My Place: Heard the one about the Radium?

So this guy walks into a bar. You know the one, right? The one you've heard 100 times and always laugh at, because that's the thing about bars - they're the perfect setup for the delivery of the timeless one-liner.
Take, for instance, Mike Royko, Chicago's legendary newspaper columnist, who grew up in an apartment above a bar and spent most of his adult life trying to outdo all the one-liners he'd heard.
"No self-respecting fish would want to be wrapped in a Murdoch paper," said Royko after the Australian bought the Chicago Sun-Times, and he announced that he would henceforth be working for the Tribune.
In the joke, Royko was the guy who walked into the bar. His particular local was the Billy Goat Tavern, an establishment of such literary repute that on any given night he'd have Studs Terkel or Norman Mailer guffawing into their drinks.
Johannesburg's equivalent is the Radium Beer Hall. Here the one-liners are actually nailed to the walls. "Berg Hikers Stoned"; "Lesbians Lose Appeal"; "Your Bra Can Kill You". Some of these are the work of the newspapermen who over the decades have called the Radium home, a collection of posters meant to sell the dailies and weeklies that - on their insides at least - are mostly not amusing. But again, what's the use of being in a beer hall if you can't laugh at your country?
For his part, Manny Cabaleira, the Radium's proprietor, would rather you didn't talk politics. There's a sign behind the 100-year-old teak bar to that effect. It says: "Politics and religion NOT to be discussed in this bar." Of course, most of the regulars know that Manny doesn't mean it. If anyone is going to start a conversation about the "uncontrolled creep" that public protector Thuli Madonsela refers to in her Nkandla report, it's Manny.
"So, boet," Manny might ask if he were here right now, ordering me a lager on the house for punting his pub in print again, "who do you reckon this uncontrolled creep really is"?
The odd free round for regulars aside, what Manny doesn't believe in is giving you a drink if you can't pay for it. This is arguably the reason he has managed to stay in business for so long, why the pressed-steel ceilings and wrought-iron railings that remember a time when the city's pioneers used to drink here aren't adorning some hipster's lounge in Parkhurst.
"Don't embarrass yourself and management by asking for credit," is one of Manny's framed injunctions. In case you weren't paying attention, another repeats the point: "Credit will only be given if you are 95 years old and accompanied by your parents."
The Radium, needless to say, is not what one would describe as a "friendly" bar. An overwhelming number of the regulars have some issue or other that they are avoiding at home, and many - as suggested - are newspapermen. But that shouldn't keep you away; timeless one-liners, after all, don't come out of the mouths of the eternally content.
As Royko once said, no doubt when perched on his stool at the Billy Goat: "Show me somebody who is always smiling, always cheerful, always optimistic, and I will show you somebody who hasn't the faintest idea what the heck is really going on."
