You walk past a folding table on the sidewalk and four old men are playing dominoes. They are not quiet about it. A domino is a small tile made of bone or plastic and when you slam it on a metal table it sounds like a gunshot. That is the point. You do not place a domino. You slam it. You slam it because the slam is the punctuation. The slam says I have been waiting for this moment since you played your last tile and now I am ending the conversation. Dominoes is not a game. Dominoes is an argument with a scoreboard.

You see dominoes on every block in East Harlem. You see them on Rivington Street. You see them in Washington Heights. The game does not belong to any one neighborhood. The game belongs to the sidewalk. All you need is a table and a set of tiles and four people who have strong opinions. The folding table is the stadium. The milk crate is the seat. The streetlight is the floodlight. And the audience is anybody who walks past and stops because the sound of a domino hitting a table at full speed is a sound you cannot ignore.

I played guitar next to a domino game on Avenue C one summer. Nineteen seventy-one. Four guys from Puerto Rico playing under a streetlight. They were louder than me. Their tiles hitting the table had more rhythm than my guitar. I stopped playing and watched. One of them looked at me and said you want to play. I said I do not know how. He said you know how to make noise. That is all you need to know. He taught me dominoes in twenty minutes. I taught him three chords. We traded skills on a sidewalk at midnight and nobody paid admission.

The city tried to stop the domino tables. Noise complaints. Loitering. Blocking the sidewalk. The city has a word for everything that brings people together for free. That word is violation. Four old men at a table is a violation. Four old men making noise past eleven pm is a violation. Four old men sitting on milk crates on public property is a violation. You know what is not a violation. A restaurant putting twenty tables on the same sidewalk and charging you thirty dollars for a salad. That is outdoor dining. Dominoes is a violation and brunch is a permit. The sidewalk knows the difference even if the city does not.

You hear the domino game before you see it. The slam. The laughter. The argument about who cheated. Somebody's radio playing salsa. A kid on a bicycle circling the table. The domino game is the block's living room moved outside because the apartment is too small and too hot and the sidewalk has more space and better ventilation. The domino game is democracy in action. Nobody owns the table. Nobody owns the corner. The tiles cost five dollars and the game lasts until somebody's wife calls them home for dinner. The most expensive thing about dominoes is the coffee. And somebody always brings the coffee. That is the rule. You bring the tiles or you bring the coffee. There is no third option.