The Big Easy

James Conaway / Photo by Peter Menzel

I met the author James Conaway in 1964. At the time I was taking a night class in creative writing at San Francisco State College and working days as a shipping and receiving clerk at the Bonanza Inn Bookstore on Market Street. Conaway was a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, who worked as a sales clerk at the same store. During a lunch break one afternoon, we learned that, not only were we both aspiring writers, but his wife Penny and my girlfriend shared the same name. Beyond that, we were worlds apart.

While I was producing awkward short stories whenever the spirit moved me, Conaway, at 23, was already an accomplished writer with a B. A. from Southwestern at Memphis. I learned just how serious he was about writing when I stopped by his apartment one morning to give him a ride to work. I found him sitting in the middle of his dining room in a straight back chair typing on a manual typewriter with all the intensity and focus of a concert pianist at his piano. I waited for him to finish writing, and then, on the way to work, he explained that he wrote every morning after his wife left for her job at Pacific Bell. It was the first time I had ever seen a writer at work. The image never left me.

In 1965, I left San Francisco and my girlfriend behind. When Conaway’s first novel, The Big Easy was published in 1970, I recalled our brief friendship and realized how divergent our paths had become. Unlike me, he had fulfilled his ambition to become a successful author, eventually publishing two more novels, as well as several nonfiction books, including a memoir of his Memphis childhood.

I doubt that Conaway remembers our brief acquaintance more than forty years ago. But, I have, on more than one occasion during my long career as a communications professional, recalled that ancient memory of him at his typewriter on a sunlit San Francisco morning and wondered what might have been had I been as dedicated and disciplined.