The planning for the menu for my wedding had very little to do with me. It had even less to do with my wife. It had everything to do with Manny Cabaleiro, owner of the Radium Beer Hall, and Lina, his former wife and constant business partner.
I sat on the stoep of Manny’s home and B&B, next door to the Radium, and let the two of them work out just what I wanted and, more importantly, what I was going to get. If I was getting married at the Radium, then it had to be a Radium menu. Which was what we wanted. Prego rolls and chicken. And chips.
“Um … Keri wants prawns,” I said, looking at my WhatsApp. They stopped talking. Manny smiled. Lina tried not to laugh. “My boy,” said Manny. “There is no way you are getting prawns. That’s kak expensive. Lina, maybe we get some prawn rissoles. Oh, and put in an order for rolls at …”
The conversation rolled over me, and it was good. I drank the beer Manny had couriered to his stoep all of 10m from the Radium and knew it would all be okay. I had been worried about asking Manny if I could get married at the Radium. It was, like most good things in our lives, Keri’s idea.
One lazy afternoon, she clicked her fingers and decided the Radium was the very place to get hitched. I called Manny. Could I get married at his place. “My boy, I thought you would never ask. But not on a Saturday.”
Saturdays were big days for the Radium. Sports crowd in the afternoon. Music fans at night. We wanted to get married on a Sunday.
“It would be my honour,” said Manny. Honour was a huge part of Manny, a man of many parts. You may have read of the story of Manny, so I won’t repeat the stories that made him legendary, all of them true.
Manny didn’t take kak. He didn’t like kak and kak didn’t like him, and Manny would often end up on the right side of that scuffle, not a man to ever tolerate kak.
Manny was the Radium. He was the building, the historic bar counter, the newspaper posters, the food, the corridor up to the stage. He was the warmth and light that came through the window looking on to Louis Botha as the sun fell to the west of Joburg, the shiny, worn barstools, his famous, fiery peri-peri sauce you could buy by the bottle, the Sunday jazz bands, the Daily Mail “Free Beer Massacre” mock-up poster and the columns by journalists that mentioned the Radium or Manny on the walls.
The late Shaun Johnson is on there, a wonderful writer who, like Manny, was taken too soon. And, so, much to my immense pride: on the wall as you walk along the corridor on the stage entrance (or, more likely, the toilet), a piece I wrote on watching some 2010 World Cup matches there.
The media liaison of the US Embassy asked me to organise a table for a bunch of journalists to watch the US play Slovenia. The table kept getting bigger and bigger as the week went on, as more and more hacks said yes. Very few people say no to an afternoon at the Radium.
The US were playing up the road at Ellis Park. Busloads of American fans had been there earlier, Manny told me, a sweat about him. They had to send for more draught, having been drunk by the Yanks.
The World Cup was good for the Radium. The last few years have not been as good. Lockdown hit them hard. Manny was a worried man. He once told me that as long as he could pay his staff and keep the lights on, that was all that mattered.
He cared deeply. He cared when my brother, Barry, died in 2017. I went past the Radium from the hospital after saying my final goodbyes to Barry. Manny put his hand on my shoulder and wished me long life. He then gave me the patches of the Piscatorial Scooter Club after I told him I had bought a Vespa. Why Piscatorial? “It was the best way of getting ‘Piss’ and ‘Cat’ into one word,” he laughed. Those patches are on Barry’s old Levi jacket.
I always thought Manny would have the longest life. He seemed immortal. He had lived life hale and hearty, wild and woolly, with a gruff chuckle and a sharp word. His passing last week has robbed us all. It has taken a legend from Joburg and a friend from me.
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