"The Bullet Meant for Me" by Jan Reid

A boxing fan gets shot in the gut and winds up making a bedridden reassessment of machismo, Texas style.

By Dan Oko

May 2, 2002 | In December, Sir Peter Blake, a world-champion sailor and environmental activist from New Zealand, was shot dead at the age of 53 aboard his yacht at the mouth of the Amazon River. Blake's accomplishments made him a hero to many in the world of sailing and beyond. In 1994, he captured the Jules Verne Trophy for circumnavigating the globe in a mere 75 days; the following year, he won the America's Cup for the first time; in 2000, he repeated that feat; and just before his death Blake had begun looking for ways to protect the world's waterways by following the example of the late Jacques Cousteau. But Blake's murder at the hands of robbers who had boarded his boat has been shrouded in controversy, especially in his native New Zealand.

Questions have been raised about the sobriety of the captain and his crew on the night in question, opening up a box of delicate issues surrounding whether Blake might have avoided such an untimely fate. In particular, some have observed that if the 6-foot-4 Blake had acquiesced to the thieves' demands, he might still be alive today. Instead, Blake charged below deck and grabbed a rifle, opening fire on the would-be pirates; in the ensuing exchange of gunshots, he lost his life.

Setting aside the question of whether Blake and his crew had been drinking -- by most accounts, they had, although nobody seems to be willing to acknowledge that they were drunk -- even some of Blake's admirers retain a lingering sense that as a man among men, the great sailor might have suffered a fatal bout of what is sometimes referred to as testosterone poisoning. "The view that Blake lived and died a hero has been challenged by those who believe Blake and his crew bear a large share of responsibility for escalating the robbery into a murder," writes Peter Nichols in this month's Outside magazine.

In simple terms, Blake responded to the threat of violence with violence -- which, as any student of the Middle East can tell you, exponentially increases the likelihood that someone gets killed. In Blake's case, it happened to be the good guy who lost the fight. But others could argue that, given the laws of the sea and the desperate nature of the crime -- in most international courts, piracy is punishable by death -- Blake did the right thing: sacrificing his life, but ensuring the safety of his crew and his ship. From afar, the only clear lesson to be drawn from the Blake incident is a reminder not to think of life in overly cinematic terms, although even that's tough to keep in mind in this day and age.

For a better perspective on what it means to live in a man's, man's, man's world, turn to Jan Reid's new memoir "The Bullet Meant for Me." A journalist and longtime contributor to the Texas Monthly, Reid had the terrible misfortune of being shot during a trip to Mexico in 1998. Unlike Blake, Reid lived to tell the tale. His insights into the culture of masculinity, in turn, shed some light on what Blake may have been trying to accomplish when he was murdered.

Make no mistake about Reid: His story undoubtedly concerns the ravages of masculine myths and violence, and the twinned themes of recovery and healing, but the author has no interest in wading through a bunch of Iron John-New Age hokum. Reid, who had plenty of time to think about what it means to be a man while recovering from his ordeal, approaches the topic knowingly, nodding to his literary forebears, including Hemingway, while puzzling through the events that led him to a fate nearly parallel to that of Peter Blake.

We Texans (even such Yankee transplants as myself), like our counterparts on the other side of the world, both Kiwis and their even more aggressively masculine Australian neighbors (paging Russell Crowe), have long had the reputation of being a macho breed. One need look no further than the "dead or alive" utterances of President George W. Bush following Sept. 11 to recognize the attitudes that have long caused the rest of America to wonder what kind of Neanderthals live in the Lone Star State. It's a pumped-up, self-propagating attitude that most Texans, even some women, often revel in; Annie Leibovitz's famed photograph of Gov. Ann Richards, a friend of Reid's, cradling her shotgun while standing in a field, tells you everything you need to know about persistence of the cowboy myth 'round these parts. Such political posturing notwithstanding, Reid manages to defend the culture of heroism without falling into the "horseshit," as he refers to it, of American -- specifically Texas -- machismo.

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