The Keys to La Buena Vida
German Vidal Isn't Just Selling Cars. He's Selling a Way of Life.

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 19, 2006

In car showrooms across America, where this line of work grew up as a chrome reflection of the nation's cunning can-do soul, the last day of the month is when the good salesmen know they've hit their numbers, and they strut like conquerors. The losers are sunken-eyed and reeling. It's perform or die, buddy, in the cruel and perfect Yankee meritocracy of straight commission.

At his desk with three phones and a large calculator, poised at the front of a giant fishbowl of a showroom overlooking a busy Bethesda intersection, German Vidal quells his nerves by thinking positive. He will sell a car today.

When he was tallying last year's record -- 348 cars sold -- he turned to his Casio and speed-keyed some numerical jazz: 365 minus 348 equals . . .

"Seventeen. Those were my days off and my birthday!" he exclaimed, laughing.

One of his phones rings. Vidal scoops it up.

"Ourisman Honda, buenos dias ," he says.

" A las dos . . . . Chao ."

He makes an appointment for 2 p.m. Beautiful. Maybe this will be the sale.

Sí, amigos, it's true: One of the top salesmen in the Washington area, one of the best in the country, is an immigrant from Bolivia, a naturalized American. Nearly half his customers are Hispanic. And his domain is pricey Bethesda, where Latin American is presumed to be a cuisine, not a market.

What's for sale in a showroom has always been more than mere transportation. That mythic car salesman forever at work in the national psyche dangles the keys to sex, status, power, possibility. He's an American archetype, permanently imagined in a plaid jacket, not to be trusted 100 percent, with a million-dollar smile and a gold-plated pitch:

Tell me what I can do to put you in this car today!

But when this archetype speaks Spanish? The meaning of the transaction shifts. He extends a promise to immigrants working hard to get off buses, out of junkers, away from the deadly and sidewalkless thoroughfares of their sprawling new frontier: This new machine, he tells them, will help you merge right into the mainstream. For his middle-class customers, trading up to a bigger car is a sign of continuing success in their adopted country.

Vidal is handing over the keys to the American dream.

At a super buen precio.

* * *

Vidal looks out of the fishbowl and admires the tableau he has arranged just outside.

Two cars, side by side. On the right, a silver 1999 Accord EX with a V6 engine and 88,000 miles. On the left, a gleaming carbon bronze 2006 EX.

The '99 is owned by Lucy Mendez, his 2 o'clock. Vidal sold it to her new, and now it's in for service. He's thinking she's thinking she deserves something new. He has picked out the carbon bronze with creamy leather and wood-grain trim, going for an elegant look that befits, he says, "a professional Hispanic lady." She is the district manager of a janitorial services company.

Check out this year's model, so sleek and sculpted, next to the boxy shape of ages ago.

Now check out the salesman. Vidal is a blend of formal reserve and switched-on charm. His style is sharp, not flashy: double-breasted black suit, red tie, tasseled loafers. He drives a five-year-old Honda S2000 convertible.

His first name sounds like "Hare-mahn." With customers who are not Hispanic, he introduces himself as "Herman."

When he started out in the early 1990s, local dealerships were realizing it was good business to serve customers in their own language. Now you hear Spanish in most showrooms. At 45, Vidal has survived a high-burnout profession longer than most.

Waiting for Mendez, he performs his pre-deal self-motivational ritual: In his mind's eye, he tries to see the future. He pictures his customer driving off in a new car, the months of car payments as mile markers on the road to qualifying for a mortgage. He will sell a car today.

The highlight of every sale is what he calls the Golden Moment.

"The Golden Moment is when I give them the keys," he says. "The look on their faces -- everyone is happy. A year from now, this brand-new Accord will be sitting in the driveway of a brand-new home. That's the picture I always have."

Star Treatment

Golden Moment by Golden Moment, the Hispanic middle class grows in Washington.

Lucy Mendez arrives to look at the 2006 Accord, her beige suit and heels harmonizing with that rich exterior finish. Since immigrating from Bolivia almost 20 years ago, where both she and her husband, Edwin, received medical degrees, her family has traveled a good way down the American highway -- in Hondas, sold by Vidal, from whom they bought their first new car. In the driveway of their Silver Spring house are three Accords.

Today is her 25th wedding anniversary, and she has come to spend part of it with Vidal. Edwin, now a dialysis technician, has urged her to pick out a new car for an anniversary present.

She slips behind the wheel for a test drive. From the passenger seat, Vidal goes over the car's features, in Spanish.

"¡G racias a Dios!" she says, when he points out the zoned temperature controls.

Cruising around Bethesda, the salesman drops the car talk. He asks about kids, work. Diego is studying hard, a business and marketing major at Towson University. Monica's quincea ñ era party has been put off until the better weather of April. Work hours are long.

"My car is my office sometimes," Mendez says. "I don't need a car that's going to be stopping all the time."

All that remains to discuss is price. "That's the easy part," Vidal says.

The sticker price including destination fees and options is $28,787. Vidal offers about $6,600 for the trade-in and knocks off another $2,000.

His fingers fly over the Casio again, factoring in taxes, tags, interest rates, various payment options. He writes a number on a pad.

That's the best price? Mendez asks.

"It's a good, good price," Vidal says. "Take advantage of this deal.

And here it comes -- "Se lo voy a preguntar."

He goes to see the manager.

It's the fifth car the family has bought from him, because "he always treats us the way we want to be treated," Mendez says, and she intends to be back next year for a Civic, when Monica turns 16. The couple has also sent her sister and their Colombian real estate agent to him -- two more cars sold.

In this way, Vidal has created a rolling community of Hispanic households -- his customers, and his wannabe-customers. They catch his ads on Spanish television and radio. They buy him beers at D.C. United games. Word spreads. One sale becomes five, then 10. Onward and upward, for a people and their salesman.

Mendez calls her husband on her cellphone. She tells him about her purchase, listens to something he says, then insists "No quiero Pilot!" -- which is Honda's SUV.

Vidal overhears and chuckles. "In our culture, usually the men rule the house," he says. "When I hear Mrs. Mendez talking to her husband, it reminds me of my mom. That's the way she talked to my father. ' No me molestes, this I like.' When you have a professional Spanish lady, she wants what she wants, it's 'Honey, I'm going to pay my bills.' That's basically the message behind all that."

While Mendez is in the finance department, Vidal writes down the radio station presets from the '99 and programs them into the '06. On the FM band, the first two selections are Latino music channels for Mendez, then American rock and rap stations for Diego and Monica. On the AM dial, there's a Spanish news station and an English one.

Vidal hands Mendez the keys. She smiles, but she's in too much of a rush to enjoy the Golden Moment. She's racing back to work.

Dream Ride

But Lucy's son experiences his Golden Moment every Friday night.

That's when he takes his 2004 Accord coupe to a Rockville parking lot, where his Honda car club gathers weekly around midnight -- throaty Civics and muscle Accords, projecting young American male cool.

Diego Mendez, 20, and his friends lovingly transformed his sapphire-blue machine into a low-rider with side-skirts, wide wheels, fat tailpipes and an air intake. He tinted the windows, added a thunderous sound system and installed a DVD screen and PlayStation behind the gearshift. (His friends watch "Girls Gone Wild" while they cruise around; "I don't watch while I'm driving," Diego says.)

His earnings as a manager of a Chipotle Grill and a previous job at Best Buy paid for the $8,000 transformation.

Behind the wheel for a spin, wearing a gray Polo sweat shirt over a black Izod golf shirt, Diego points out how those exhaust pipes give a "rougher sound" to the motor. "You're gonna turn heads. I love it when people snap their heads back and look to my car. . . . First thing in their head when they meet you: The man has a hot car."

At first Diego wanted a Mustang with a spoiler, like his friends at Wheaton High School. But the Mustang was a lemon, so a year later he went to see Vidal.

Unlike the Latino salesman at Ford, who kept trying to talk him into higher-priced models and seemed to lose interest before the deal was done, Vidal was laid-back. Diego is more comfortable in English than his parents, and so in English he told Vidal his dreams for his ride.

"He said, 'I know what you're going for,' " Diego recalls. "He brought it out, and he hit it right on the spot."

Culture of Trust

Vidal grew up in Cochabamba, the largest market town in the breadbasket of central Bolivia. His father owned a Mercedes repair shop.

Entering the professional class of his father's customers was capricious in his country -- too much depended on whom you knew. His parents paid for Vidal to study aeronautics technology at a trade school in Tulsa. Not finding work in his field, he moved to the Washington area. He sold Toyotas for a few years, and then Ourisman Honda recruited him in 1995 to run its Spanish department, which today has five bilingual salesmen, including Vidal. Vidal was hired in the middle of May, and by the end of the year he'd sold more cars than any of the other salesmen, who now number 22. His name was added to a plaque on the wall for Sales Representative of the Year. Every year a name is added, and every year since 1995 it is the same name: German Vidal.

American Honda has ranked him among its top 10 salesmen in the nation. "You don't see him work," says Stephen Steele, a fellow salesman at Ourisman. "The great ones you don't."

On the outside, a Hispanic car salesman may not appear radically different from the domestic model. But on the inside, he is thinking about how to bridge more complicated cultural currents. To succeed, he must also sell well to non-Hispanics, while in dealing with his own community, he must decide if he will be their champion -- or use their trust to take advantage.

"I have not received one call saying anything bad about German. That speaks highly of him," says Alejandro Carrasco, operator of Radio America, 1540 AM, a dominant figure in local Hispanic broadcasting who crusades against businesses preying on Latinos.

The Hispanic car salesman must also be savvy to differences. Hispanics are much more likely to take the advice of friends and relatives about what to buy and who to buy it from. They seek a guide in a land of dizzying choices and information overload.

If a car has a problem, a non-Hispanic buyer will report to the service department. Not Hispanics.

"They come and see the salesperson, even if the service person speaks Spanish," says Gus Casabe, used-car manager at Alexandria Toyota, one of a handful of Hispanic salesmen in the area as long-established as Vidal. "It's some kind of different relationship between the salesperson and the customer than American people have. . . . Once you get into a relationship with a Spanish customer, unless you do something crazy, it's almost forever."

Vidal says this customer loyalty is simply a cultural instinct of Latinos -- a triumph of the relational over the transactional. "That's what we are," is how Vidal explains it. "It's our culture back home."

More Than a Salesman

Between customers, Vidal waits at his desk, scanning the lot for in-comers, listening for the soft buzzer that signals a sales call. Whoever grabs his phone first gets the lead -- car salesman "Jeopardy!"

Friday is Vidal's only day off. Yet many Fridays he's in the showroom, accommodating a customer's schedule. He's so busy trying to create Golden Moments for other people, he rarely seems to enjoy his own.

"It's like being a doctor," he says. "You're always on call. Or a firefighter."

In the heat of a deal, shuttling between his customers and the manager's office, his shoulders are hunched like a bull's, and his upper body springs tautly with each step. On busy days he breaks into a trot.

Now here come customers Loana and Alex Noguera, all the way from Frederick, driving past three other Honda dealerships to see Vidal, who has sold two cars to them and four to friends the couple sent his way. They need a minivan because their family is expanding dramatically: Loana, 32, is pregnant with triplets.

She jokes to Vidal in Spanish, "Every time we come here we go home with a car!" Today it will be a burgundy Odyssey, with leather interior and DVD player.

In Venezuela Loana was a flight attendant, and Alex, 34, was in the military. Six years later, she is a mortgage loan officer and Alex is an electrician. When they first went car shopping in 2001, shortly after immigrating, other Hispanic salesmen insisted on big down payments. Vidal didn't, and put them in a new Civic.

"After we got the Civic, we started getting 20 credit card applications a month," Loana says. "I had to throw them away. We received offers to buy a house, everything. We didn't exist; now we exist after the car."

For some customers, Vidal provides even more.

Daniel Garces, 27, came to Washington six years ago on an internship with the World Bank. His parents wanted him to return to Ecuador to work in the family gasket-manufacturing business, but he decided to stay.

He delivered pizzas. His first credit card was secured: He had to put up a deposit, make payments on time, and eventually the deposit was returned and his credit limit increased. He bought two cars from Vidal and now owns a house.

For a while he was the valet parker at Ourisman. Vidal became his mentor. When Garces's English improved, Vidal recruited him to be a salesman, and for the first time Garces felt he was going to make it in America. Now he's a top agent for an insurance company.

"I owe that man a lot," Garces says. "If he wouldn't have chosen me, and he didn't see that special thing in me from the beginning, I'm pretty sure I would have got tired and right now I'd be home in my country."

Land of Opportunity

Evenings after work, Vidal will walk a long block from the dealership, past the Dunkin Donuts where he buys his customers an honest cup of Joe; past the video store where he procures DVDs of family-friendly hits to slip into customers' Odysseys; past the rich boutiques of Bethesda where a cowhide-and-elk-suede couch sells for $7,700 (marked down from $13,000!); past the eclectic restaurants where Spanish is a language of the kitchen -- and he steps inside Rio Grande Cafe.

He orders a carne asada and washes it down with a Pacifico beer.

So much juxtaposition of upward mobility, conspicuous consumption and desperate striving steers his conversation to one of his favorite themes: his unshakable faith in the land of opportunity. With education and hard work, he says, you can be anything you want, and your children can achieve even more.

He gets to thinking about 9/11 when he sees one of the guys working in the kitchen, Jose Delcid, hauling tubs of warm chips out to the bar. Vidal reaches out to shake Delcid's hand.

Vidal sold Delcid the first new car he ever owned -- a CR-V, the smaller SUV -- on Sept. 11, 2001. Delcid, now 48, had immigrated from El Salvador in 1993. He was making do with used cars until he saw one of Vidal's commercials on Univision.

He arrived at the showroom unaware of the terrorist attacks. Much of the nation seemed paralyzed by the horror playing and replaying on television. But Delcid was not about to put off a test drive, and Vidal was not about to turn away a customer. Delcid will always remember the moment. "I had never had the opportunity to climb into a new car before," Delcid explains in Spanish during a break in his shift.

His credit wasn't perfect, but he qualified, made his payments, working 50 hours a week at Rio Grande. "After 3 1/2 years, my credit was good and I was able to qualify to buy a house," he says.

It is Delcid whom Vidal pictures in his mind during that regular ritual as he tries to steer another deal to its Golden Moment. Or rather, it is a composite of Delcid, the Mendezes, the Nogueras, Garces. Immigrant families at different points in the same journey. The new Accord in the driveway of the new house.

Delcid nods toward someone behind the bar, dressed in tight black pants and a black shirt, hair gelled just so: The next generation, Jose Delcid Jr., 23. He drives a used Civic that his father helped him buy from Vidal. And he is one of the Rio Grande's managers.

"I'm a little proud of my son," the father says, smiling shyly.

Going the Extra Miles

On a Sunday at work, Vidal looks out of the fishbowl at the families having fun on the bike path adjacent to Ourisman and feels a little pang of envy.

Working too much: That's American, too. It's what the Dream sometimes demands.

Over the years, the car biz has sometimes kept Vidal away from his family. He turned down chances to be promoted to manager, he says, because a salesman can control his hours, and Vidal can take time off for spontaneous family events. He is private about his earnings, but a salesman at his level can make $150,000 to $250,000 a year in commissions, more than a salaried manager.

He works so hard, he says, to keep his daughters, Alicia, 14, and Nicole, 12, in private Catholic school and give them the very best university education. That way, they may ascend into those mythic professional classes -- the realm of people who write checks for the entire cost of an Odyssey, or who brought Mercedes to his father's garage.

Whatever his girls do, he "will be very proud," he says. "That's the only thing I want."

Inside his spotless and spacious Germantown home, on a cul-de-sac next to a wooded park, Vidal devotes some of his free time to video and photography. For his final project for a video-editing class at the Corcoran, he made a DVD called "Heroes," showing images of firefighters at Ground Zero, with a background of waving flags and a soundtrack of "America the Beautiful."

In the finished basement, there is an American flag on the wall above the large-screen television, and some of his poster-size photos and collages are on display -- red tulips in front of the Washington Monument, his family against a backdrop of the Statue of Liberty.

Sometimes he does projects on his iMac for customers, unasked. He just finished a wedding album for a customer he recently met over a Civic deal. He sold a used car to a woman last year, then learned her sister died. He made a DVD -- "Recordando a Nancy," or "Remembering Nancy" -- with snapshots, eulogies, music, and he presented 25 copies to the family. It was a gesture that will "live forever in our family," Ruth Jaramillo, Nancy's sister, writes in an e-mail in Spanish.

His preoccupation, the secret of his success, is creating memories in a country famous for its amnesia.

"I want them to go home with an experience that exceeded their expectations," Vidal says. "And the next time they think about buying a car, they'll think about buying it from German Vidal."

Staff researchers Bobbye Pratt and David J. Barie contributed to this report.