SUPERBAD

By Perry Woods

Perry Woods was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. After a tough childhood, he trained as a brick mason and started working as a maintenance laborer at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. While there, he suffered harassment, stressful work conditions, and was denied promotion over twenty times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Perry Woods
• Release date: Aug 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781087910789

Book preview

CHAPTER I

MY BEGINNINGS

As everything has its start, I did too. I was born on February 28, 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama. I never knew my mother. She passed when I was about three years old. My father wasn’t really in my life. He was there for a little while but eventually he just vanished. Next thing that I know, he had got himself killed in a family dispute.

I did know my grandparents though, at least for a little while. I had the opportunity to be with my grandparents until I was about six years old. My grandfather passed when I was about seven. He worked at US Steel, and my grandmother didn’t work. It was right around this time when I had my first experience with the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). I had a tumor in my jaw and it would move from side to side each year. We had no idea why it would do that, but one side would seem very swollen. I had to deal with it for years and years before they found a cure for it. UAB did a great job to correct my issue. They took a little piece of my jaw bone out along with a few bad teeth, and it eliminated the problem. I was very grateful to UAB for doing that. After living with my grandparents, my aunt took over. Aunt Ellie raised me and my sister. There was just the two of us, but we were raised alongside my cousins.

Growing up was tough. I didn’t really have a childhood. My childhood was stolen from me with all the work I had to do. We had a family business by the name of Little Walk In that was over in Oxmoor. It was sort of like a convivence store in that we sold snacks, drinks, and such, but it was also sort of like a club. I had to work in the store due to the fact that I was the man of the house. Being a boy meant it would be better for me to spend more time there than any of my girl relatives. I had to help run the store and sell whiskey, beer, candy, stuff like that. I spent all my time after school cleaning up.

We had someone come in and play the piano back in the 50s. And later on, going back into business a second time, we were able to get a Rock-Ola which took the place of that piano in the business. At our store, we sold alcohol, but we didn’t have a license for it. I had to stay out of school sometimes to deal with the beer man and potato chip man. By age 8, I was hiding moonshine in the woods and had to remember to find my way back to it at night. I was deathly afraid of snakes and didn’t like going out there in the dark. But there was no way I could come back to my aunt and tell her I couldn’t find the whiskey in the woods. She would have tore my butt up. Thankfully, I never did see any snakes but the whole thing was a hard situation.

I had to mop in the evening time, and my cousin was supposed to help me. But he refused to. He belonged to the street. He wouldn’t be caught dead mopping. Instead, he would be out smoking weed and drinking. That