Roger Sheffer Driving School ften, when I'm driving the quarter-mile remedial track, my instructor will make a reference to the founder. Like, "Mr. Wilton prefers that students not smoke in the cars." Or, "Mr. Wilton watches from his bedroom window." I've never seen this Mr. Wilton, except a black and white cartoon version of his face on a dusty package of graduation party napkins. These were on the kitchen counter in the main building. Inverted V-shaped eyebrows, a tiny H itler mustache, a caricature of bonhomie. "Congratulations!" the face is saying, and in smaller print, "Better driving since 1949." Which, I'm told, was the year Wilton bought a section of public highway, fenced it off and built this academy next to it. The only other road out here is a low-maintenance horror-County Road XX, loose gravel on a swamp. A half inch of rain will flood it. "Don't drive the double X." That's what we hear from Giles Henderson, an 80ish retired banker with a big nose and sloping forehead, now doing his fourth gig at the academy. DUI this time, though Henderson doesn't call it that. He says, rather proudly, "I must have nodded off for a split-second. Scratched a piece of bark off a maple tree that would have died anyway. No real harm to nature or mankind. It was my own front yard, for godsakes. I was still in my own driveway!" The people who run this academy let him get away with such remarks. This is not, evidently, a twelve-step kind of place, where they make you tell the truth. I'm not sure what the philosophy is at Wilton, and I have no idea whether I'll come out of here a better person. "Don't drive it," Henderson says. But if we can't drive County Road XX, how will we ever escape from Wilton Academy? On foot? By helicopter? I ask Henderson and he looks at me like I'm crazy. "What's the hurry?" he says. "Do you have some urgent need that isn't being met?" A sprawling aluminum ranch house overlooks the property. Mr. Wilton comes out once a week, they say, and only for a few minutes, to present scrolls, diplomas, ballpoint pens. Last time, he merely tossed them from his bedroom window into a puddle, no names on them. No graduation party, no napkins. I fear I won't complete the training. I've been here two and a half days. I've driven the remedial course twice each day, and each time, something terrible has happened. The employees of Wilton Driving School don't seem to care. They stand with clipboards and walkie-talkies at both ends of the course, statue-like, making observations. Some of them, as it turns out, are statues, or, rather, two-dimensional wooden silhouettes. One of them is supposed to look exactly like Broderick Crawford, another like Erik Estrada. I have no
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