But that was a cosmetic problem, really. I am the proud owner of any number of tattered and beaten biographies that are still decipherable. Time creeps. Time alters. Gravity insists. As my mother used to say to me, “After fifty, Bruno, it’s just patch, patch, patch.” No, it wasn’t my going-on-sixty carcass with receding hairline and basset-hound cheeks that made that chapter so bad. It was that I had lost me. I was no longer the hero of my own life. Instead, I was lurking in the proverbial shadows as some goddamned minor character with only a couple of lines of dialogue here and there. Imagine getting up in the morning and scouring the apartment for yourself, turning out drawers and rifling through closets and checking under the bed for yourself. Where had I mislaid him, that bright, curly-headed youth with prospects shining just over yonder hill? Whatever happened to Bruno Kleinfeld? You may well ask. My person seemed to have sidelined itself in ways that meant I was no longer I.
