August 24 – On most weekend nights, there’s a long line out the front door of Bubba’s Sulky Lounge. And even from the parking lot, as people wait to get in, there’s plenty to see.
To the right of the door is a vignette: a life-size statue of a horse standing in a wooden stable. Sitting upright in a carriage is a terrifyingly realistic mannequin. The face has a waxy sheen and the mouth is a stern straight line. The scene is lit in red light behind the glass.
Inside the heavy front doors of the Bayside bar and dance club, photos of racehorses hang on the wall, each labeled with the horse’s name. The bouncer — usually a man named Kevin — asks for $5 in cash, and you’re in.
Inside, the flashing rainbow lights of the three dance floors set the whole place ablaze. Colorful vintage lunch boxes hang from the ceiling. Broken office chairs are pulled up to the bar. A stuffed raccoon sits in a corner. Old ovens are lined up along the wall.
The drinks are cheap and simple: beer and spirits. The music is loud and catchy. The dance floors are never empty.
And while regulars know the Friday night setlist from the 80s by heart, Bubba himself remains a mystery.
“That’s him in that suit, dancing every Friday.”
“He’s from New York City.”
“He was a jockey.”
These are some of the rumors that have been circulating about him in recent years.
But the man who opened the Portland dive bar in 1959, primarily to serve Korean War veterans, hasn’t been there during its hours in years. Back in the day, he says, he would “shake it up” on its 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 although he owned horses for decades, he never raced them himself.
Today, the bar that opened on Lancaster Street and moved to the bottom of a hill in Bayside in the 1960s is one of the few places in town where you can still dance — for a bachelorette party, a 21st birthday or just anyone looking for a fun night out. And while Bubba may no longer be on the dance floor, his spirit still defines the place.
‘A DIVE IS NOT EVERYTHING’
On a warm Tuesday afternoon, Larkin sits at a large round table in Bubba’s. The place is closed. In the cool darkness, 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 photographs of the beloved horses he has owned.
Larkin bought his first racehorse sometime in the 1960s — he doesn’t know exactly when — after a trip to Scarborough Downs with a friend. Since then, he’s owned 18 of them. He built a stable for them in his backyard in Scarborough and took care of them himself. They raced at the Downs for decades. He sold them a while ago when he got too old to care for them. But he still thinks about them. Sometimes, seemingly out of nowhere, he shakes his head and says, “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 the fact that he was Jewish. When he went to school, he said he was made fun of for being gangly and clumsy, but he eventually became a high school basketball player. 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 out of 2 1/2 years in the Marines. A man 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 it Bubba’s so the people he grew up with would know who ran it.
At first it was just a neighborhood bar. Over the years it became other things: a home-style restaurant, a motorcycle club, a pool hall. Larkin rebuilt it after a fire in 1979. His children, mother and ex-wife all worked there over 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 in town called Bubba’s a dive. Larkin didn’t like that. It was one of the reasons he wanted to bring in the dance floors.
“A dive doesn’t have everything,” he says that afternoon at the bar, pointing first at his dance floors, then at his beloved belongings. He is gentle but determined.
Larkin has left bits of himself in his bar. A photo of his granddaughter on a mantelpiece. 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 read this,” he says, “you’ll recognize me.”
This stuff. It started with photos and trinkets. But soon he was lugging around mannequins and bicycles. Messy mannequins, a sign for a closed apartment complex, framed photos of people Larkin never met — he can’t explain what drew him to these particular items. He says he just liked them, or thought his customers would. He kept bringing treasure after treasure back to the bar.
Eventually, his space ran out.
His son, Theodore Larkin, now 61, drew up plans and built a new bar in the back, then an additional dance room, then an alcove that Larkin decorated with a barbershop theme, then another alcove that he filled largely with rocking horses. Theodore Larkin says they built as far back on the large lot as they could. Each addition was out of necessity. The rooms kept filling up. Larkin kept bringing in more stuff.
“If we run out of space again, we’ll have to start building,” says his son.
A TYPICAL NIGHT
Bubba’s is only open two nights a week: Friday and Saturday.
On a Friday night in July, Cathy Leo is behind the bar. She was hired by Larkin on impulse in 1981, when another bartender didn’t show up for her shift. She had come with her girlfriends on New Year’s Eve to ring in 1982, but ended up getting a new job. She’s been at it ever since, except for a few years ago, more than a decade ago.
“He talked me into it,” she says as she sets down the bottles and cleans the bar in preparation for a busy evening.
“You fall in love with the place, you never want to leave. It’s a good job,” says Leo, now 66. Her sister and daughter have also worked there.
Maria Griffin, a regular, is the first customer to walk in. 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 there a few years ago while dancing.
“After months of coming here regularly, I started making friends,” she says. “And it’s such a fun place with all the old stuff.”
As she and her boyfriend sit at the table, Jay Tubbs, the DJ, pulls a red cart full of large angel statues across the empty dance floor. He places one on a thick black speaker, so people don’t put drinks on it. He covers the surface with more of the statues.
This summer, a loudspeaker was already burned by a spilled drink, he says.
“People will respect angels,” he says, laughing.
Charlie Brown—his real name—does maintenance on the building. He wanders around with a surviving angel, looking for a home for her. As a child, he would come into the bar with a bucket of laundry and a horsehair brush to shine shoes.
Brown, 74, may have been hired to do maintenance, but spends most of his time tending to whatever Larkin brings him.
They have a system: Larkin drives 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 drives up to the bar and throws whatever he finds out the side door. Brown will find a home 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,” Brown says. “We don’t need to communicate.”
He likes to place the objects around the bar. Sometimes he makes the visitors stop and laugh, sometimes he makes them jump.
“Look, this guy’s taking a bath,” Brown says, pointing to a life-size plastic skeleton in the corner.
The skeleton’s head hangs over the edge of a tin container, which it appears to be holding with its plastic fingers.
‘MY CHURCH’
The first person to hit the dance floor is Bart, who doesn’t want to give his last name to protect his privacy. He has about 40 glow sticks stuffed into his shirt pocket and closes his eyes as he dances alone, slowly unfolding his limbs in all directions and twisting his hips, bending deeply into his knees. Every now and then he pauses to decorate himself with the glow sticks, threading them through his shoelaces and the buttonholes of his shirt, so that he glows from head to toe.
“I’ve had two hip replacements and three knee surgeries. I broke my neck,” he says. “It hurts, but I still dance. This is my church.”
A bachelorette party shows up after 9pm, one of the women is wearing a short white veil. They hold each other’s arms and point as they look around. They all take shots and the one in the veil hops onto the dance floor.
The bar in the back starts to get busy around 9:30, but Christine Arsenault has been there since opening. Like Leo, she was lucky with her job.
“I was a single mother of two children, I lived in the neighborhood and I needed a job,” she says.
Larkin didn’t need a barmaid, but he hired her anyway.
“She was my neighbor,” he says when asked about her. “You help your neighbors.”
That was 16 years ago. Arsenault gets tears in her eyes 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
Older people. Younger people. Tourists. Regulars. Larkin says he wants everyone to feel at home at Bubba’s.
Though he’s scattered little pieces of himself throughout his home, he’s also left something for everyone. A pink-haired Barbie doll is tucked away in an alcove by the back bar. Bicycles hang from the ceiling of the third dance floor. Larkin has never seen an episode, but he’s placed a framed “Friends” poster by the entrance.
“People love it,” he says, which is why he chose it.
Over the years he has rebuilt the bars, thrown out pool tables and installed dance floors, but he has never sold or taken away any of his collection of stuff.
With the bar, Larkin has had his own chapters over the decades. He has changed.
“I can’t do it anymore,” he says one July afternoon as he leaves Bubba’s with Marley in tow.
“That’s okay, Dad, you don’t want to retire,” says his son.
The younger Larkin says he will take over when his father asks, but he is in no rush.
And there won’t be much preparation needed. He doesn’t plan on changing anything.
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