I remember the first time I turned 17. I was headed eastbound on Lake Shore Drive, out of the city, in a brown station wagon. "Shit," I said to my sister Elmyra, "I really think I’m getting old."

"Think?" she asked me. "Maybe you should try driving the car." And, thank God, a cop pulled me over just before I slid into the embankment.

"Do you have any idea how fast you were going?" he asked me.

"I don’t know," I answered. "Eight, maybe nine miles an hour."

He pulled his mirrored sunglasses down his nose and sneered at me. "Listen, hotshot," he said. "If it wasn’t Christmas Eve, I’d give you a ticket."

Oh, yeah. I was born on Christmas Eve. I was one day older than Jesus.

The cop hopped back on his motorcycle and sped off into the night.

"Whew," I said. "That was a close one."

Elmyra was as pale as a ghost. "You could have killed us," she said.

"Technically, that isn’t true," I said. She knew I couldn’t die, at least not in the conventional sense.

"I guess you’re right," she said. "Good thing it was your birthday."

A good thing.

At first, my parents were uncomfortable with my being immortal.

"Immortal?" my dad asked. "I’ll beat the immortal right out of you." But of course, he couldn’t, even when he used the real 33 ounce aluminum bat, not the fungo. I just lay back and laughed at him. Eventually, when he stopped coming in to work, the mill fired him.

Served him right.

After that, my mom supported us by selling flapjacks on the corner to the junior high students on the way to class. Two for twenty-five cents, or four for forty. It was a real steal. She sold close to seventy thousand pancakes a day. Pretty soon, we were able to move into a bigger house, which Elmyra promptly burned down for the insurance.

My dad asked her not to do that any more.

Our next house was a mobile home. It was a lowrider mobile home, with tinted windows and whitewall tires and a satellite uplink to the CIA. They demanded that we install one so that they could keep an eye on me, and also for the free cable. For most of the eighties, my family was the purveyor of almost half of all premium cable services. By the next time I turned seventeen, our market share had dropped to around 35% (Skinemax cut into our lead because my mom wouldn’t let us show dirty shows until I turned eighteeen, which meant never) but hey, it was free. So they took it. It was a pretty sweet deal.

I miss being that seventeen.