Sniff . . . Phew! : Lifestyle: What could smell (or look) worse than his old rotten sneakers, a Glendale youth wonders as he heads for the ultimate competition--a rotten sneaker contest.
Alex Momdjian boarded a DC-10 in Los Angeles early Wednesday and, after a quick turn at the Pacific Ocean, headed back over the Los Angeles metropolitan area and off toward Vermont.
You may have smelled him as he went over your house.
OK. That’s a bit harsh. What you may have smelled were Alex’s sneakers. And that’s why he was headed for Vermont.
Momdjian, 10, is one of 12 finalists competing in today’s 17th annual Rotten Sneakers Contest in Montpelier, an event that has brought contestants and their reeking, gag-inducing shoes from as far away as Alaska. Even Texas has an entry, and you have to figure that was one heck of a tough competition.
A shoe store in the Vermont capital started the event as an advertising gimmick: Bring in your old shoes, no matter what the condition, and we’ll give you $5 toward a new pair. Little did the owner realize that he was about to have a store full of sneakers with things growing on them. The gimmick continued, and in 1988 Corporate America (which tends to wear new, clean shoes) stepped in. The event is now sponsored by the makers of Odor-Eaters, the shoe inserts that are supposed to prevent sneaker stink.
Would they work for Momdjian?
“I don’t think so,” Alex said. “Nothing can help these sneakers.”
So what could a guy like Momdjian put in his sneakers to prevent odor?
Well, his sister Rose, 14, doesn’t know either.
“But if he doesn’t want them to stink, I know what he shouldn’t put in his sneakers,” she said. “His feet.”
Momdjian, a fifth-grader at Columbus Elementary School in Glendale, earned his plane tickets to the national contest by walking into the regional competition at the Glendale Galleria late last year and clearing out the room. (His mother, Anne, accompanied him to Vermont, and gosh, how proud can a mom be?)
His sneakers were born in some Far East port city as a pair of Nike Air Cross Trainers, leather athletic shoes with a price tag of about $65. But in just three months of sockless-sweating, fence-climbing, escalator-playing and bicycle foot-dragging, Momdjian had turned the handsome footwear into the shoe equivalent of Bayonne, N. J.
“I didn’t try to ruin them or make them stink,” Alex said. “It just happened.”
The end products of Momdjian’s inadvertent shoe abuse are two things hardly recognizable to the human eye as sneakers. Of course, it might help if a human could get an eye within 15 feet of them. For that to happen, however, a human nose would have to be in the same general vicinity, and the odor of the sneakers puts that adventure on the pleasure chart just a notch below slam-dancing with a porcupine.
A reporter tested his courage--and the limits of the body’s anti-gag mechanism--earlier this week when he foolishly picked up the offending sneakers to examine them. (OK, so it wasn’t exactly watching a SCUD missile screech over your head while lying in the sand of a Saudi Arabian border town, but it wasn’t exactly like covering the Rose Parade, either.)
An hour after the cursory exam, the reporter’s hands still retained this most unpleasant odor, a smell previously noted only once, after an afternoon alongside a Wisconsin lake scraping the scales from the decaying bodies of a dozen large Northern Pike.
“Don’t tell me about the smell,” said Alex’s mother, who emigrated with her family in 1985 from Lebanon. “I live here with them. He leaves them in his closet and all day the door is closed and it gets warm in there. Oh, I cannot tell you the smell then.”
Please, don’t even try.
She said that in recent weeks, in an effort to sort of freshen them up, Alex prepared for the national competition by wearing the shoes without socks. His mom was forced to wrap the beauties in two plastic bags to keep the neighbors--and likely the Southern California Air Quality Management District--from complaining. These babies were third-stage alerts.
Neighbors, however, did notice.
Hratch Kledjian, who lives in an apartment next to the Momdjians, said Alex recently asked him to carry the shoes, unbagged, outside. Unwittingly, Kledjian obeyed.
Kledjian described the stench by making an odd, hooting noise while simultaneously pinching his nostrils together with one hand, extending the other hand and closing the tips of the fingers together as if holding the shoes. It appeared to be the international symbol for Caution: Man Carrying Uranium Waste.
“I cannot believe how they smell,” Kledjian said. “You cannot believe how they smell. No man, I think, can believe how they smell.”
(If you want to locate the Momdjian’s apartment building in Glendale, here’s a helpful hint: Look for the place where skunks are kneeling in worship.)
Trying to outstink Momdjian’s sneakers will be 11 other youths, including 8-year-old Meghan Mackey of Chugiak, Alaska. She won that state’s prelim with a pair of sneakers that she claims to use daily while mucking out the duck, cow and sheep corrals at her family’s farm.
Another contender is the U.S. Armed Forces national finalist, Chris Williams, 10, who worked his sneakers into a fume frenzy on the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. (It’s unknown why his sneakers stink; that information is classified. As a military spokesman might say: “At this point we are not prepared to engage that question because of the vast array of potential detrimental ramifications.”)
But Alex Momdjian is proud and undaunted: “Oh, I can win this thing. They are so bad, these sneakers. What could smell worse?”
The young man has a point.
In addition to odor, appearance will count, too, according to the lucky judges. The jurists will actually lower their faces to within inches of all 12 pairs of the nasal nightmares to determine the winner. One judge, by the way, is named Patricia Pugh. Honest. Another is a cow. Which perhaps then might give a pint of sour cream?
First prize is $500 and six new pairs of sneakers. And a year’s supply of the sponsor’s product.
Luckily for Momdjian, his sneakers look as bad as they smell.
“The right one is really ripped bad,” Momdjian said. “I got it caught in an escalator at the Galleria and the whole side ripped out. And I ripped the other one on a fence. They look bad and they smell bad.
“That’s what they want, right?”
Right.
