of advice: Don’t be open seven days a week, take a couple of days off. Mr. Charlie says, “I did what he told me and I realized I hadn’t lost a dime in doing it. Now we’re closed the holidays and even a couple of weeks in the summer.”

Charlie Vergos’s passions are his restaurant, his love of downtown Memphis and his collections. He collects guns, old photographs, signs, stuff: he’s got his-and-her chastity belts hanging on one wall.

“What do you think that is?” he asks and points to who-knows-what on the wall.

An oxen yoke? I reply hesitantly. A great laugh.

“It’s an outhouse seat.”

But there are two openings side by side.

“Yeah, isn’t that something?”

The building is bigger than I thought. Surely bigger than most people think before they go in. The restaurant is in the basement, and the party room, which serves as a waiting room for extraordinarily busy nights (even ordinary nights are busy here) is on the street level. The whole place seats seven hundred and it has three kitchens. They serve three to four tons of pork a week. A week? Last year they were named Restaurant of the Year by the National Pork Producers Council. Mr. Charlie is proud of all his square footage, and he takes me up an elevator to the top floor to see the warehouse.

We ride up with Tony. “What you doing, Tony? Carting some ribs up?” Mr. Charlie knows every single thing going on and his eyes never stop scanning the place. Years of having to be the boss. “Yessir,” replies Tony (and everyone else who addresses Charlie Vergos).

The prep rooms are up in the warehouse. It’s very clean and cavernous. Empty, I guess, because by this time, right before opening at 4:30 p.m., all the prep people have already done their jobs, cleaned up and gone. Along the way Mr. Charlie points out the original ceilings, floors, balconies, the stairwell. Like many of the old buildings in downtown Memphis, it’s just plain beautiful. Heart of pine and solid enough to keep the building from burning down in the two fires since 1934. “The fire didn’t even penetrate this wood,” he says and raps proudly on a bench made from one of the pilings they removed in the renovation.

Back downstairs, we tour the party room again. Looking at the signed photos on the wall I spot: Sid Caesar, Lash LaRue, Sen. Jim Sasser, Victor Mature, Red Skelton, Bruce Jenner, Gail Stanton (Miss June of something), Dan Quayle, George and Barbara Bush. “We used to take a box of ribs out to the plane,” he says.

Air Force One?

“Just like we do now with Clinton.”

Downtown Memphis? Mr. Charlie’s been there in the thick of it. He says, “The blue bloods or whatever you want to call them, the founders of the city, just made up their minds at one time that they would move everything out of downtown and give it to the blacks. Downtown was really going when I came – Peabody in its glory, Ole Miss in its heyday. We didn’t have any of this Overton Square – and Beale Street was just Beale Street. Then there was nothing downtown – it almost died. If it hadn’t been for Ole Miss and the University of Tennessee, I would have died, too. But we did business as always. We had the window dressers then. You know, the people who used to dress-up the department store windows? And we had the airline stewardesses,” he adds with a smile.

“We got into ribs about ’54. I used to cook all day on Saturday. The guys would come up from Mississippi and bring their wives shopping and they would come hang out with me and eat whatever I cooked and watch the ballgame. Back then ribs were sixty cents a pound; now they’re two dollars and sixty cents. ‘Hell, man, I want some ribs,’ someone said once. So I basted them with the pickle vinegar I had left over and put some paprika and garlic and salt and pepper on them. Dry barbecued ribs, I called it. Now everybody’s got it – dry-rubbed, they call it now. I guess I was the first person to do it this way.”

Mr. Charlie Vergos is the day man. He leaves me when Nick Vergos, his son, the night man gets there. But not before introducing me to the staff of waiters eating their dinner back in what looks like the waiters’ room on the basement level. “Talk to some of these guys,” he says, “they can tell you some stories.”

Yes sir, Mr. Vergos.

“Come over here honey and talk to that big-headed guy with the mustache who knows everything.” It is Jack Dyson, the most loquacious of the family of waiters sitting around the tables in the warm back room, who speaks up. He points to Lonnie Yates. “Lonnie’s been here twenty-seven years, me and Charlie [Lonnie’s younger brother] been here, what? Twenty-eight years, Charlie?”

Tell me a good story, I say.

“Honey, we all got stories.”

Tell me one. A waiter story about someone famous.

Jack says, “I waited on the Rolling Stones, but naw, honey, we don’t want to talk about them. Keith Richards, man! Michael Jackson, too.”

Tell me about Michael Jackson, was he a good tipper? I ask.

“His daddy was doing the tipping then, girl. He was young, had to be about fifteen years ago. They was chicken people, but we introduced them to pork. Lemme tell you, if they come uptown, they come to the Rendezvous. Anybody who’s somebody who comes to Memphis gonna come to the Rendezvous. All good people, though.”

Albert Hurt, who has been there nineteen years, has a story. “We had a fire, but everybody came in and got together and within five days we was open and making some more money. My old lady got pregnant that day. I went home and I wasn’t very tired. Nothing like a fire. My son’s thirteen years old now.” Everybody laughs; they’ve all heard the story. They’ve heard all the stories, most of them were there.

Robert Earl Stewart has been there the longest, thirty-three years. His son, Robert Kenneth Stewart, who is twenty-two years old has been there twelve years. I ask Robert Earl, Why? I gather you like it here. He says, “When you look at it, you got to look at it all the way around. It’s more than a job; it’s a closed environment, outsiders don’t get it.”

There are no outsiders: no women waiters and only a couple of young white guys working the bar up front. That’s all. Ask Jon Von Nolan, who is the self-proclaimed “baby” of the family, only been there nine months; before that he was what Jack called, “an uptown gourmet waiter.” He worked at Memphis’s Justine’s for thirteen years, but was on the waiting list five years to work the Rendezvous.

So my next question is, How much do you make in tips?

I ask Albert this – he’s sitting back contemplating his answer, but offers only this with a knowing smile, “There are two things we don’t talk about around here: politics and money. We talk about everything else, not that.” Then Jack asks me, “How much did you make as a cocktail waitress?”

I say nearly $100 a night for the three good nights. I’m proud of this, but the response is, “Girl, you was talking, not running.” A query from him, “Suppose you sell four thousand dollars in a night, how much you figure you make? And fifteen percent been gone a long time.” I gasp at the figure I come up with. Can’t be right. He’s pulling my leg. A big laugh all around.

“You got to move,” Jack says. “you don’t sing, you don’t dance, you just bring them their stuff. You put the food down, you ask them was it good. Can I bring you something else? And maybe you smile while you’re doing it. At other places you’re all the time pouring that coffee and getting more water – we don’t go through that. We don’t have butter, coffee or sweets and we just memorize everything, put it right here.” He taps his noggin.

“Talk to that man over there.” Jack points to a quiet guy, lounging, getting ready for the night.

What’s your name?

“Larry Fentress.”

“He’s the cheeseplate man,” Albert says. “He’s been here twenty-three years, got a system going and can make a cheeseplate in five seconds.”

Larry Fentress looks up and says only, “Five hundred pounds of cheese a week. Everybody orders one.”

Albert points out Mark Ford, a younger guy with glasses who’s been quietly studying the newspaper during the interview. Albert says, “He’s our intellectual waiter.”

How do you mean?

“He reads the paper. Tremendously.” Another all-around laugh. Mark Ford gingerly folds his paper and heads out to the floor. But he’s smiling. He’s heard it before.

One more story please, and then I’ll let you fellas get to work. The place is starting to fill up. From the moment the doors open at 4:30 p.m., people begin filling the empty seats, transforming the clean, quiet expectancy to a close and noisy giant.

“Got plenty of stories,” Jack says. “The other night a lady came in and we have tea, all ours is sweet. I have tea, but it’s sweet, I say. ‘I don’t want it sweet.’ She wanted some tea, but she wanted it unsweetened. But I don’t have any, all my tea is sweet, but she kept insisting on it. She was mad ‘cause we couldn’t get that sugar out of that tea. And then, you know people get mad ‘cause we ain’t got any dessert. And coffee. You can walk up there and tell them say, ‘I got Coke, Sprite, root beer, Dr. Pepper, iced tea, Diet Coke and Michelob beer on tap, no hot drinks, and my iced tea is already sweet.’ That’s all the way it comes and the first thing you hear is, ‘Can I have some coffee?’ And then you come back and explain: ‘Everything on my menu comes with beans and slaw,’ and the first thing come out of their mouth is [all together, a chorus of waiters]: ‘YOU MEAN TO TELL ME YOU AIN’T GOT NO FRENCH FRIES?’” They’ve practiced this, I can tell. Horselaughs, chuckles, grins, while they pick up their dinner plates and head out to the floor. Now it’s just me and Jack, who has more to say on the subject.

“We got the same menu all the time. We specialize in ribs. I hear them say, what you suggest I eat? Barbecue I say. This is a rib house you know. Pork ribs, and then they order chicken.”

I went back later for dinner. I had the cheeseplate, the pork ribs and a beer. I didn’t ask for coffee. I didn’t pay too much, and Mark Ford was my waiter. He treated me well, just as he treated the other diners around me, who were having a good time, smiling and cleaning their plates.

I knew I could go back in a month or more and they would all remember me, ask about this story, slap me on the back and tease me about what a lazy waitress I must have been. The thing that sticks with me, of course, is Mr. Charlie and his family of waiters – the way they work, then go home, make babies and pay the bills, all within the security of this restaurant. I don’t imagine they think too much about it, the work, that is, outside of Jack. He said that whenever he goes out of town he eats at all the barbecue places. He said, “I went to Gridley’s the other day in Jackson, Mississippi, and I won’t ever go back. They said, ‘Man we got some baby backs.’ I said, ‘Bring ‘em on.’ I couldn’t eat it. I didn’t tell them where I was from until I got ready to leave, tipped the waiter and made him happy. It wasn’t none of his fault. I been to Tony Roma’s, you been there? Seems like they boil their ribs. Now I like Gridley’s beans, you know that little honey taste. They got a dry rib that I tried, still ain’t no good, they try to get our little secret. But they treat you nice at Tony Roma’s. When I go out of town I be trying all the barbecue places, but I still ain’t eat any better and it ain’t because I work here…”

He could have gone on all night.