I was sitting at a desk that was covered in black cloth with my own book on display in front of me. Balloons with colors to signify which genre were tied to the chair of each of the forty some odd authors who’d come to present their books. Mine was lime green for fiction. Out of everyone, I seemed to have been the youngest. It was surreal. I was gonna sit all day and wait to leave.

One of the fiction writers, before the festival began, approached my table and sniffed my book out without picking it up. “Hmm,” he said. “I like the concept.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He walked back to his table across the way.

The festival started at 10 am, and the public entered the conference room where our tables were set. One by one, they would step up and get a feel for my book, then look at me. I got uncomfortable. Please go away.

All the while, they were giving readings at the other end of the room behind a black curtain. Each one was narrating chapters from his or her book through a microphone. From what I could sense, hardly anyone was sitting in there.

When the author sharing my table came back from taking a piss, I asked him, “Are there any people sitting at the reading?”

“Yeah,” he said. “There’s people.”

He didn’t look too assuring.

Wamp wamp wamp was all I heard through the microphone. I remained seated at my table and looked back at authors who were sitting at their tables looking back at me, looking away. Those glum faces. No one buying.

And I was supposed to pitch the importance of my book. I’d read through it so often that it was like a story I’d regurgitated too many times to too many people. Like when a friend or relative would say, “Hey Benjamin, tell him what happened at the grocery store yesterday.” Since yesterday, I’ve dished it out a dozen times. A baker’s dozen would’ve carried less flavor than the first telling. So I try to rush through it and feed them only the crucial ingredients, leaving out the quirky ingredients, which may have tickled the listener’s taste buds. It tasted that way after countless revisions. Whenever someone asks me how I can make out when a story is finished, I tell him when I hate it.

The woman who sat at the table to my right told each person who walked by about her historical novel like a pro. I didn’t do that. Most people would pick my book up from its stand, get a whiff of the cover and the back before setting it down and moving to the next table. So this is how a festival works. We sit there with our piles of books and watch the people sample our covers before they walk on.

The woman to my right came up and asked to look at mine. I gave it to her. She went back to her table and opened it to a random page.

Oh, man. How unsettling when someone near me was reading my book, as if she were reading my lab results. I thought, My god, I’ve made a mistake by writing this.

I’ve had other uncomfortable moments, like ten years ago, when a homeless man at a coffee shop kept begging to read a memoir I’d been working on. He twisted my arm enough to where I let him read it.

The next day, when I saw him, I asked him what he thought, and he told me that he hated every page, that he couldn’t make it past page forty. I never spoke to him again.

The woman returned with my book and said she wanted to buy it. Uh, what? My first sale in person. I couldn’t believe it. It sounded as if I were selling her an empty shoe box. She paid me cash, and I gave her change. And then she wanted my autograph. Oh, please. I signed it with my not-so-handsome handwriting. And after I gave it to her, I realized I’d forgotten to write the date. You’re supposed to write the date.

Then up came another writer, a memoirist who said he was interested in reading it. He wanted to pay with his card, so I used my point-of-sale to make the transaction. He walked away with the book. My second sale. No other sales after that. I ended up buying his book, too, at the same price as mine. I broke even.

The turnout wasn’t the greatest. Each of the forty authors of different genres was called into the reading room at specific times in the day. They called mine at 1:30 pm. I didn’t want to go because there weren’t enough people behind the curtain. The organizer approached me and asked me to go over there.

The person in control of the readings spoke to me like an umpire for a boxing match:

“No muttering, no reading for longer than five minutes, no words you wouldn’t use on prime-time network TV. When your time is up, ask if there are any questions. Got it?”

Yeah, I got it.

I entered the curtained room. Five people slouching in their chairs were listening to a novelist mutter his story into a thin microphone at a black podium. It was more of a group counseling session than a reading. I couldn’t follow his story because of how much I was itching. Oh, how I didn’t want to be there.

When he was done, someone else left, so the audience was down to four.

Next went an elderly woman. She was too short for the microphone. Her hands were trembling as she was reading from her book.

As she was reading, I was standing in the back where I could see around the curtain. A lady with her schnauzer pointed at me from there and told me to come over to her, so I did.

“When’re you going up?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s like two people ahead of me.”

“I’m interested in reading your book. Will you please let me know when you’re up?”

She walked away with her schnauzer.

I wondered how she was expecting me to flag her down. Was I supposed to announce it through the microphone? “Attention, you, middle-aged woman with the schnauzer, I’m reading now.”

I waited through the next one giving his reading. He was the one who’d liked my concept without turning a page, a New Yorker telling his tale about New York. His story might’ve been appetizing if I wasn’t feeling too awkward to digest it.

The boxing umpire approached him when he was halfway through his story and gestured with the old blade-across-the-throat to wrap it up. He stopped mid-sentence and gathered his pages before leaving the podium with his walking cane.

So I was up. Oh boy. With four people in the room. I went up there and said to myself, Okay, get this shit over with.

My elbows pressed into the podium as I leaned into the microphone, and I opened a copy of my book to the correct page. I had no words to introduce myself with other than, “Hi, my name is Benjamin Talbot. This here is a collection of short stories called Periscope City. It takes place in a town full of loners.”

The quartet stared at me before I began the first sentence.

“Ice cream is my abusive husband.”

I worried that the organizer would’ve pulled me because of my uttering the word “abusive.” Maybe it was too taboo for prime-time, but she let me stay up there. “He smacks me around like I’m a dirty girl.” I also breathed from the same paragraph the word “sadomasochism.” The piece, although meant as humorous, smelled of serious since no one chuckled. So which is worse? Bombing in front of four hundred people or four people? Something tells me the latter. The odds of laughter would be lesser. Plus, my parents were in the “crowd”, which made it all the more stale. They didn’t matter. They were the only ones laughing as if it were canned laughter. But I wasn’t gonna die up there.

I survived to about the third page, close to the middle of the story, when I had to wrap it up and close the book in the middle of a sentence. It was time for Q&A.

“Questions?”

Nothing.

Then one of the listeners asked me something, but I forgot. It may have had to do with where I’d come up with the characters, as if I’d discovered them at a factory. My memory has repressed whatever my answer was.

So I thanked everyone and rushed from the podium. The organizer pulled me aside with a question of her own.

“Is every story in the first person?” she asked.

“Yes, they are.”

“It must be pretty hard to write that way.”

“It is, yes.”

I hurried out of the room and returned to my table. Whew. That was brutal. I could breathe when it was over.

The lady with the schnauzer had never shown up to my reading, but she came to my table and looked over my book. And every time someone would do that, I avoided eye contact with him or her. My collection of short stories was a product that I was selling at a convention, but it was different from a vacuum cleaner in that it was made from the depths of my soul; not with screws, hoses, and plastic. With a vacuum cleaner, I would’ve described how it sucked up the particles from a floor without feeling such critical judgment. It’s put to practical use, whereas my product is for entertainment? If they had questions of what it was about, I could’ve given them a brief answer, a sentence or two. But I wasn’t like the woman to my right who kept telling each person, “It’s won two awards. It’s about dyslexia and domestic abuse.”

I was supposed to sit there until four, but by three o’clock, there had been only two sales, and they were both from other authors. I felt the obligation to buy theirs out of respect.

The lady with the schnauzer said she was quite interested, but she said she bought her books only online. I wrote my name, my blog URL, and my email on the back of a random business card and gave it to her. I don’t believe she’ll buy it, but that’s fine.

I left with the bitter aftertaste of what the purpose was. I didn’t connect with anyone. The woman to my right had mentioned that the LA Book Festival was going on that same day. How much better would that festival had been for my book? That’s if they would’ve allowed me to come there as a vendor. They may have been all filled up. And how expensive would it have been for an author to be there? Maybe next year.

I lugged my cardboard box full of books to my car. It started raining. The festival had been held inside a library, as opposed to last year, of all places, at a senior center, or so I learned. To call it a festival was misleading. A festival has the air of thousands of people, which maybe they’d expected, while this attracted a few hundred through the course of seven hours.

Anyway, it was an experience nevertheless, something to write about.