For Liquor Salesman, a Sense of Belonging in Language of Friendship

Under a fading old sign advertising "Salignac, the Cadillac of Cognac," Jong Im and Herman Aronovic talk Torah. In Korean.

"Herman is a wise man, like Thomas Edison," Im says. Behind the metal-and-plastic barricade at Frank's Tavern in Fairmount Heights, the two trade proverbs and compare religions while Aronovic delivers a few cases of Schlitz.

Given the scraggly addicts hanging out in the parking lot and the siege mentality inside the store, this might not seem a likely spot for a conversation about cosmology between the poet of Prince George's County's liquor salesmen and a Korean Bible student. (The store also employs a Mongolian oceanographer, but that's another conversation.)

"It's a fascinating dichotomy of insanity," Herman says.

For 24 years, Herman has been on the road selling booze, mostly in the District, now in Prince George's. His friends are the guys from the stores, a Korean who owns a shop in Mount Pleasant and a Salvadoran who has a place in Columbia Heights.

Herman makes the rounds in Hyattsville and Bladensburg and Greenbelt and Riverdale, to corner stores and strip shopping centers, to high-security places where drunks get their MD 20/20 and to brightly decorated shops where $10 wines are starting to push malt liquor out of the cooler.

He stops at Party Time and Orbit and Super-Mart. He glances at his quota sheet, steps through the door, chats with the owner in his language of choice, checks the inventory and takes the order. Herman speaks passable Amharic, Korean and Spanish, the languages of most of the liquor store owners and clerks he visits each week.

The bosses want him to push Harp beer from Ireland, but that's not Herman's world: "This is Prince George's County. If you find me an Irish person, I'll buy your kids a bar mitzvah. I sell Guinness; that's what people from the Caribbean and Africa are loyal to. Guinness pays my mortgage."

He spends his day climbing into attics and descending into storage cellars, counting cases. As often as not, his competitors -- old-fashioned door-to-door guys with order sheets and stories to tell -- are in the same stores pushing their wares. Their business is all relationships, decades-old ties to stores once owned by Jews and Greeks and now the entree to the American dream for Koreans, Salvadorans, Indians and Ethiopians.

In Hyattsville, at Lee's, "an old bouffant-hair white bar that an Indian guy bought from a white guy," Herman hands out snapshots he took of the staff. Down in the cellar, Ajay Sharma, one of the owners, asks whether he can leave his young daughter with Herman on Saturday while he and his wife attend a birth class at Holy Cross Hospital. The other salesmen are in and out in a couple of minutes, but Herman makes friends.

"You can know your pinot noirs, but you got to know people," he says. "That's what life is about. If you're a white guy and you come in and you speak Korean, and your accent changes with each person you meet, everybody thinks you're a little off. But they know my word is good. I can talk to everybody, maybe because of where I grew up."

Here's an old photo, a class picture showing Mrs. Brown's sixth-grade class at Barnard Elementary in the Petworth section of Northwest. Twenty-eight children, one of them white. That's Herman.