STORY SHOWCASE #21

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UP TO THE ROOF

by Tony Mastrogiorgio

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A little taster…

I went up to the roof to be alone. I came back down wanted in three states. That’s how fast fate kicks you in the balls. No wind up, no three steps back. Just bam and you’re on your knees.

Who’s to say why it came out the way it did? Judges and juries think they make the call, but they weren’t there. No one was there, not for all of it; no one but me and Nina. And we don’t even know. Not 100%. We don’t see who spins the wheel or rolls the dice. We don’t know if the wheel is weighted or the dice are shaved. None of us know, not on the suckers’ side of the table. We just watch the dealer rake in the chips with a grin that says the fix was always in.

How do you beat the fix? You don’t play the game. That’s it, the only way. Sit on your brains and do nothing. Too late for me now; my game’s done. I’m facing the Big Bedtime, the Final Tuck-in. I have a reservation at the warden’s Bed-No-Breakfast down the end of the gray highway. Was there any chance it comes out different, some little thing turns this way instead of that and me and Nina get to live our lives like regular Dicks and Janes?

About the author

After a few decades writing marketing copy, Tony Mastrogiorgio sought to atone for his crimes against the culture by returning to his passion: serious writing. Unfortunately, his Irish mother’s darkly comic sense of humor had burrowed too deeply into his soul. As ennobling and heartrending as he wanted his work to be, he found that where others cry, he laughs, and where others laugh, he cries. He has given in to his nature and is now at work on several projects ranging from lively trash to what he describes (with considerable embarrassment) as literary comic fiction.

We asked Tony …

K&R: What was the spark or idea that led you to write this story?

TM: The teenage protagonist of my nearly finished comic novel goes up to the roof of his apartment building and sees his neighbor and one time classmate sunbathing. He is a shy, awkward kid who has had a gentle crush on her for a long time. The sight of her in her bikini blows his head up. (Or was it her underwear? The question tortures him into wanting a second look he’s afraid to take.) Depressed by his lack of boldness, he goes back downstairs without speaking to her.

He thinks that if he had talked to her, he would have gone back downstairs a different person. This sparks four “Nina variations” where he imagines how he would have changed. They include the Seminary Student, East Village Poet, Italian-American, and one I submitted to Trash Tales, the Noir Loser. It’s a mashup of two of my favorite films, Gun Crazy (which provides the overall framework) and Detour, a masterpiece of self-pitying voiceover, which provides the narrative voice. 

K&R: Do you have any other work do you have out there, for folks to dig into?

TM: I’ve done commercial and marketing writing for a long, long, too long time. I’ve written for a few now defunct community newspapers in San Francisco (news, reviews, a column), most of which has now vanished from the earth. (Don’t let my love of unreliable narrators fool you – most of it was brilliant!) I’ve also written a number of book reviews here and there. Over the past few years, I’ve returned to fiction, my enduring passion. I’m close to finished with a comic novel that I think is going well, will give a brush up to another comic novel I finished three years ago, and a couple handfuls of short stories. My plan for 2026 is publishing more work or going on a blaze of glory crime spree. 

K&R: What’s next for you as a writer?

TM: In addition to what I described in the previous answer, I’m working on a thematically related collection of short stories with concluding with a novella retelling … Ah, no spoilers yet. I’ll keep it secret for now.

K&R: What does “trashy fiction” mean to you, and what do you love about it?

TM: I’m not sure what “trashy fiction” really is. The world is full of films and fiction that were once looked down on as trash but are now acknowledged masterpieces. Look at Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. Denounced or dismissed in their time, they are now considered among the greatest films ever made. I’m a fan of high art and low trash – it’s all the stuff in the middle that panders to conventionality that I can’t stand. High art and low trash have a great deal in common. Both are dedicated to their chosen form and deliver on sets expectations. A crime story has to have a crime. A horror story has to have a horror. An avant-garde novel has to play with language and perceptions. Conventional fiction wants to meet the conventional expectations readers and viewers had when they began. It’s boring. 

K&R: Hit us with your own favourite “trashy” fiction recommendations!

TM: I’d argue that none of the following are “trashy” although they may be according to some standards or they were considered at least “low brow” when they were published. That said:

Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest invented a modernist American vernacular just as much as Hemmingway did, and was far more entertaining while doing it. 

Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 is one of the greatest satires of small-town politics I’ve ever seen. 

Derek Raymond’s Factory Series is full of austere beauty even as the bodies pile up (and are occasionally chopped up).  

Steven Graham Jones’s horror novel The Only Good Indians ends with an incredible vision of beauty. 

Alison Rumfitt’s trans haunted house novel, Tell Me I’m Worthless, is astonishing, angry, and had a deeply emotional impact on me.  What I love about all of these is that they reflect a deeply held, deeply understood vision of the world that they are unafraid to depict, unlike so many so-called serious works that our shifting, evolving world leaves behind almost as soon as they are written. 

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