The domino game on the folding table sounded like a typewriter operated by four men who disagreed about the sentence. The slap of the domino on the metal table was a punctuation mark. Every slap was a period at the end of an argument. The man slapped the domino down and the sound said I am right and you are wrong and the table agreed because the table had no choice.

The folding table sat on the sidewalk at the corner of Clinton and Rivington from May through October. Four men sat around the table in folding chairs that were older than the men. The chairs had been sitting on that corner since the men were boys and the men had been sitting in the chairs since the chairs were new. Nobody remembered which came first. The chairs or the men. The corner or the game.

The dominoes were not a game. The dominoes were a parliament. Four men governing a folding table with small rectangular bones made of plastic that used to be made of ivory that used to be made of actual bone. The game had been played with bones for a thousand years and the fact that the bones were now plastic did not change the sound. The slap was the same slap. The argument was the same argument.

The men spoke Spanish and the dominoes spoke Spanish and the table spoke Spanish. I did not speak Spanish. I played guitar on the corner twenty feet from the domino game and I did not understand a word anybody said but I understood every domino that was played. The domino was a universal language. The slap meant I win. The silence before the slap meant I am thinking. The shuffle meant we start again. The laughter meant somebody lost badly and the loss was funny because the loss was not about money. The loss was about pride and pride is funnier than money when it falls.

The game ended when the streetlights came on. Not because the men could not see the dominoes. Because the wives could see the men. The streetlights meant dinner was ready and dinner outranked dominoes in every culture on the Lower East Side. The men folded the table and folded the chairs and put the dominoes in a cigar box and carried the whole parliament home under their arms. Tomorrow the parliament would reconvene. The corner would hold the space.

I never played dominoes. I was not invited. You did not ask to play dominoes on that corner any more than you asked to sit in on a session at the Blue Note. You were invited or you watched. I watched for fifty years. The slap of the domino on the folding table was the backbeat of every song I ever played on that corner and the men at the table never knew they were part of my band.