The domino table was a folding card table on the sidewalk in front of the bodega with four men sitting around it slamming bones on the wood so hard the coffee cups jumped. That was the sound of the neighborhood thinking. The crack of the domino on the table. The argument that followed. The silence while the next man decided. The domino table was a chess game played at the volume of a bar fight.

The old men played dominoes on East Houston Street every day from April to October. They brought their own chairs. They brought their own dominoes. They brought their own rules and the rules changed depending on who was winning and the arguments about the rules were louder than the game. Nobody wrote the rules down. The rules lived in the memories of men who had been playing since before you were born and if you challenged the rules you were challenging the man and nobody wanted that.

You learned everything about a person at the domino table. The man who slammed his tiles was angry about something that had nothing to do with dominoes. The man who took too long was afraid to lose. The man who talked the whole time was lonely. The man who said nothing was dangerous. The domino table was a personality test conducted with twenty-eight tiles and a folding table that wobbled on the sidewalk. The table always wobbled. Nobody ever fixed it.

I sat at a domino table on Avenue D in the summer of 1969 and a man twice my age told me I played dominoes like a tourist. He was right. I was counting my own tiles when I should have been counting his. That is the lesson of dominoes. The game is not about what you have. The game is about what the other man does not have. The domino table taught me more about reading people than any book. Twenty-eight tiles. Four men. Every move a confession.

The domino tables are still out there. That is the miracle. They survived everything. The gentrification. The noise complaints. The sidewalk regulations. You can still find four men on a sidewalk in Washington Heights slamming bones on a card table at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday and arguing about a play that happened in 1987. The domino table is the last surviving parliament of the street. No agenda. No moderator. No term limits. Just four chairs and twenty-eight tiles and the sound of men who refuse to be moved indoors.

See also: Stickball, Corner Store