Aug. 24—Most weekend nights, a line snakes up to the front door of Bubba’s Sulky Lounge — and even from the parking lot, as they wait to get in, people have plenty to look at.
Just to the right of the door is a vignette: a life-size statue of a horse standing inside a wooden stable. Sitting upright in a carriage is a hauntingly realistic mannequin. Its face has a waxy sheen and its mouth is a severe straight line. The scene is illuminated in red light behind the glass.
Inside the heavy front doors of the Bayside bar and dance club, photos of racehorses line the wall, each labeled with the horse’s name. The bouncer — usually a guy named Kevin — will ask for $5 cash, then you’re in.
Inside, the flashing rainbow lights from the three dance floors set the whole place aglow. Colorful vintage lunchboxes hang from the ceiling. Broken-down office chairs are pulled up to the bar. A taxidermy raccoon sits in a corner. Old ovens are lined up in a row along the wall.
The drinks are cheap and simple: beer and well liquor. The music is loud and catchy. The dance floors are never empty.
And while regulars know the Friday ’80s night setlist by heart, Bubba himself remains mysterious.
“That’s him in the suit dancing every Friday.”
“He’s from New York City.”
“He was a jockey.”
These are a few of the rumors that have circulated about him over the years.
But the man who opened the longtime Portland dive bar in 1959 largely to serve Korean war vets hasn’t been to the place during its open hours in years. In the old days, he says, he used to “shake it up” on his dance floors. But now he has bad knees.
Robert Larkin, better known as Bubba, is 88 years old.
He was born and raised in Portland, not New York. And though he owned horses for decades, he never raced them himself.
Today the bar that opened on Lancaster Street and moved in the 1960s to the bottom of a hill in Bayside is one of the few places left to go dancing in the city — for a bachelorette party, a 21st birthday, or for anyone looking to have a fun night out. And while Bubba might not be on the dance floor anymore, his character still defines the place.
‘A DIVE DOESN’T HAVE ALL THAT’
On a sweltering Tuesday afternoon, Larkin sits at a big round table inside Bubba’s. The place is closed. In the cool dark, he sips coffee and flips through old photo albums. White curls peek out from under his baseball cap. His big Goldendoodle, Marley, leans against his long legs. (His dogs are always Marley, he says. This is his fifth or sixth.)
He runs his fingers over laminated photos of the beloved horses he’s owned.
Larkin bought his first racehorse sometime in the 1960s — he’s not sure of the exact year — after going to Scarborough Downs with a friend. Since then he’s had as many as 18 at a time. He built a stable for them in his Scarborough backyard and cared for them himself. They raced at the Downs for decades. He sold them a while back when he got too old to take care of them. But he still thinks about them. Sometimes, seemingly out of nowhere, he’ll shake his head and say, “I miss my horses.”
Larkin’s parents were immigrants. Their last name was Lazarovich. His father was Lithuanian and his mother was Irish. They gave him a different last name to hide that he was Jewish. When he started school, he says he was made fun of for being lanky and awkward, but he ended up a high school basketball star. Bubba was what his sister Betty called him before she could say the word brother. The nickname stuck.
He was 21 when he opened Bubba’s, fresh off 2 1/2 years in the Marines. A guy he knew in the neighborhood was trying to sell his bar after getting divorced and asked Larkin to buy the place. He agreed and named the place Bubba’s, so people he grew up with would know who was running it.
It was just a neighborhood bar at first. Over the years, it was also other things: a homestyle restaurant, a biker hangout, a pool hall. Larkin rebuilt it after a fire in 1979. His kids and mother and ex-wife all worked there throughout the years. He added “Sulky Lounge” to the name in the ’70s because he loved harness racing, in which jockeys ride behind horses in small carts known as sulkies.
When he first opened, people around town used to call Bubba’s a dive. Larkin didn’t like that. It was part of what inspired him to bring in the dance floors.
“A dive doesn’t have all that,” he says that afternoon at the bar, gesturing first at his dance floors, then his beloved things. He is soft spoken but decisive.
Larkin has left bits of himself in his bar. A photo of his granddaughter on a mantel. A newspaper clipping from his high school basketball days mounted and displayed on a shelf. Those photos of his racehorses just inside the front door.
“If you look through this stuff,” he says, “you’ll know me.”
This stuff. It all started with photos and trinkets. But before long, he was hauling in mannequins and bicycles. Disheveled dolls, a sign from a shuttered apartment complex, framed photos of people Larkin has never met — he can’t explain what drew him to these particular things. He says he simply liked them, or he thought his customers would. He kept bringing treasure after treasure to the bar.
Eventually, he ran out of space.
His son, Theodore Larkin, now 61, drew up plans and built a new bar in the back, then an extra room for dancing, then an alcove that Larkin decorated with a barbershop theme, then another alcove he mostly filled with rocking horses. Theodore Larkin says they’ve built as far back into the large lot as they can. Each addition was out of necessity. Rooms kept filling up. Larkin kept bringing more things in..
“If we run out of space again, we’ll have to build up,” says his son.
A TYPICAL NIGHT
Bubba’s is open only two nights a week — Fridays and Saturdays.
On a Friday night in July, Cathy Leo is behind the front bar. She was hired by Larkin on a whim in 1981, when another bartender didn’t show up for her shift. She had come in with her girlfriends on New Year’s Eve to ring in 1982, but ended up with a new job. She’s been at it ever since, except for a few years away more than a decade ago.
“He talked me into it,” she says as she arranges bottles and wipes down the bar to get ready for a busy night.
“You fall in love with the place, you don’t want to ever leave. It’s a good job,” says Leo, now 66. Her sister and daughter have sometimes worked there, too.
Maria Griffin, a regular, is the first customer in the door. She doesn’t drink, but she sips water at a table near the first dance floor. She’s been coming to Bubba’s since 2018 and met her boyfriend dancing there a few years ago.
“After months of coming here on a regular basis, I started making friends,” she says. “And it’s such a neat place with all the old things.”
While she and her boyfriend cozy up at their table, Jay Tubbs, the DJ, pulls a red wagon full of large angel figurines across the empty dance floor. He sets one atop a chunky black speaker, so people won’t put drinks on it. He covers the surface with more of them.
Already this summer, a spilled drink has fried one speaker, he says.
“People will respect angels,” he says, chuckling.
Charlie Brown — his real name — does maintenance on the building. He wanders around with a leftover angel, looking for a home for her. He used to come into the bar as a kid with a bucket of wax and a horsehair brush to shine shoes.
Brown, 74, though hired to do maintenance, spends most of his time arranging whatever Larkin brings him.
They have a system: Larkin will drive with Marley to Antiques USA in Arundel or to Goodwill in South Portland, or to any number of other vintage stores or flea markets he frequents. Then he’ll drive to the bar and drop whatever he’s found by the side door. Brown will find a spot for it.
“If I open that door and see something sitting there, I know he bought it and wants me to find a place for it,” says Brown. “We don’t need any communication.”
He gets a kick out of placing the items around the bar, sometimes to make visitors stop and laugh, sometimes to scare them for a second.
“See this guy, he’s taking a bath,” Brown says, pointing to a life-size plastic skeleton in the corner.
The skeleton’s head lolls over the edge of a tin tub, which its plastic fingers seem to grip.
‘MY CHURCH’
The first person to hit the dance floor is Bart, who didn’t want to give his last name to maintain his privacy. He has about 40 glow sticks stuffed into his shirt pocket and closes his eyes as he dances alone, slowly unfurling his limbs in all directions and twisting his hips, bending deep into his knees. Periodically he pauses to decorate himself with the glow sticks, looping them through his shoelaces and the buttonholes of his shirt so he glows from head to toe.
“I got two fake hips and three knee surgeries. I’ve fractured my neck,” he says. “It’s painful, but I’m still dancing. This is my church.”
A bachelorette party shows up after 9, one of the women sporting a short white veil. They grip one another’s arms and point as they look around. They all down shots and the one in the veil skips her way onto the dance floor.
At the back bar, things start picking up around 9:30, but Christine Arsenault had been there since the doors opened. Like Leo, she lucked into her job.
“I was a single mom to two kids, I lived in the neighborhood and I needed a job,” she says.
Larkin didn’t need a bartender, but he hired her anyway.
“She was my neighbor,” he says when asked about her. “You help out your neighbors.”
That was 16 years ago. Arsenault tears up when she talks about her boss.
“There’s a lot of pressure as a working single mom,” she says. “And he made it easy for me to be there for my kids.”
A NEW GENERATION
Old people. Young people. Tourists. Regulars. Larkin says he wants everyone to feel at home at Bubba’s.
Though he has scattered little pieces of himself around his place, he’s left something for everyone else too. A pink-haired Barbie doll is tucked away in an alcove near the back bar. Bicycles hang from the third dance floor’s ceiling. Larkin’s never seen an episode, but he put a framed “Friends” poster near the entrance.
“People love it,” he says, and that’s why he picked it out.
Over the years, he’s rebuilt the bars, tossed out pool tables, and installed dance floors. But he’s never sold or removed anything from his collections of things.
With the bar, Larkin has had his own chapters over the decades. He’s changed.
“I can’t do it anymore,” he says one July afternoon as he ambles out of Bubba’s, Marley in tow.
“Yes you can, Dad, you don’t want to retire,” says his son.
The younger Larkin says he’ll take over whenever his father asks, but also that he’s in no rush.
And not much preparation will be necessary. He doesn’t plan to change a thing.
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