She remembers how she got hired here, decades ago when the place was called Crazy Guggenheim's and hosted doors-locked dirty movie nights.
"I came for my interview at four o'clock," she says. "The barmaid asked me why I was there. I told her I had an interview. She told me I'd better come back another day. I told her I needed a job so I would stay. She told me I'd be better off coming back some other time."
This went on for quite some time, with Margie refusing to budge. "And then from the back room I hear this woman wail, 'Nobody loves me!' and out came the owner in nothin' but a G-string, red-sequined, heart-shaped tasseled pasties and clear plastic high-heel shoes. She asked me why I was there, and I told her I had an interview. She told me to have a seat and she'd be right back.
"Now, I kinda assumed she was gonna go put some clothes on or somethin', but she came right back out with the same ol' next to nothin' on she had when she left me there. I was tryin' to just look straight at her face, but it's hard when those tassels on 'em heart-shaped pasties are wigglin' around. She asked me a few questions, and then she told me to go on over to the bar. 'Here, cut this lime,' she said. I cut the lime up. She said, 'Okay, you start at five.'"
A few years later, Margie bought the bar, sold it back to the old owner a few years after that and then reacquired it not long after that. Along the way, her boyfriend, a former shipping company executive (thus the name, and the vaguely nautical decor), started helping her out with the ownership. "He's my boyfriend, he ain't my husband," Margie stresses. "I'm the happiest widow there ever was. That bastard ex of mine got kilt in a tornada years ago."
The dirty movies and former jiggling owner are gone now (though she still visits), but Margie isn't the only one with stories. The selection of the Gap Band's "You Dropped a Bomb on Me" serves as a Proustian madeleine for the bar's lone Saturday afternoon customer, who drifts off into a spoken reverie of times past...
"This reminds me of when I was a titty bar DJ," he says. "I did that for three years. It gets old, going to bed with a different girl every single night. It wears a man down. It's just like any other job. You have to be their brother, father, sister, mother. And you get sick of seeing naked women."
"Same tits, different day," puts in Margie.
