What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [126]
The store’s counters were stocked with water pipes, rolling papers, and drug paraphernalia. Black light posters of nudes hung on the walls. The store’s annual gross sales had plummeted from $300,000 to next to nothing. The Internal Revenue Service had seized the duplex where Betty and Mel had lived as newlyweds. And the store itself was in foreclosure. Its only remaining value was the two-story stucco commercial building itself.
“I remember standing there, knowing little about how to save the business, and saying to myself, Okay, Betty, you can only manage five hundred feet. And everything in my five hundred feet has to be right,” she recalled.
Of all the many turning points in her life, her determination to act now, to reclaim the dream of the store and a patch of the street, would be the bravest and the most transformative. Though the culture of the street and the times were stacked against her, she was compelled to challenge her world with action. In other words, it was one of those defining moments in Betty’s life and in the lives of the other subjects of this book, that personality, history, and an event combined to cause personal perception to shift tectonically and courage to be activated. Suddenly, Betty knew what she had to do with the rest of her life if it was going to have meaning.
“The successful iconoclast learns to see things clearly for what they are and is not influenced by other people’s opinions,” neuroscientist Gregory Berns wrote in Iconoclast, a book examining how innovative thinkers break through barriers. Referring to the part of the brain responsible for the processing and memory of emotion, Berns continued, “He keeps his amygdala in check and doesn’t let fear rule his decisions. And he expertly navigates the complicated waters of social networking so that other people eventually come to see things the way he does.”
One of Betty’s first steps was quite simple. She put a can of paint under the counter and whenever she saw a mark of graffiti on her building, “I would get my little can and go paint over it.” After a while, “the little drug dealers who stood at the bus stop across the street wouldn’t let anyone put a mark on it, either. And at night, when I was in the store alone, if they saw anyone suspicious enter, they would wander in to make sure I was all right.”
Betty got her first practical lesson in local politics when she came to suspect her upstairs tenant, a professed businessman, of being a major drug dealer in the neighborhood. When she tried to push him out, he pushed back with lightly veiled threats. Betty assumed political connections could help, and through a well-heeled friend of Soskin’s, she secured a meeting with Shirley Dean, a former mayor who was running for the city council. Dean declined to help. Instead, she told Betty that she considered the tenant an important community leader and was counting on him to bring out the vote for her ticket.
Livid, Betty got in her car and drove directly to the opposing Democratic mayoral candidate’s headquarters. Without knowing anything about political newcomer Gus Newport, Betty took home as many campaign posters as she could carry. She plastered her store windows with them and got all the merchants in a three-block radius to do the same. The next day, when she drove down from affluent Grizzly Peak to Southwest Berkeley, she found that all of her posters were turned around and replaced by Dean’s posters. Her tenant had harassed the store owners after she had visited them. None cared enough about politics to resist. But she was not about to be intimidated. She went to work knocking on doors and registering voters. She even got the young drug dealers who had befriended her to put on shirts and ties and help her. “It was a wonderful experiment in democracy,” she said, tickled by the memory. Her candidate won, and Dean’s ticket was defeated. “For the