2006-07-07 - 11:57 p.m.
I don’t know why the story of the death of former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay made me cackle like some kind of a grisly witch around her cauldron, but I am ashamed to say that it did.
News of the old ghoulish embezzler’s demise had me all but shrieking with glee – almost to the extent I was a tad fearful that I was losing my mind. So Mister Lay, you think you had problems BEFORE, do you? Well looka you now! There you are, roasting in the fiery pit of hell, being beaten with a whip and a pitchfork. It is clear that the Devil could not wait to get you ino Hell, so he called you up earlier than you planned.
Ha ha ha! Ho ho ho! Hee hee hee!
Oh, I can hear you saying it now. “Oh, Johnny Darling,” you go. “That is not especially nice. You should be kinder! You should be kinder to people. Do not speak ill of the dead.”
Pfft. I hate CEOs. I have never met a CEO who didn’t take over the company I worked for and then fire me. And so, when I hear that one particularly wicked CEO died of a disgusting heart attack, I consider it a win for the good guys. It is less about the fact that Lay was a crook and a skank, than he was The Authority. I do hate The Authority, I must confess. Mainly because authority ate up my Salad Days and gave me nothing in return. I think the world would be so much nicer with nothing but mom and pop stores – and maybe the internet, so I can order books really cheap.
Actually, my amusement comes more at how the sudden development showcases the bizarre caprices of fate. I mean, the villain dying of a heart attack in the last scene is so dopily melodramatic it threatens to edge into the terrain of bad soap opera. It’s like one of those lame scenes in a mystery screenplay, in which the killer is unmasked in the finale, but, because the writer loathes the idea of merely putting him in jail, he abruptly kills him off, for no other reason than to show that the rules of conventional morality must be maintained.
Rule number one is that “Evil cannot triumph.” If you do evil, then you shall die of a heart attack! Of course, the truth of the matter is, Mister Kenneth Lay died of a heart attack on crisp and clean white sheets, in some luxury ranch in Aspen, rather than while being buggered and shanked by Big Black Bubba in the shower room of Oz, which is what he richly deserved.
But there’s a disturbing element of Last Laugh to the death. Lay’s demise vacates his conviction, which implies, I believe, that his assets will no longer be stripped to pay off the bankrupt pensioners and starving little old ladies who put their life savings into the company.
It is droll to me that no one is mentioning that Lay’s heart attack could have been brought on as suicide -- like the death of that Yugoslavian fellow, Miroslav Blagflosidec. Miroslav Glugzabidic was refusing to take his heart pills, and then adding blood thinners or thickeners or something like that, so the Judge would send him to a hospital, not a prison. He just miscalculated and croaked instead.
Perhaps Mister Lay was similarly inclined. Or perhaps his own wife or children slipped him some lovely wolfebane or hemlock, which, as we know from any episode of “I Claudius”, will mimic the effects of heart failure. His family would want to maintain their fortune, after all, and what better way than to make sure the daddy would have his debts cancelled?
I was just telling this story to my stepfather, with whom I was having coffee at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Venice, and he responded by noting that he didn’t think that Lay was guilty at all. My stepdad claims that Lay never sold off his stock, like some of the other defendants in the Enron case did. If he had, he could have made hundreds of millions of dollars.
My stepfather went on to regale me with a most pleasing, if non sequitor anecdote. Back when former Presidential Candidate Al Gore was running for President, he appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. And, in the famous cover photograph, it appears that former Senator Gore was wearing an enormous rubber penis extender just inside his blue jeans.
As my stepdad told me this tale, I told him I recall that there was actually some scandal about it on various blogs and whatnot of the day. My stepdad, who has a comic sensibility that awkwardly navigates its way between the bawdiness of Howard Stern and the elegance of Moliere (which is not that far distant, if you think about it), chortled and slapped his knee.
“Did I ever tell you this story?” my stepdad noted, sitting back in his chair. “Some years ago, I was touring England with your mother. And we stopped off in Oxford to go bookshopping in this old bookstore. I was on the second floor of the store, which was where all the used books are kept. And I was perusing a bit of Jonson and a bit of Cawper. I had completely forgotten that outside the bookstore, I had picked up a tennis ball, which I had popped into my pocket. What a bulge that ball made in my pants! I wasn’t even aware of it, as I was too busy reading the Poetics of Aristotle.
“Anyway, at some point, I climbed up the stepladder to look at the Loeb Classics on the top shelf. And then, when I looked down, I suddenly saw that the bookstore clerk, a bespectacled man with a huge bald spot, had posed himself directly in front of my crotch on the ladder! He was staring at – no, his eyes were GLUED to – my crotch, which had been enhanced with the tennis ball. His mouth was SLACK JAWED. My gosh, I think some drool was actuall dribbling out of the side of his mouth.
“I climbed down the ladder and locked eyes with him. I smiled. I leered at him! And I reached into my pocket and – I pulled out the tennis ball! And then I laughed in his face. I laughed and laughed and laughed! The clerk blushed blood red and ran from the room, hiding his face. It was soooo funny!”
And, so, you see, that is the fate that often must befall the man whose size queen desires are not offset by any underlying intelligence or wit. A fair warning to us all, methinks!
