The 15-Proof Solution

’Twas an uncharacteristically cool and foggy December morning in Los Angeles and I, taking an early constitutional on the beach, was reminded of the gravelly back roads and cold, heavy fog of London town.

I walked rather briskly along the beachhead where the sand is moist and thick but is of least impedance to one’s step until I came upon a clot of loiterers raising no small amount of rabble at one of many light blue shacks stationed on the waterfront. These “Life Guard Stations,” as I’ve since learned that they are called, are so named after the noble men and women who seat themselves therein to protect the ocean’s bathers. This band of ne’er-do-wells were clearly of not nearly so dignified a calling.

The largest and perhaps quietest of the fray stepped forward to stop my passage and began making mockery of my gentleman’s garb, drawing forth cacophonous howling from his boisterous lot.

You will learn about me, reader, that, perhaps to my detriment, I am a man without fear of physical altercation and am well versed in the noble language of boxing. As such I stood proud my ground before this dark-skinned giant of a man, whom some of his gang—the correct term, I was told later—referred to as Heh-ne- rawl Verr-gah, a name of rich meaning, I’m sure.

“What do you think you are doing on our beach, ese?” he asked in a dark drawl of a savage Latin tongue.

I glanced at him casually through my heavy-lidded eyes and suppressed my smirk of amusement.

“I perceive about you, Heh-neh-rawl, that you are a man of great and recently received wealth who has within the month returned from a long mining expedition in China.” Said I, awaiting the usual shocked silence that ordinarily follows my elementary observations.

I was instead greeted by a wave of laughter whose strength rivaled that of the lapping ocean to my left.

Alarmed, I steadied my stance and raised my cane for violence.

This elicited even more raucous uproar from this cache of irregulars.

Thankfully, at my display of preparedness, Heh-neh-rawl’s stance loosed and he, too, began to laugh.

“Ese, we were going to fuck you up for being on our turf. But, FUCK it, less party!!”

I learned from that tense confrontation and day of leisurely relaxation that followed, two things.

The first lesson is in regard to my deductions. They are, I am afraid, in some areas out of date. Thick canvas pants are worn by many more than miners. All-black clothing is not purely the vogue of the rice field Chinaman. Prisoners in this age or on this continent are made to work in the sun robed in excessively collared clothes, giving them the pale necks I spied beneath the many gold chains around their “General’s,” as ‘twas translated for me, neck.

The second lesson is that there is a hearty grog of early Britain to which I was ashamedly unaware. Olde English 800, it is called, and it put even me and my cast iron stomach upon my drunken backside.