Breakfast at Truckers "Tiffany" : "The Chrome Shop"

Late winter 2008

It was at a sleazy Super 8 Motel on state road 44 in Wildwood Florida where I met the gray bearded, stockily built Nicholi, an independent truck owner. At age 59 he was, in many ways, winding down his business but his love affair with big shiny rigs had faded not at all. He had been born and raised in Ohio and moved to Gainesville Florida some thirty years ago. That's where he raised a family with a wife and two, in his words, "no account" sons and built a successful trucking firm that employed, at one time, some eighteen drivers. Now, he was down to his last rig and thinking retirement. It was more than his advancing age that influenced his thinking. Working conditions in the industry had deteriorated badly in recent years and the game was no longer worth the candle.

 As he explained, and much to my surprise. new trucks now run $220,000 to $360,000. Last I heard, a dozen years ago, $100,000 could get you in the game. The fuel tanks hold 300 gallons, 150 on each side. Deisel fuel runs around $4.00 a gallon, counting on my fingers revealed that a full tank cost $1200.00. Those "Big Bertha's" on wheels could get maybe six miles to the gallon. Cross country runs there and back come to about $2600.00 just for fuel.

His rig has 1.5 million miles of highway driving at seventy miles per hour. The tires, amazingly, can last 350,000 miles. He explained that one of the worst places to have to make a delivery or a pickup is a dump. That is where he has gotten the most tire blowouts and once ruptured a fuel tank. Repairs and tire replacements are enormously expensive making auto repair costs seem trivial by comparison.

He described the husband-wife driver teams and how there are special cabs that are as big as walk in closets and provide showers. Ceiling mirrors, he joked, were optional.

It was becoming increasingly evident that this otherwise non descript man thought "big". Having bought and sold a number of trucks in his career Nicholi was used to big transactions. This was evident too when he pointed out to me a store across the road that I had hardly noticed and hadn't given a second thought to. Later, upon reflection, it became obvious that unlike me, stopping at this particular motel was not a random choice or one based solely on room rates. He positively lusted to visit that store.

It was a wide, one storied building that included both a display shop and truck garage. It was named "The Chrome Shop". We went over there together, coffee cups in hand, and he led me through the aisles lined by glittering displays in every direction and around the two monstrously large brightly colored cab bodies, without wheels that were themselves decorated and surrounded by shiny chrome in every possible shape and size. Each cab had unbelievably bedazzling jewel like hub caps laying on the wooden floor next to where the wheel would be, the wheel housing, if the wheels had been mounted.

He brought me over to one cab that sported two vertical black stacks which he was tempted to buy at $950.00 each. He had called his wife and she told him to forget ever coming home if he wasted their money on them.

But I saw the yearning in his eyes. He was easing out of the business yet the temptation was still there. I imagine he will always have one shiny cab sitting out in his back yard that he will, from time to time, start up, polish, nurse and admire as long as he lives.