Chapter 1

The story is told by Benjamin Bailey Bradford III the lowest person in the hierarchy.

For a while I was unsure if my life and marriage were in the toilet or if everything is unfolding as it should. My friends are sexually molesting my wife and it seems that’s ok with me. Everyone seems happy with the status quo and the new corporation that we formed looks like it’s about to succeed beyond our wildest expectations and the reason for everything that has happened seems to be a linear dominate hierarchy. But I am getting ahead of myself. To make sense of everything I need to start at the beginning, which includes an explanation of what a linear dominate hierarchy is.

A dominance hierarchy is the organization of individuals in a group that occurs when competition for resources leads to aggression.

Schjelderup-Ebbe, who studied the often-cited example of the pecking order in chickens, found that such social structures lead to more stable flocks with reduced aggression among individuals. In other words everyone knows his place and doesn’t buck the system.

Dominance hierarchies can be despotic or linear. In a despotic hierarchy, only one individual is dominant, while the others are all equally submissive. In a linear hierarchy, for example each individual dominates all individuals below him and not those above him.

Dominance hierarchies occur in most social animal species that normally live in groups, including primates.

I Benjamin Bailey Bradford the third have such a group of friends that collected or perhaps a better description would be coalesced due to proximity to each other. In other words we lived in the same neighborhood for the better part of the eighteen years that it took for us to grow from infant to high school graduate and for better or worse the six of us remained a group with the exception of a few short hiatuses where a member or two would pursue other avenues of interest, but would eventually return to the flock.

Our flock, which for the most part, was dominated by Eddie MacMillan. A dominance that was more like benevolent dictator than angry overlord and his dominance was rarely contested during elementary and middle school and never questioned among our group during high school. Eddie was and always has been the bigger and stronger of our ensemble. Perhaps it was because he was a year, almost two years older that the rest of us, but even without that advantage I think he would have been the alpha of our group simply because of his size. In seventh grade he was over six feet and weighed more than two hundred pounds.

If Eddie was the dominate male, I, in this gathering of eclectic individuals, was the submissive, the chicken at the bottom of the pecking order. And it’s true I got more than my share of nuggies, Indian burns, weggies and arm punches, but I was never grossly mistreated or teased or humiliated outside of the gathering of six and many times I was aggressively defended by Eddie and the others when malevolent individuals accosted or belittled me. It wasn’t often, but occasionally when someone who didn’t know that Eddie was my protector would accost me and it would get back to Eddie. At which time Eddie would explain to the individual, who’s feet would be dangling in the air, that he should re-think his position with regard to threatening the little geeky guy.

Once a large Neanderthal transfer student who was trying to assert his dominance, informed me that he was going to make me his bitch. I wasn’t sure what “being his bitch” entailed, but I didn’t like the sound of it and I made sure Eddie and the others heard about it. Eddie bested the ruffian, but not without sustaining substantial injuries of his own. I cannot tell you how grateful I was to have Eddie as my protector during that time of my life.

Right up until my first group shower in physical education class I was known as Bennie B. After that freshman shower I was known as BB. Not because of my initials, but because of my smallish male equipment. One classmate commented that my testacies were the size of BB’s.

I may be the lowest on the physical ladder of our hierarchy, but I was at the top from an intellectual stand point and as such I had an integral function that was valued among the six that made up for my lack of male prowess. Some of the six I assisted with homework, some I tutored, but for Eddie, I did his school work because he asked me to and I never felt inconvenienced or exploited by his or the others requests and I did not even resent the sexual demands that Eddie required of me. Indeed it was my contribution to our group that made me feel like an integral cog in the mechanism that held us together because we were all very different people. Differences that I will expound on later in my story, but for now let’s just say that we were a tight group until the September following graduating from high school when the six eventually went our separate ways.

Eddie stayed in Jasper Florida where we all grew up. Jasper is a small to medium sized city near the Georgia - Florida border of about 4500 people. Eddie worked for his father who owned a junk yard / auto repair shop. Clyde Wendell, Marcus Williams, and Bart Mason went to Jacksonville to trade schools located there. Chuck Sumar enrolled into the prestigious art collage in Sarasota Florida and I went to Florida State in Tallassee majoring in finance and minoring in business. From there I got my masters at Purdue University in Indiana.

It was at Purdue that I met my wife Lacy who, like me was a bit of a recluse. She more so than I. In fact she kept so much to herself it was hard to strike up a conversation with her. It wasn’t that she was stuck up or snobbish, no she was extremely shy and socially inept. She was from a small town in West Virginia that was no more than a stop light and a gas station. She was the first of her family to go to college. She completed her first year with a 3.5 GPA then had to drop out because of finances. She refused to go back to W. VA and got a job in West Lafayette hoping to earn enough to pay for another year.

I met her on the bus during first year because I didn’t need or even want a car. I was totally committed to getting my post graduate degree and wanted no distractions, But this waif of a girl huddled in the back of the bus peaked my curiosity and I promised myself the next time I saw her I would speak to her. A promise I broke four times before I got up the nerve to sit next to her. It would be an understatement to say I have never been comfortable with the ladies. At twenty three I was still a virgin.

So you may ask, how do you spend four years at a school like Florida State and not even accidently get laid. The answer would be simple I was too scared. Even when it was clear to me that the female pursuing me was not only willing, but eager to engage in sexual activity. The teasing I received in High School made me unwilling to expose myself to the potential ridicule and inevitable rejection that I knew I would receive if I exposed my perceived inadequacies. The reality was when erect I was just a quarter inch over the excepted male average of six inches and as smart as I am I could not allow the facts to interfere with myself delusion.