Screening Room: Family Pictures

  The restaurant was started in 1949 by John’s father, Charlie Vergos. According to the stories, one day Charlie discovered a coal chute in the basement of his diner, allowing him to set up a vent for a charcoal grill. These days, the Rendezvous grills 1,650 pounds of meat every week. You can get barbecued chicken or barbecued beef or barbecued pork. You can get your beef in shoulders, in ribs, and in slabs. You can get it on the bone or pulled. You can get accompaniments like coleslaw, barbecued baked beans, peppers, and rolls. Desserts are not served at the Rendezvous. “This is awfully fine meat,” somebody groans from the next table. At another table, a large man in a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off is pouring a half bottle of barbecue sauce on his two rolls.

  The sauce. It is red sienna in color. It is thick. It is sweet and sour at the same time, tangy. It is known that the ingredients include minced onion, dry mustard, cayenne pepper, tomato paste, brown sugar, vinegar, olive oil, and garlic. Customers have conjectured that the Vergos family, being Greek, have surreptitiously added cardamom and anise.

  Aunt Lila is attempting to eat her ribs with a knife and fork. My brother and I use our fingers and teeth and are biting and chewing as if we were hunter-gatherers on the African savannah. The black waiters move through the room with large pitchers of beer as if they are offering holy communion. “Yes, sir,” somebody says softly. There’s not a lot of talking at the Rendezvous. Some of the waiters will linger at the tables in that slow southern way and try to strike up a conversation. “You need more sauce? More water? You don’t look like you’re from around here. How do you like Memphis? You been to the Peabody yet?”

  Lennie seems to have taken a rest from her food. “M.A.’s second theater was the Memphian,” she says. The Memphian was built in the mid-1930s in the Art Deco style. It was three stories high with three sets of double doors in the front. Not a single window. The ground level was orange; the top level was a great pink slab like the side of a mountain. The front of the building consisted of three walls at funny angles with a neon marquee on the top of each wall. “As I remember, Mutiny on the Bounty was the big movie at that time. All the family got free admission and free food. In the summer, I used to go there with a friend and eat popcorn until I was ill. I didn’t care. I just wanted to sit somewhere cool and dark. I would go home with a laundry bag full of popcorn. Your Uncle Ed went to the Memphian with his girlfriends, impressing them right off the bat that he could get in free. He and his girlfriends would argue all through the movie and then make up and kiss before the lights came on.” Lennie pauses; her eyes become misty.

  Listening to Lennie, I am ten years old again, climbing the stairs into the projection booths at the Memphian and the Malco and the Crosstown. It is the late 1950s. I loved the booths. They were tiny rooms, with two movie projectors, each mounted with a giant reel of celluloid film three feet in diameter. Like a fish tank, the front wall of the booth was glass. An intensely bright “carbon arc lamp” provided a powerful light, which shined through the film, then through a focusing lens, then through the glass wall and out into the theater, finally landing on the movie screen two hundred feet away. I was fascinated by the carbon arc lamp. It consisted of two pointed rods of graphite a couple of inches apart. The rods were first brought together so that they touched, and an electrical current passed between them. Then the rods were slowly separated. The ionized air and carbon vapor kept the electricity flowing. You couldn’t look directly at the burning rods, the light was so extremely bright. However, the rest of the booth was dark, so as not to distract the moviegoers.

  While the movie was being shown, a projectionist would stand in the booth and operate the equipment. I remember some of the projectionists. They wore colored T-shirts under their outer shirts and had keys dangling from their belts, and they casually threw around “shits” and “fucks.” For long movies, requiring two reels, the projectionists had to load up the second projector with the second reel and get it operating just when the first reel was finished. Another of their jobs was to make sure that the film didn’t catch on fire from the heat of the carbon arc lamps. When a fire started—which I once witnessed—the film would break and make a flapping sound. Of course the movie would stop, to the great annoyance and boos of the moviegoers, while the projectionist respliced the film. This took a few minutes.

  From the projection booth, I watched such films as The Bridge on the River Kwai, Some Like It Hot, Ben-Hur, and North by Northwest. For me, the projection booth was a secret cave. The moviegoers couldn’t see into the dimly lit booth. The projectionist would work his magic with the huge reels of film and the amazing carbon arc lamps, creating another world on the screen, while he and I huddled invisibly in our little control room like the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain.

  The projectionists were friendly men and skilled at their job. They didn’t mind my being there and even welcomed the company, speaking to me in whispers so that our voices wouldn’t be heard. One of the men complained to me that he didn’t make enough money as a projectionist to support his wife and children and had to work a second job as a security guard at an automobile dealership. He was always tired and sometimes dozed off. I was terrified of an accident, but he always woke up just when it was time to change reels. Some of the men occasionally brought their girlfriends into the booth. I once saw one of the girlfriends sitting on the lap of the projectionist, a small wiry man who had been especially friendly to me. The two of them seemed unconcerned that I was there, six feet away. She kept kissing him on the mouth, more and more urgently, and soon his hands disappeared beneath her clothes. I strained to see more, but the light in the booth was too dim.

  What? How long was I gone? Lila’s voice brings me back.

  “… that was it. Alfred rented out the Rendezvous for his fortieth. Years ago. He’d hired a musical group from Mississippi to play. I don’t know why Alfred had to go all the way to Mississippi—those people can hardly put a sentence together, but apparently they can do music. The guitarist had some kind of car trouble and didn’t show up, so Alfred, who was an amateur guitarist himself, insisted on filling in. At first, the musicians humored him, and people listened politely, but then they begged him to stop, which he didn’t. Then the other musicians refused to play anymore, and Alfred was going solo. Eventually, everyone wrapped up their barbecue in brown meat-packing paper and left. Alfred moped around for weeks.”

  My Career in the Movies

  The movie business is one magic trick after another. Making the movie, each actor pretends to be somebody else. Capturing scenes on celluloid film or silicon chips is another trick. Before digital technology, the film of a movie, containing a couple of miles of one-inch still photographs, was whisked through the projector at twenty-four frames per second. With these photographs racing by, the logical question is “Why don’t moviegoers see an actor’s head fly up from the bottom of the screen to the top and then abruptly appear at the bottom again as the next frame comes along?” Because of another magic trick. A shutter on the projector opens and closes at lightning speed, perfectly timed so that a blackout occurs while one frame is moving away and the next is coming into position. What actually appears in front of the eye is a still photograph, then a black screen, then a new still in the same position as the first, with the objects in it slightly shifted. But the human nervous system is such that the image of the first photograph persists in the brain for a split second after it’s gone, lasting through the blackout, until the next image appears. The resulting impression is lifelike movement on the screen. A projectionist once explained these miracles to me between reels of Elmer Gantry.

  Another technological trick transformed silent movies into talkies. The main obstacle to talking movies was accurate synchronization of sound with image, almost impossible when the two were recorded and played with different devices. Then some inventors discovered how to photographically record sound on film, so that each film frame contained both an image and the sliver of sound that went with that image.

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p; The greatest trick of all is what happens inside our minds. Moviegoers crave the illusion of another world. From time to time, we need to imagine that we can inhabit a different reality, a cosmos of beautiful people, dramatic events, times different from our own. Through wars, stock market crashes, and alternative forms of entertainment, people have continued to attend movies in large numbers. When television first appeared in the 1950s, the prophets thought it would replace the movies. It did not. Similarly, when home video appeared in the 1970s, the prophets thought it would replace the movies. It did not. Likewise for DVDs in the 1990s. Evidently, there is something about an evening out of the house, about watching a story unfold in the dark while surrounded by a crowd of strangers, that cannot be replaced. Could M.A. have foreseen so much back in 1915, as he looked out of his hotel window at people lining up in front of a ramshackle store? Did he know that he would become a magician?

  I remember the years during my early adolescence when I sat in the balcony section of the old Malco on Main and Beale and watched movies. I saw maybe two or three movies per week, sometimes three movies in a single day. In the cool dark of the balcony, the movies became my alternate reality, tilting and stretching my mind, and when I left the theater, entering the other reality, I began imagining that I could set scenes, I could bring in a backdrop here or there, I could position people around me, I could change the camera angle from sideways to overhead. I began seeing life as a series of scenes.

  In my mid-teens, I started to work summers in my family’s theaters in Memphis. I can date each period of my life at this time by the movies carved into my brain, as I was forced to hear the sound track of every film over and over for weeks. The summer of 1965 was Doctor Zhivago. Somewhere, my love, there will be songs to sing / Although the snow covers the hope of spring. The early summer of 1966 was The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming. Late summer 1966 was Alfie. What’s it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the moment we live? Early summer of 1967 was Sean Connery in You Only Live Twice.

  My chores included making sure that the soda dispensers were mixing the right ratio of water and syrup and that the ushers swept up the spilled popcorn. Most crucial was my job supervising and adjusting the oil, butter, and salt for the popcorn. Popcorn is the cotton crop of the movie business. Half the total profit of a movie theater comes from the food sold, and popcorn has the highest profit. Without popcorn, it is possible that the movie business, and all of Hollywood, would come to a halt.

  At first, in the silent-film days, movie theater owners hated popcorn. It created a mess. Moviegoers would have to get up out of their seats during a movie, leave the theater, buy popcorn from a street vendor, gulp down the popcorn in two minutes, and return to the theater. In the mid- and late 1920s, theater owners stumbled upon a secret: they could sell a bag of the stuff for thirty or forty times what it cost to produce and make enormous profits with popcorn. At the same time, an inventor named Charles Manley from Butte, Montana, designed the first electric popcorn machine. Theater popcorn, and the movies as a whole, roared through the Depression after an initial slump. A nickel bag of popcorn was something people could afford, along with the relatively cheap ticket price of a movie.

  We made the popcorn in a big steel kettle that could hold half a pound of popcorn. First you switched on the electric heater. Then you poured in the coconut oil. If you waited more than ten or twenty seconds to pour in the oil, your kettle and motor burned up, and the manager began screaming at you in front of the patrons. The general rule of thumb on the oil was half as much oil as volume of popcorn kernels. You waited about ten seconds, to give the oil time to get hot, then you poured in the popcorn and salt. The teenage concession girls, who wore so much mascara and eye shadow they looked like raccoons, tended to pour in way too much salt and had to be restrained. Next, you turned on the motor that shook up the kettle. When the cooking was finished, you turned off the heat immediately and left the motor running for another ten seconds or so.

  During the summers that I worked in the theaters, I developed a high-level expertise in making popcorn. I could tell when it was cooked with too much oil or not enough oil. I could tell when it had sat too long under the heat lamp. I could tell if the buyer had switched brands. I ingested a great deal of popcorn, not all of it willingly.

  On lunch breaks I would go over to the Pig-N-Whistle on Union Avenue for barbecue and fried onion rings. A sign on the road showed a merry pig standing on its toes and scarfing down a barbecue sandwich. The onion rings at the Pig were the best in the city. They were made of big, thick, munchy slices of onion fried in a light wheat and corn batter, with some exotic seasoning like paprika. The Pig had an interesting ambiance. The building itself resembled an English Tudor pub, with dark wood walls, dark trim, and dormer windows—as out of place as a spaceship from Mars. But nobody paid attention to the building. What people did was park in the big parking lot that wrapped around the building and dine in their cars. The white gravel parking lot of the Pig-N-Whistle must have been half the size of a football field and hosted forty cars when things were jumping. The carhops wore immaculate white jackets and had names like Cadillac and Preacher. The customers were mostly white, middle-class teenagers from Central or East high schools with time on their hands in the summer. And there were some powdered young ladies from Miss Hutchinson’s School for girls. These were the kids who planned to matriculate at Sewanee, “the University of the South,” Memphis State, Ole Miss, the University of Alabama, and Louisiana State.

  During the summers of the mid-1960s, the parking lot of the Pig was always jammed with automobiles, their radios belting out “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” and “Ticket to Ride” and funky tunes like “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” One of the boys would always have his hood up, fondling his engine. Teenage girls coasted up in their T-Birds and little MG Roadsters wearing Villager A-line skirts and matching tops in apricot or baby blue, flesh-colored stockings even in the fierce August heat, two-tone saddle shoes, and straight shoulder-length hair. Furthermore, these young ladies would be perfectly decorated with eye shadow and lipstick, not a hair out of place. Ninety-five degrees in the shade, no problem. The boys wore Bermuda shorts and untucked polo shirts and loafers without socks. They would look at me in my business attire, with my sweat-stained white shirt and skinny tie, and say, “Are you some kind of joke or what?”

  The parking lot of the Pig was a dance floor. It was a meeting place, a holy mating ground, a watering hole, a place to primp and to strut and to eat good barbecue. The boys would get out of their parked cars, cigarettes dangling from their lips, saunter over to a car filled with girls, and squeeze into the vehicle. To demonstrate their manliness, they’d lean out of the window and flick their ashes on the ground, then wave over a carhop to clean up the mess. But the carhops had their white jackets and their dignity, and they would usually decline.

  Couples necked. Engines revved. Guys jockeyed for telephone numbers. Next year’s football lineup was discussed. Girls would make pilgrimages from car to car to visit their girlfriends; in each new vehicle, they’d look at themselves in the rearview mirrors and reapply their makeup. The girls had to try very hard to act dumber than the boys, while at the same time retaining their gentility. The worst possible thing one of these southern belles could do, an abomination so disgraceful that she might refuse to be seen in public for weeks thereafter, was to burp after downing her barbecue.

  In the summer of 1965, when I was sixteen, my father appointed me assistant manager of one of his theaters. I was flabbergasted. My only qualifications were that I was good at making popcorn and good at math. I cannot imagine my grandfather ever making such a mistake. Since M.A.’s untimely death a few years earlier, the business had been directed by my father and two uncles. As assistant manager, my most important job was to run the theater on the manager’s days off. The manager of the theater, Phil, was a small, sour man with a heavily pockmarked face and a small supply of greasy hair, which he carefully swept over his b
ald head. About fifty years old, Phil was always making passes at the sixteen-year-old girls behind the concession counter. When Negro moviegoers walked into the lobby, Phil would stare at them suspiciously, as if they were planning to steal ten bucks from the cash register. From my first day on, Phil eyed me with disdain and resentment. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that I had received the job only because I was the owner’s son. And he was right. In retrospect, I should have refused the job. It was a poor business decision on the part of my father. But I felt a certain pride and excitement at having been given so much responsibility. And I felt that this was the first step toward a glorious career like that of M.A.

  Phil could talk with a cigarette in his mouth, and he did. He smoked constantly and later died of lung cancer while still in his fifties. Despite his rough ways, Phil had a tender spot when it came to his granddaughter. He spoke of her lovingly and cherished the framed photograph of her on his office desk, once getting enraged when the cleaning woman misplaced it. I stayed clear of Phil as much as I could.

  Now, forty-five years later, I cringe when I hear Lara’s song from Doctor Zhivago, reminding me of that summer of 1965. My greatest responsibility on Phil’s weekend off was to collect the box office and concession receipts and take the money to the bank. Before leaving the theater, the money stayed in a safe in Phil’s office. On weekends, I sat at Phil’s desk, careful not to disturb anything. One Sunday night, I returned to the office after briefly stepping out to the toilet and discovered that the money had disappeared from the safe. I had apparently forgotten to relock the safe after the last deposit. Phil got paid $90 a week, I got $60, and the amount stolen was something like $500, greater than my total salary for the summer. When Phil learned of the theft on Monday morning, he said nothing, but his mouth registered a slight smile. I deserved to be fired.