By Marc Fisher
Thursday, April 13, 2006; B01

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.

He's 52 now, lives alone in Silver Spring. He drives by the old neighborhood all the time, visiting with the old men who, all those years ago, taught him to play the card game tonk and took him fishing in the C&O Canal or out to the Chesapeake Bay. All the other white people moved off his block of Varnum Street, most before the '68 riots, but certainly all afterward. And after some kids hit him with a staple gun, Herman went to his parents to beg to be transferred out of Rabaut Junior High and into Gordon, in Georgetown.

Herman's wife -- he's divorced -- was black, as were his other girlfriends over the years. His son is a Howard County police officer. "I don't see color or money," Herman says.

Instead, he sees people who are up against powers greater than themselves: big, callous companies, bosses squeezed from both sides, property taxes that keep shooting up because someone else is getting rich.

At Jack's Liquors in Fairmount Heights, Herman warily exchanges greetings with two drunks sitting in the parking lot. "Where's Rambo?" Herman asks, inquiring about one of the store's regulars.

"Rambo locked up," comes the reply.

"You're not. That's good."

"Real good. Real lucky."

Inside, where the big sellers are Velicoff vodka, the alcoholics' choice, and Schlitz malt liquor, Herman reels off a few lines in Amharic (the official language of Ethiopia) and Korean to the two clerks, who toil behind bulletproof barricades.

"I see people with desolate lives wherever I go," Herman says, "but I'm like them, trying to make a living. They're going to buy the stuff if it's from me or anybody else. I just try to get along with all the people.

"I'm more worried that I'm 52, and I'm in this universe trying to find my place."

In the dash of his Accord, Herman keeps a book of poetry he got from a friend who chucked it all and moved to the hills of Arizona. "Look on Page 37," Herman says, and there, the poet James Kavanaugh writes:

"It makes no sense to my friends back home

That a middle-aged man should want to roam.

But I left the money and a share of fame

And I called it quits in the business game;

I left a house and a proper wife,

To begin to live the rest of my life."

The book is called "There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves."

Herman punches his orders into the cellphone, stops for a quick lunch at Greenbelt Lake, where he shares his banana with the ducks and thinks back on the 8-year-old boy he once was, catching crappy and bass near Fletcher's Boat House in Georgetown.

Herman keeps trying to tie his story together, searching for the connection between that white kid in Petworth fishing with the old black men and the middle-aged salesman on the road, shooting the bull in Amharic, Korean and Spanish.

"I tell my story to people, and they say, 'What's your ending, Herman?'

" 'I don't know,' I tell them, 'I don't want to be that old guy from the play, Willy Loman. Maybe I just need to belong.' "