Whatever happened to Kenny Boy Lay?
Commentary by BETTY BELL
Where money’s concerned, these minds
move faster than Bode Miller in a World Cup slalom.
Rarely a day goes by that I don’t see an
old friend at the market or in the post office, and as soon as I do I blurt out,
"Hey, nice to see you, how’ve you been, what’re you up to?"—blather meant to
veil the god-awful blank where a name should be. And yet, Ken Lay, the first to
fall in the Calamitous Corporate Corruption Category, is a name that doesn’t go
away. The guy whose end-run at Enron left hundreds, maybe thousands, of bodies
strewn behind. And already, he isn’t worth 10 seconds from Peter Jennings, or an
inch or two in the New York Times, or a short segment with the belligerent
talking heads on Crossfire. Can we attribute this to memory loss, too? I don’t
think so. I’m much too paranoid not to think that Kenny Boy still has friends in
high places. So, he’s free to start a whole new shim-sham enterprise, though
this one won’t be for money since there’s still plenty of that squirreled away.
Nope, this time it’ll be about regaining all that power and its attendant
fawning, which have to be the most painful losses in his new life.
Some place along my way to heaven I expect
I’ll have to justify the many ungracious musings I indulge in about this man. As
soon as I turn one off, up pops another. Sometimes I picture old Ken Lay-Away as
Serious Repentant: I see him in a monastery, rising from his iron cot (though he
did remember to bring his Egyptian cotton sheets with the high thread count) at
3 a.m to fall to his knees on the stone floor where he stays as long as he can,
maybe 12 minutes, beating his chest and crying mea culpa!
In my scenario Ken seems mightily
depressed, and I happen to know that’s because yesterday Brother Luke told him
to "get rid of that hair shirt"—a custom-made beauty stitched from the hide of
an endangered snow leopard that cost a bundle. Brother Luke suggested that he
scrub pots and pans extra hours instead, but Ken said no. The truth is his hands
have been chapped since his first day here when the Abbot made him put his crème
de la mere lotion in the communal shower; it quickly disappeared among gleefully
slathering monks.
Well, the monastery scenario is fun, but
it’s short, because I can’t see Kenny sticking it out more than three or four
days.
Another skit that I usually play as I
await my turn in the "After you, Alphonse" dance of lights at Ketchum’s big-time
intersection, is a golf scene: Kenny Boy has just teed off on No. 1 on the lush
36-hole spread on this Shangri-La isle, a charming hideaway where "Internal
Revenue Service" is a gauche phrase that no one ever utters. If I were a good
sport, I’d visualize Kenny Boy’s drive going straight down the middle 230 yards,
and then the other guys in the foursome exclaiming "great shot…way to go"…that
sort of thing. But that’s not how my mind works. No, the drive flies 130 yards,
not 230, and it slices wickedly to the parallel 18th fairway, where,
still on the fly, it smacks poor Jack Welch, (poor Jack Welch?) smack on the
cheek. And oh, what an uproar! Jack’s caddy grabs Jack’s cell phone and summons
the G.E. helicopter (still on his list of perks) to hurry, hurry, to take
out-cold Jack to the club’s hospital. The island hospital has more exotic
equipment than Mayo’s and Walter Reed’s combined; it’s a fun place to be sick or
injured. When you show up at this ER or front desk there’s none of that
intimidating pestering about finances or insurance—it’s rightly assumed that
you’re as good as gold.
The guys in Jack’s foursome huddle around,
faces worried, though in my skit I can tell you that if you could get into the
heads of the opposing twosome, you’d see they suspect Jack staged the whole
catastrophe just to weasel out of the $52 grand he’s down. Where money’s
concerned, these minds move faster than Bode Miller in a World Cup slalom.
Back on the first tee, unaware, as usual,
of what he’s done, Kenny Boy takes a mulligan, and this one does go straight
down the fairway…130 yards. And since Kenny Boy took a mulligan, the others do
too.
Nothing unexpected happens in rest of the
round—just whiffs that don’t count … balls that get nudged for better lies … and
eight or 10-foot gimmee putts. When the boys finish their round they leave bags
and golf carts with their caddies, and clunk to the clubhouse to settle their
bets. No matter how much money changes hands it might as well be Monopoly money,
and Kenny Boy is bored … bored … bored. Once you’ve chummed with the doers and
shakers of the world, and told them how you want them to do their jobs, and
that’s the way they’re done, there’s not much fun in being on an itty-bitty
piece of paradise where "big action" means a game of below average amateur golf.
I’m hoping that there’s a prosecutor
somewhere, but probably not in Texas, who will finally put Ken Lay’s name to the
Enron meltdown and tell him it’s time for the buck to stop at his door. Now
wouldn’t that put some thrill back in this man’s life!
An old tune, new words: "Oh where oh where
has Kenny Boy gone…Oh where oh where has he gone? … with his employees cut short
and his stock options cut long…oh where oh where has he gone."