{"id":1048,"date":"2018-05-28T09:01:43","date_gmt":"2018-05-28T13:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/?p=1048"},"modified":"2018-05-28T09:01:43","modified_gmt":"2018-05-28T13:01:43","slug":"ugliest-man-alive-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/?p=1048","title":{"rendered":"Ugliest Man Alive"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ugliest-man-alive-56\"\u00a0<\/a>Billy O\u2019Banion had to be the ugliest man alive.\u00a0\u00a0 He was \u00a0monstrous to look at – an absolute fright – and there was no hiding it.<\/p>\n

Some liked to speculate that his father was a mutant clone or an alien invader.\u00a0 There was even a vicious rumor that his mother took a demon into her bed.\u00a0 Really though,\u00a0 the O\u2019Banions were perfectly respectable.\u00a0 In fact, Billy\u2019s birth was completely normal and he had a decent, happy childhood.\u00a0 He\u2019d never succumbed to any horrible illness or accident and was never bitten by an irradiated lab rat.\u00a0 He simply started getting ugly at some point in his twenties, and kept getting uglier and uglier with each passing day.\u00a0 He was an inexplicable freak of nature\u2026an awful, tragic figure\u2026..how sad!?<\/p>\n

The funny thing about Billy, however, is that he\u00a0was perfectly okay with his predicament.\u00a0 He took it all in stride and made lemonade out of the rotten tomatoes he was dealt.\u00a0 He figured he was a cross between Darth Maul and a Gothic dragon\u2026cool!\u00a0 See, Billy had an outrageous sense of humor\u00a0which dwarfed his ugliness.\u00a0 He was a clever practical joker and filled his days with gigantic gobs of fun.<\/p>\n

Nothing tickled his tendrils more than slipping quietly into a mob on the street, disguised in a hoodie\u2026only to burst out suddenly, flashing his most charming grin, yelling \u201cSurprise!!!\u201d\u00a0 He could barely contain the giggles as they screamed, shat themselves and fainted (usually in that order).\u00a0 It never got old.\u00a0 He could clear a fast food joint or a movie theatre in seconds and never had trouble getting a good seat.<\/p>\n

For a while, he made piles of money in the Mexican masked wrestling circuit but eventually retired on a generous pension provided by several New Jersey towns \u2013 \u201cto stay the hell away!\u201d These days, he lives quietly in a posh Hoboken penthouse where he writes creepy clown poetry and practices his banjo\u2026but still gets a kick out of scaring the bajeebies out of solicitors, delivery boys and trick-or-treaters. He likes to leap out of the elevator and gobble them down whole.\u00a0 Oh, don\u2019t worry, he craps them out onto the carpet an hour later\u2026completely unharmed (at least physically), after all, he always was a vegetarian.<\/p>\n

***I wrote this in our weekly, Saturday morning\u00a0\u2018Montclair Write Group\u2019\u00a0free-write workshop with\u00a0John\u2019s horrible self portrait as the prompt.\u00a0 It’s good practice, good exercise and good inspiration.\u00a0 John\u2019s image was originally published in a 2010 issue of Analog Magazine.\u00a0 We have 3 books available for sale, you can find them by following the link above to: www.sallemander.com\u00a0 \u00a0 -Marsha<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Billy O\u2019Banion had to be the ugliest man alive.\u00a0\u00a0 He was \u00a0monstrous to look at – an absolute fright – and there was no hiding it. Some liked to speculate that his father was a mutant clone or an alien invader.\u00a0 There was even a vicious rumor that his mother took a demon into her … Continue reading Ugliest Man Alive<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[150,241,124],"tags":[79,56,7,210,105,128,248,38,176,99,19,96,102],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1048"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1056,"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048\/revisions\/1056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}