The Indoorsman -- He'll always be Spotty

I missed a phone call from my friend Spotty the other day, which is only partly a bad thing.

I say this not because I dislike talking with him; it's one of life's great joys, and I recommend it for anyone. I say it because I knew he would leave a typically Spotty-ish voicemail that I could save and replay over and over again. He didn't disappoint. It started like this, "Hey man. (pause) You're probably busy. (pause) Covering the beat. (pause) Doing your investigating of local stories." Then it continued with some profanity, the use of the word "colloquial" and a short rant about dealing with editors. (He's a bookstore manager down in Miami, but he dabbles in writing.)

Anyway, it was classic Spotty, which is to say it was somehow full of good humor and righteous anger at the same time. Those are kind of his defining characteristics. That and fearlessness. And every group of friends needs someone like that -- someone to be the first off the cliff, someone to run naked across the Spartan Stadium football field, someone to woo the Australian soap opera actress despite being out of her league.

That's Spotty.

He and I met when we were paired up in a freshmen dorm room at Michigan State University. It was a two-person room, but things were overbooked and they put three of us in there, Andy, Spotty and me. We were all friends by the end of the first day and remain so now. It was during those early days that I gave him his nickname; before that he was Mike. (The origin of "Spotty" is so newspaper-inappropriate and so much of a stupid in-joke that I won't explain it here. Let's just say Andy and I misheard something Mike said and found it funny enough, even after he corrected us, that we took to calling him Spotty. I encouraged everyone on our floor to call him Spotty, and within weeks people had forgotten his real name.)

There were a couple of times during our college years when he politely asked us to stop calling him Spotty. We rather impolitely declined, redoubling our efforts to make sure nobody who met him ever even learned his real name. After stewing for a while, he inevitably accepted that fate.

Of course, that was a decade ago. Time passes. Spotty got married a few years back, settled down, got domesticated, grew up. His wife calls him Mike. Everyone in Miami calls him Mike. It's weird to hear it, but I suppose I'm happy for him. He finally got his way. He's Spotty to a smaller and smaller percentage of his friends each passing year.

But he's still Spotty to me. And I think, now that it's a nostalgic novelty, he actually kind of likes the name. That may be why he called in the first place. When he and I spend an hour or two on the phone, toasting each other cross-country with whiskey and beer, he isn't Mike at all. He's Spotty again. Fearless again.

Young again.

* Pat Muir is the lead writer for On magazine and a staff writer for the Yakima Herald-Republic.