I have this, and you don't.

August, 2001. London, England.

An afternoon of British theatre yields itself to a particular thirst. Dry theatre, plus dry humor, well ... you get the idea. I was a cactus in a garden of stuffy, uppity hydrangeas.

I am alone in one the sections of Old London. Dickens could have peered from a corner to ask me for a ha'pence to call his mother. Then he'd say, "Oy, guv'nah, how do yeh use this telly phone?!"

The pub crawl commences. My feet point the way and my lips follow. Ales and porter flow everywhere. Then my buddy whiskey arrives, and he leads me through the old streets for many hours.

At almost the last pub, I meet a Frenchman named Bruno. We talk awhile of the neighborhood, of his country and mine. Somewhere during the conversation, he pulls an American $10 from his wallet.

"Do you know why I have this, Bryan?" he says.

"Uh ... no. No I don't."

"In my village in France, we have a saying. If you have an American bill in your wallet, some day the bill will become two. And those two will become four. And so on until one day, America makes you a rich man."

And I could have said a lot of things then. I could have told him (as I did a group of guys who offered me a lift one night) that in America we don't all carry guns, and we work just as hard to get the things we want in life. And some of us are better at life than others, and some of us still get left behind and forgotten. I could have told him the American dream is achieved by as much sweat and grease it takes to make it anywhere else, and our streets are not, and never have been, paved with gold.

Instead I took the Scottish five-pound note from the bar I was planning to use for my next drink.

"Bruno, you have your bill, and now I have mine," I said. "And one day, I'll make this bill become two."