Calendar Has Both The Sizzle And The Beef

He’s half-naked, glistening and posed suggestively with an ax on the cover of a calendar that will definitely heat up your wall space.

But Mike “Sparky” Sparkes and the battalion stallions pictured inside aren’t typical beefcake pretty boys.

The hunk-a-hunks of burnin’ love gracing the 1998 Inland Northwest Firefighters calendar are all Spokane smoke eaters.

The calendar that sizzles is sold at Tidyman’s grocery stores and the Sparky’s submarine sandwich shops the firefighter owns. All profits go to the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

Holy smoke. Better wear oven mitts when turning some of these scorchin’ pages.

April, for example, may be the cruelest month, but not with a different shirtless Mike to guide us through the days of drizzle. The 6-foot-1 firefighter grins mischievously while straddling a red and white fireplug. Ouch!

And who can miss brawny Brian, the 6-foot-3, 210-pounder who fleshes out June? Brian the Bruiser demonstrates that the best way to welcome summer is with a naked chest covered only by red suspenders.

Sparky was such a naughty hot firecracker that he was given July to represent as well as the cover.

“It was the baddest decision I ever made,” mutters the 27-year-old about being the calendar’s cover guy.

Apparently some of the gang down at Station 2, where Sparky earns a paycheck, have been relentlessly flaming their budding supermodel. “They keep taping pictures of buff hunks to my locker,” he complains. “I’m a laughingstock of the firefighters.”

Sparky has only himself to blame.

The calendar was his idea. He borrowed it from Seattle, he says, where firefighters publish a similar month-by-month studfest.

Sparky recruited models from fire department ranks, bought the film and took all the photos.

But while he did most of the work, selection and placement of the photographs was up to the MDA’s Jana Worthington and women at the Spokane Firefighters Credit Union.

They also determined the dress code. All firefighters were photographed both clothed and sans shirt, but only five were deemed hunky enough to flex their oiled, uncovered pecs.

You’d think people who fight fires for a living would know enough not to slather petroleum byproducts all over their skin.

Oil’s a combustible, guys. You phony Fabios go running into the next house fire greased up like french fries and your buddies will be hosing you down.

Sparky says he invited some of the department’s 15 women to pose but found no takers. “I guess they want their careers to go farther than ours,” he muses.

Does the city’s fire boss mind that some of his men are getting a little unexpected exposure?

“If somebody gives me one, I’ll look at it,” says Spokane Fire Chief Bobby Williams. “But I don’t guess I’ll go out and buy one.”

The fire chief says he won’t get too alarmed as long as the city wasn’t involved, the firefighters posed in their off hours, and the calendar doesn’t offend anybody.

I hope this thing sells like hot tamales.

This could be the beginning of a tidal wave of calendars featuring some of our finest public figures.

I’d certainly buy a Buff Bureaucrats of City Hall calendar. Especially if it includes a Spandex-clad City Manager Bill Pupo, his bald dome sheeny with Vaseline.

Or how about a Hunks of Spokane County calendar? Imagine County Commissioner Phil Harris in nothing but a thong. There’s an image that will put a lot of people in therapy.

A Studs of the Newsroom calendar would celebrate the city’s manliest journalists. We all know who’d be on the cover of that one.

Sparky says it’s too early to tell if sales of his first calendar are sputtering or raging like a wildfire. Even if it bombs, at least Sparky can now say that he knows what supermodel Elle Macpherson feels like.

“No I don’t,” snaps the cover guy, quickly adding, “but I’d like to.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo