Bradford went to law school to make more money than his father.  Bradford’s dad was a psychologist who earned his living testifying for defense attorneys on behalf of their clients.  He spent the last decade of Bradford’s life laundering money and misquoting his income, before escaping offshore to live on a sailboat alone with his dog.

Bradford’s dad said all women were whores, and while Bradford never said he agreed, his actions suggested he did.  There was a new girl each night; they became conquests of his, especially in Mexico.  During college he spent two years studying Spanish in Guadalajara and decided that he needed to marry a Latin woman.  Bradford believed Latin women allowed their men to cheat because they expected it.  They’d seduced married men in their younger years.  However, as a wife, women shifted more towards the mother Mary, growing more religious, holding themselves to a double standard.  The unwritten rule that existed about affairs was that the mistress could never be elevated above the wife.  This was different than in American culture.  It was meant to safe guard the woman, though Bradford decided it safe guarded himself.  He wouldn’t ever have to worry about a messy divorce due to his philandering.  Likewise, if he chose other Latin women as his mistresses, along that same line, the mistress was never to cross paths with the man’s family.  If this happened, and the Latin code was broken, justifying the man’s refusal to acknowledge the woman, his mistress, calling her crazy, insane.  This last part would prevent the mistress from marrying a man all her own later in life, which helped to maintain the double standard in Bradford’s favor.

Bradford considered most women he came across to be insane.  He joked about “crazy bitches,” saying the religious ones were the worst.  They reminded him of his mom and his fat sister.  He hated them equally.  Both had left Bradford and his father and moved off to Kentucky.  Bradford hated going to visit them, because all they ever did was rant about how they hated men, and how Bradford didn’t love Jesus.   They figured he hated Jesus because he was like his father, and because he was like his father that’s why he hated Jesus.

Bradford told me once that he thinks in some ways he became his father because everyone was always saying he was already half way there.  His response to his mom and sister when they called him out about his lack of love for Jesus was always, “My head hurts.  My feet stink.  And no, I don’t love Jesus!”  He’d read the quote at a gas station on his way to visit them in Kentucky.  The saying was branded onto some fake wooden plaque, with a drunk scowling at the words beneath his feet.  Bradford still regretted not buying the wall hanging for himself, because he’d never seen anything as funny since.

In high school, after his dad left, Bradford threw parties every weekend.   He told people it was a good way to distract himself, keep himself company, though really he just liked the sympathy it created and access it provided him to drunk young chicks.  Because his last name was Brock, he called his parties “Brock Stock.”  By graduation, he’d managed to throw something like twenty-five Brock Stocks senior year.  Most of the time there were games of strip poker where everyone ended up naked. The house was a bachelor pad originally built for a middle aged man, which meant that after his father was gone, Bradford gained access to an indoor hot tub and the remains of his father’s wet bar and extensive wine cellar.  That’s where I developed a taste for Chianti.  It was his father’s favorite, so Bradford had cases and cases left to him, and to us as well.

I always felt sorry for the girls Bradford dated.  He didn’t care about them anymore than he felt for the sleazy newscaster he met at a bar in college.  The newscaster was a man, Phil Moniker, everyone in Austin new who he was.  What they didn’t know is that Phil paid boys like Bradford to sit naked in the hot tub with him, drinking Mai Tais, then asking them to shower while he watched.  Sometimes he would pay Bradford five hundred dollars to clean his kitchen in a thong.  Bradford always told me these stories, not to justify why he had a roll of hundreds, but as an aside.  Bradford’s escapades with women and with Phil Moniker ran together like a line of train cars, one no more significant than the next.