“Tell your story walking”

“Tell your story walking” is a rule of speech and conduct in the narrator’s recollection: do not stop the action for a long explanation. First heard as a beat cop’s brusque command on Court Street, it becomes a way to understand Frank Minna’s taste for compressed, mobile talk. Later, during the drive toward Musconguspoint Station, the narrator changes the wording to fit the moment; at the close, the original phrase returns as a parting dismissal and a statement about choosing one’s battles.

Origin and Meaning

The phrase comes from a story the narrator describes as true, though it has been repeated so often that it has been “tugboated relentlessly.” A beat cop on Court Street regularly broke up groups of teenagers gathered at night on stoops or outside bars. When they offered excuses, he cut them off: “Yeah, yeah. Tell your story walking.” The instruction is literal in its scene—keep moving rather than hold the street with explanations—but the narrator treats it as more than a police officer’s practical impatience. It names a preference for talk that keeps pace with action.

The narrator connects the cop’s phrase to Frank Minna, whose manner made it a kind of working principle. Frank Minna loved talk but despised explanations; he valued compression and the way ordinary things could become more vivid or funny when conflated. An endearment, in his style, gained force by being folded into an insult; an insult improved when it also contained self-deprecation, street philosophy, or the resumption of an old debate. The maxim gathers those habits into one brisk instruction: speak on the move, and make each beat of talk do more than one job.

A Shared Conversational Ethic

The phrase also describes how the narrator understands the group’s way of speaking. The narrator says that they learned to tell their story walking: not by separating explanation from action, but by letting talk happen “on the fly,” out on the pavement and between beats of activity. In that account, the rule is not silence or a ban on storytelling. It favors speech that stays alive to its circumstances and resists the flattening effect of a formal explanation.

Its compactness is itself part of the point. The cop’s command is an order, a dismissal of excuses, and a memorable piece of street philosophy at once. Frank Minna’s conversational style likewise depended on ordinary language made expressive through juxtaposition and timing. The phrase therefore works both as remembered speech and as a small model of the verbal economy the narrator associates with him.

From Walking to Driving

During the journey toward Maine, the narrator adapts the rule to a different kind of movement. After tossing a cell phone onto the seat amid the remains of food from Zeod’s Market, the narrator recognizes that neatness and getting things exactly right no longer matter. The phone calls had sustained a disastrous flow of dialing tics; once that flow breaks, the narrator’s mood hardens and attention narrows. Crossing the bridge at Portsmouth into Maine, the narrator turns toward the drive and the answers waiting at Musconguspoint Station.

At this point, Frank Minna’s remembered voice supplies a practical command: “Floor it, Freakshow. You got something to do, do it already.” The altered refrain, “Tell your story driving,” carries the earlier maxim into the pursuit. Walking had meant speaking while moving through the city; now driving gives the narrator a way to cast aside unnecessary behaviors and focus on reaching the destination. The change in wording preserves the rule’s core while making forward motion part of the narrator’s immediate objective.

Closing Reprise

The original phrase returns at the end, where the narrator considers the dead and the limits of personal guilt. After naming Ullman as the remaining ghost in this reckoning, the narrator invokes Frank Minna’s view that people choose their battles whether or not they subscribe to it. The narrator says there can be no guilt for every body, emphasizes never having met Ullman, and ends by addressing both Ullman and Bailey with dismissive expressions before repeating “Tell your story walking.”

That final use changes the phrase’s weight without changing its briskness. Earlier it interrupted other people’s excuses and described the lively, compressed talk learned around Frank Minna; on the road it became an instruction to act. At the close it helps the narrator draw a boundary around grief and responsibility. The repeated wording links street talk, pursuit, and the difficult choice not to carry every death as a personal obligation.