Changes for the Manscape

“I hate this job,” Mike grumbled as he wandered through the park at oh-dark-thirty Monday morning. Yesterday was Cinco De Mayo, so he had been finding more sleepers than usual this morning. It had been a great job when he was in high school, going around the parks rousing drunks before the mundanes woke up, making sure no one was caught out in the open in a compromising state. The Council paid him very decently for three hours of “work” seven days a week which left him with enough to live decently on and plenty of free time to pursue his education. The job had not been quite as fun when he was in college and been more than a little hung-over himself as he chased drunks out of trees. Ever since the box incident, though, the job had been downright sucky.


He was going to kill whoever had started calling him “Manscape Mike.” Last night, he’d had to chase off a bachelorette party that had decided to wrap up the evening’s festivities in the park fountain. They had refused to “leave the landscape until they’d seen the manscape.” No freaking way was he going to drop trou for a bunch of drunk, horny shes just to get them to go home and sleep it off! Or so he’d thought. They had adamantly refused to leave—had even started causing a ruckus!—until he’d shucked his cloths for them. It had reminded him of those human-style “cruelty parties” where one male stripper got to be the party favor for every lady present. He could understand how a guy might be intimidated by such a thing. Being a cat, he’d simply accepted it for what it was and enjoyed it.

It had also netting him a gig for one of the attendee’s bachelorette party, this time as a paid stripper rather than the park monitor whom they’d randomly chosen to molest. Ok, wrong word for it. He had definitely been an active participant in last night’s sex play. But the point remained. Next week he’d get paid for it rather than going pro bono.

But he really did need to find another gig, he though as he kicked a half-naked frat kid out of a tree to whine of “but I’m in my human skin!” Yeah, he was in his human skin and even had his jeans on but he had chosen to sleep it off in a tree in the park directly over the Nylabone park benches. That just wasn’t acceptable. He’d been doing this job for close to ten years now. If he didn’t find something more productive to do with his life, he’d still be chasing frat kids out of trees and dropping trau for bachelorette parties until he was eighty.

Maybe he should open a steakhouse, like that one down in Texas that had an all-you-can-eat deal. That would probably go over really well around here. Of course, he’d have to come up with something more complicated than “eat the whole 96-ounce steak and it’s on the house.” Maybe he could do it by class. A hundred-pound person had to down a 96-ouncer and a 200 pound person had to down a 160 ouncer. And by meat type. It was a lot harder to choke down a 96-ounce antelope steak than 96 ounces of prime beef. He could even offer veggi steaks and burgers for the herbbie crowd. The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea.