Wes Anderson

The Ballad of Reading Milton

Max, sitting alone on the roof of Philly Joe Jones' Easy Way Out Bar and Grille, on Bleeker
Street, cracked open a Dr. Pepper. He did not immediately drink it, but, instead, placed it
delicately on the back of his left hand. He drew his fingers away from the rim and balanced the
can, with tremendous confidence and poise, for thirty-six seconds, at which point his
concentration broke. The image of Jack Kennedy holding a half-empty styrofoam coffee cup
infected his mind. He could not block it out. He was incapable of avoiding a slight, but sufficient,
overcompensation. The can sank to the floor and nailed the steel mesh cover of an air
conditioning vent, chugging its contents through the grating. The compressor, previously roaring,
became silent. Max stood and dropped his hands into his pockets. Looking out into the street, he
noticed the presence of an African lotus blue Porsche 911 turbo, double parked. It was not his.
He crossed the rooftop and entered the stairwell. He descended three steps at a time to the
ground floor, and, as he slammed his palms against the horizontal bar on the face of the door, he
realized, with a blow to the head similar in many ways to the type that might be delivered by
heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson to a receptionist at an investment banking firm, that he would
need a coat hanger.
I'm a Platonist, to be totally, perfectly, absolutely, entirely honest. I believe in the Forms: the
fundamental elements that underly reality as we perceive it. I differ with Plato, however, in my
delineation of the Forms. I mean, I believe in the One, of course, and God, and so forth. But,
unlike Plato, who's always talking like a bat out of hell about the Forms of number, justice, and
likeness, l tend toward my heroes. I think the underlying form of jazz is Louis Armstrong, the
Form for baseline groundstroke passing shot tennis is Borg, and the Form for all true acting,
even for a guy like Cary Grant, who always played Cary Grant, is Marlon Brando. He's an
anachronism in his own time.
Max adjusted his tie and opened the door. He slipped on a pair of tortoiseshell glasses as he
crossed through the restaurant. With a glance bade over his left shoulder, he ducked into the
kitchen. As he passed the stove, behind the chef, who, reading a copy of "Popular Psychology,"
did not pay him even a hint of attention, he paused in order to pick up a cup half-full of olive oil.
He poured it into a skillet of sauteing mushrooms.
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing. It needed oil."
"Who are you? How much did you add? I want them to be crisp, you understand? I don't want
them to be saturated." The chef closed his magazine and examined the contents of the pan,
turning over one mushroom at a time with a flat, wooden spoon. "Jesus Christ Almighty, they're
saturated."
As he scanned the inside of the broom closet, just beside the stove, Max responded, "Add
more mushrooms." Me spotted a thoroughly mutilated coat hanger of the cardboard tube paper
coverless variety, and snatched it off the rod from which it had been effortlessly hanging.

"Sure, yeah, right. But then I'll have to add more garlic, more salt, more pepper, more
everything. You're a true gentleman, you know that?" Max injected a fork into one of the hypersaturated mushrooms. He dipped it into a shallow bowl of hollandaise, and ate it in a single,
necessarily small bite.
"It's fine. Try it. it's fine."
"Anything sounds good to untrained ears."
"Maybe you should toss in some paprika. What do you think?"
"Paprika? Why don't you get the hell out of my kitchen?"
Max swung the door open in front of him with his foot. A medium-close shot from the waist
up would have created for an audience the illusion that he had forced open the door through the
efforts of his mind alone.
There is one and only one thing worth doing, and that's checking out the scene. What I mean
by that is that, whether you're making a papier-macht panda or just watching some
blockheaded television show, if itis true you're really watching this show, or you really want to
make the panda, then you're all set. Whereas in the case of a guy who is raking in the dough and
owns an island, but really doesn't like being an investment banker, in spite of the fact that he's a
financial wizard, you can observe a lack of the checkage of the scene. And if you don't check the
scene, I'm saying, then you're toast, because you just will be.
Max removed a chromium-plated, black plastic-handled key from the parking attendants' box.
He walked several feet down the sidewalk, and then pressed the button in the center of the
handle. A single, shrill pulse was emitted from beneath the hood of the Porsche. Max opened the
door on the passenger's side, took off his jacket, draped it over his coat hanger, and, leaning into
the car, hung it from the peg above the back seat. He closed the door, and stepped around to the
back of the car, to the other side. As he dropped into the driver's seat, he slipped on his seal belt
and ignited the engine. It idled just above 1000 rpm. After examining the contents of the glove
box, Max removed from it a Maxell XL2-S 100 and slipped it through the opening on the face of
the Blaupunkt. An internal mechanism grasped the tape from his fingers and sucked it inside. Six
speakers simultaneously presented him with Debussy's La Mer. I le released the parking brake,
shifted into first, and popped the clutch.
Nietzsche was a serious guy. One thing he said, and I agree with him all the way around the
block, is that the whole entire Goddamn point of living lies in art. Very big on art, Nietzsche was.
The thing he missed, though, is that checking the scene and art, just as an entity, not as an action
or what have you, not as in "creating art," are one and the same thing. That's what they are, one
and the same thing. Checking the scene equals art. You've got to cut him some slack, though. I
mean, he was Nietzsche. That carries some clout where l come from.
Max attempted to perfect his shifting technique, matching up the engine speed to the rate at
which the wheels were turning with enough precision that each downshift and each rapid break

into third became a single, distinct, fluid motion, unifying the street, the wheels, and the engine
with Max himself. He rolled down the windows.
A gust of moderate force gently lifted Max's tie away from his shirt, into the air, and over the
top edge of the seat. It was suspended horizontally above his shoulder. He stopped at Manhattan's
singular drive-through Jack In The Box, midtown, and ordered a jumbo Dr. Pepper and a Bacon
Cheeseburger Supreme.
To check the scene requires singularity of vision. Your vision has to be singular is what I'm
driving at. You can't say, "I'm going to play a little squash, maybe shoot some pool, and then
check the scene." That's definitely out. Forty hours a week is one full time Job, and there are 168
hours per week, so four and one fifth full time jobs is what it takes to check the scene. Because
what it is, it's a matter of commitment.
Shutting down the engine, Max slipped the Porsche into neutral and coasted into an alley off
Tenth Street. He stepped out, placed his drink on the roof of the car, and slammed the door. The
Jumbo Dr. Pepper slid down the elegant curve of the spine of the car, toward its enormous whale
tail. Max grabbed at the cup, but without the casual grace of a well-seasoned tap dancer. He
managed to secure the cup itself, but the contents flew, as a unit, over the end of the car and into
the expanse of similarly-colored liquid that covered the floor of the alley. He tucked the bag
containing the burger and fries under his arm, and locked the door. He tossed the empty cup into
a grey-blue and somewhat tiny dumpster.
People say to me, "Max, everything you do is too damn arbitrary. Show a little backbone." I
just shake my bead and say, "Woah." You see, I've got a code of ethics and everything. It's Just
that they're aesthetic and they change to allow for junk that might have just happened or
something. I have a clarinet, for instance, and l can play it. I'd like to play with the Philharmonic
or the Jazz Messengers, but no dice at all. l frequently get people to photograph me with it,
though. See, it's a matter of technique and genius. That's what checking the scene requires. If you
can't play the thing well enough to join up with a symphony, get your photo taken with it. If you
lose your place in line at the theatre, because you just realized that you didn't lock the car, then
try the back door or a roof entrance or something.
As he meandered down Fourteenth Street, Max ate the last three bites of his Burger Supreme.
He rolled the foil wrapper into a ball and dropped it into the bag, which he was carrying by his
side, in his left hand. A group of three women, none of whom were over twenty-two, each
dressed in basic and elementary black, with a combined total of twelve earrings in six ears,
swished past Max, going the opposite direction. He heard one of them say, "I'm not even
French."
He reached into the bag and attempted to isolate, among a terrific array of highly specialized
paper containers (for his straw, salt, pepper, fries, and rings), a single French fry. He withdrew it
from its box, upside down at the bottom of the bag. Holding it at one end, with his head tilted
back in a manner reminiscent of a Greek slave owner swallowing a single grape, he lowered it
into his mouth.

You ever been to the beach in the winter? Maybe not, I'm guessing. I'm disinclined to
speculate as to what you're waiting for. I have no data. Just the same, though, I'm not even going
to try to tell you about it. You should just go there. Judge for yourself. Note that the sky is not
blue. It's white. Which is fine. The gulls look like they're flying backwards. Also, there's nobody
there who keeps leaving bottles all the hell over the place. These facts may or may not be in the
public domain. But, let me put it to you now, one of the key elements when it comes to checking
the scene is what you call timing.
Max stuffed the bag into a green, wire mesh trash can, and merged with a small crowd of
people. They were watching and listening to a man whose shirt announced his name, Bernard
Jackson, as he jammed out a freestyle version of "Michael Row the Boat Ashore," singing,
playing a bright red acoustic guitar, and, simultaneously, managing a respectable soft shoe
routine.
Jumping forward from the crowd, to Bernard's side, Max began to scat sing in an operatic
tenor. Bernard executed a single, precise pirouette.
I'm a lying bastard. I mean, I'll go ahead and tell you right now, because you'd probably find
out anyway. I'm a complete liar. So anything I may have said about the Theory of Forms and me
being a Platonist, don't buy it. I didn't mean it. I don't even know if any of that garbage about
commitment and timing and genius and technique is true. It's all just speculation. Marlon
Brando doesn't even live in Tahiti anymore. He lives in Hollywood. I'm not saying I'm not
working on my technique, or trying to perfect my timing once in awhile, but I don't really have
much faith in it. I mean, It's all mostly just luck. That's been my experience with it. I reckon,
however, I reckon Brando still listens to a little Charlie Parker when he gets the chance. I'm no
cynic.
After leaving a check in Bernard's guitar case, Max parted from the crowd and made his way
to a small Hunan restaurant, expensive even in metropolitan terms. He was seated near the
entrance, facing a window that composed the entire two story front of the building. The dimness
of the dining room and the terrific wattage of the streetlamps that illuminated the sidewalk
outside produced, from Max's perspective, the effect of cinema. He fancied himself alone in his
realization of the fact that the patrons of the restaurant were chance members of an audience of
not only Bleeker street, but of a particular strip of the universe (a view which they were afforded
due to the Greenwich Village building code restrictions on altitude). He ordered a Dr. Pepper
and, "some kind of Hunan salad or something. See what you can come up with, why don't you."
Immediately upon the arrival of his Dr. Pepper, Max, impetuously, but without intentions of
any sort whatsoever, swept his arm across the surface of the table and set the drink on its side. As
the waiter rushed to his aid, Max leaned down to tie his shoelace, inasmuch as it had, at some
point, come untied.