Guns and Drugs and Other Literary Things

Guns and Drugs and Other Literary Things

By Urban Waite – author of Dead If I Don’t

I’m pretty sure I’m on the FBI watch list. I spend a lot of time researching guns. Looking for the perfect fit. Trying to picture how they’d feel in the hand, the weight, the way the gun bucks and recoils, the smell as the chamber claps open to eject a casing. In the first few days of writing DEAD IF IDON’T I looked over a Ruger handgun, I moved onto a hunting rifle with a telescopic sight, picturing the scene, trying to recreate it and feel the way the character holds the stock to his shoulder, the cold hardness of the rifle pressed close into his cheek. I think about another character holding a pump shotgun in his hand, loose at his side, the matte finish barely visible in the early morning light through a locust thicket in southeast New Mexico.

But the truth is I’ve never done those things. I’ve never looked down at another human being and seen into their future, or more aptly, seen there is no future for them. I try to imagine it. The closest I’ve ever come was when I spent a week walking the shores of Kodiak Alaska, a shotgun on a strap over my shoulder and the big slugger shells loaded up in the belly of the gun. Lead slugs big and dangerous enough to stop a 680 kg Kodiak Bear from charging. Lucky for me I spent most of my time simply walking the shores and watching the cool dark shadows beneath the trees. Waiting and wondering and hoping I would never need to take that shotgun off my shoulder.

I travel a lot as an author and I think this too keeps me on the watch list. I spent two weeks this past January huddled in a tent close to the New Mexico/ Mexico border because I thought it would help me nail down the facts for my novel. I traveled out there from San Diego with a couple friends and to many I’m sure we looked a little strange. The only tent set up in all that wide, open flatness. Simply being there, looking south, waiting with a warm cup of cider steaming in our hands and our hats pinched down close over our brows, watching the thin clouds stream across the sky. It’s a truly beautiful place to write about. But I’m sure people saw us—crouched over a small wood fire, combing charcoal with a stick, our hair wild and unwashed, wearing the same worn pair of jeans all the while—and thought us suspicious. 

I don’t know what it is about the books I write, but they seem to get people thinking I’m actually one of these guys out there smuggling drugs across the border. I’ve spent a good amount of time recently going up to Vancouver, sometimes simply just to go, and the last time to meet up with a director putting together a film based on my first novel, The Terror of Living. It’s a nice little trip for me. Two and a half hours away from my home in Seattle. Easy enough to drive, but better to fly. And of course they keep tabs on me whenever I cross the border. Quizzing me to see if I can remember the last time I left the country and seeing if I can duplicate my story. Often the story changes, I sort of like giving those border agents the run around. Sometimes it’s business, other times pleasure. I wonder what they think of me. All that travel. The drug dogs sniffing at the bag I’m carrying, or running their noses by my shoes. Once even sitting next to me and then moving on again. Of course that’s what they’re trained to do when they smell drugs on you. Sit and wait. Silently saying what everyone is thinking.

Urban Waite’s brand new novel, Dead if I Don’t, set in the gangland territories of the Mexico border, is out now.