Trucker school, also known as the Commercial Drivers' License School Inc., abutted a Honda repair joint on Northwest 27th Avenue. The walls were lined with pictures of S-cam drum brakes, clutch brake squeezes and a giant portrait of I-95. The highway was utterly traffic-free and any Floridian would call that sublime.
Except for that, trucker school was not an artsy place.
The head teacher was named John Pye. Some newbie truckers choke the first time they hit the road, Pye said - like young paratroopers who might need a friendly kick out the plane door. Also, a trucker should know his rig like a soldier knows his weapon, ``so when it jams out in the desert and the jungle, you can take it apart, clean it and lock and load in three minutes.''
Pye used to be a trucker, but before that he was in the military, and drew frequently on that experience to make his points.
The president of trucker school was named Albert Hanley. There are excellent reasons why truckers despise the greater Miami metro area, Hanley said. Those include eternal gridlock, theft from warehouses and poor road etiquette. Very poor.
``First of all, you've got people who come from a different traffic system altogether,'' he says. ``Then you've got your elderly. Then there's your tourist who's just lost. You see some of these people drive, you're really scratching your head: Don't you realize there's 80,000 pounds on there?''
That is the most a fully loaded 18-wheeler can legally weigh. Some of the student truckers will never come close to the wheel of a maxed-out 18-wheeler. They'll spend their lives making local or regional deliveries in lesser vehicles. They'll deliver milk or soda or bread. They'll drive the same route and get home for dinner every night.
Fritzdale Jones was not interested in that kind of job. He was 41, a Jamaican immigrant, a one-time school bus driver in Broward County. He was tired of earning $350 a week, so a few weeks ago he became an ex-bus driver, borrowed some money and enrolled in trucker school. He'd heard a long-haul man could earn $50,000, even $60,000 a year.
He wore a T-shirt with a patriotically colored truck on the front. It said ``Trucking, An American Tradition'' beneath the truck.
``I grew up around buses,'' he said. ``But I always wanted to own an 18-wheeler. There's this love for heavy operation. You could say I'm a small man, but I love heavy things.''
This was last week, the day of the road test every driver must pass before applying for his CDL - commercial driver's license. Jones had already run through an 81-point pretrip checklist: ``This is the flex pipe to the muffler, looking good but it could crack and leak, so I'm looking for a dark spot . . .'' Then it was time for him to get into the 18-wheeler, an old refrigeration trailer with a Spartan cab.
Pye listed the feats to be performed: straight-line backing to a forward tight right turn, followed by an angled alley-dock and closing with a ``conventional blind-side back down, better known as parallel parking.''
One could not help but think, listening to Pye, of an announcer describing an Olympic figure-skating routine. One wisely kept his mouth shut about that.
Pye blew a whistle to start the test. Then he glared.
Jones didn't choke. He backed up very, very slowly for 100 feet. He came forward into the turn.
``Your wheel hits the corner, you could be hitting a fire hydrant, an old lady waiting for the light to change, or the curb could just punch right through the tire wall,'' said Celio Confienza, a teacher watching Jones come into the alley-dock. ``That ain't gonna look good at all.''
``See,'' said Confienza, ``back in the day in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, they'd put the docks in the back of the building. You'd have to go around, back into an alley and get yourself turned.''
Jones began his parallel park. This is not an easy operation in a four-wheeler; in an 18-wheeler, it can be nerve-wracking.
``Just imagine a BMW in front, a Mercedes in back and a Rolls-Royce Phantom on the other side of you,'' Confienza said. ``You bump a car with one of these trucks, you're going to tear a hole in it.''
Jones cut hard to jackknife the trailer, easing it into the parking space and leaving the truck cab perpendicular.
He passed.
``You did excellent on the pretrip,'' Pye said. ``And the basic skills test - you did damned good on that, too.''
A commemorative photo would be nice, Jones thought, before he caught the Greyhound up to Chattanooga, where he'll sign with Covenant Transport, one of the bigs.
``No,'' said Pye. ``I don't do that.''
If you have a story idea, e-mail nspangler@miamiherald.com.
