Interview by Marcus Waldron

photos by Elias Parise

Let’s talk about Coda.

It’s been twenty years. It’s crazy. The running joke has been that we can’t even go out of business right. Twenty years ago I was just bored and wanted to make something. I was in between sponsors, and Autumn Dave helped me out a little bit with sharing ideas and we just made a graphic. We made some boards and he bought 50 of them. All my friends owned shops, which were all the best shops on the East Coast, and they all bought some. Then people wanted to ride for it for some unknown reason. It snowballed and we made a video and all of a sudden it was twenty years.

When did you move to New York?

I was getting Real flow and that was back in the day when it was like “oh you want to ride for a big company? You have to move to California.” So I moved to the Bay Area around ‘95 or ‘96. I always had family in Staten Island, and ever since I found skateboarding I understood how important New York was for skating, especially from where I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Maryland where I had to hike an hour through cow fields to get to a mini ramp. I moved to Staten Island and then I moved into Brooklyn sometime around ‘98.

And you’ve been here ever since?

Yeah. I tried to move to Portland, I mean, we can get into the drinking and the drugs… That stuff will chase you until you deal with it.

What happened when you moved to Portland?

I kept doing drugs and drinking.

Why did you move to Portland?

To get away from drugs and drinking. They call it “pulling a geographic”. I needed a change but it wasn’t the change that I needed. That’s kind of a broader, longer story. But I met a lot of great friends and had a great time. New York will change you, whether you love it and you live here for the rest of your life or not, it’s going to affect the way you see the rest of the world. I mean the utmost offense to everybody who loves and lives in Portland when I say this, that is the most racist place I’ve ever been. Because liberal ideology around progressive ideas creates giant blind spots which does not allow them to be self aware enough to judge themselves.

Favorite thing about New York?

I’ve always loved so much about it. Everything you want is here, whenever you want it. There’s freedom in chaos. You can hide in plain sight and do whatever you want. Become whoever you want. You can find your people in New York. You can go from the most fringe, outcast, sub-group in your little podunk town wherever you’re from to being who you want to be and finding your friends, and your influences and that’s more important than anything else. Plus you can get all the food, whenever you want. You can develop a great drug and alcohol habit and never have to drive drunk in your life. And on the back end of that, having gone through it, you can find a huge support group for getting off drinking and drugs.

You’ve been building ramps a long time, when did you start and do you remember your first one?

Growing up, if we wanted to skate we would build stuff. This was around the mid eighties, and every neighborhood had a skate crew and every crew would try to build things because no one had any skate parks. They would be building out our neighborhoods, and we’d go and steal the wood, then make ramps in front of the house they were building, and we would never get in trouble. If they were building a new house there would just be this shitty, wooden skatepark out in front. And I always liked to think that the carpenters would be looking outside like, “We should probably say something… But that’s pretty impressive! Maybe we should give them a job…” But that’s where I learned to build because we all needed to make our own stuff just to have something to skate.

What would your dream ramp be like?

I think like a three foot little koi pond that went to like five or six for a proverbial deep end. Good transitions, good flow, definitely not something that would be aggressive or gnarly. Something you’d have your friends over for a barbeque and skate. That would be the perfect ramp. Not something that people are coming over to try and shoot a photo on. Cool shape, trees, the grill, friends, no HOA.

Did you get banned from Thrasher?

It was a soft ban. I don’t know… Yes.

Why?

Somebody recently told me that Jake Phelps and I were very much alike, and I never saw it that way but we’re both just loud and opinionated and that can clash. It was Jake’s call, it was Jake’s mag at the time, and rest in peace Jake. He had a lot of strong and good ideas and kept skateboarding core, and nothing but respect for that. I just think that he didn’t like me and I didn’t give a shit. You gotta have respect for certain people and I’m a little bit of a punk and always will be and I’m not gonna respect you just because you’re an “authority” right? I’ll never actually know, but I can tell you it was probably more than a handful of little reasons that added up. Anybody that knows me would be like, “Yeah, I could see that.”

But they ran a lot of photos of me. My favorite one was AWH, which is one of Coda’s distributors, wanted to run a Coda ad so I gave them a photo. They ran the ad and everybody at the mag knew Jake’s take on it, so they actually snuck it in last minute and ran it to print, gave it to Jake to OK the mag, and Jake goes “No way is Pat Smith getting a photo in the mag” But they were like “Sorry, it’s already to print.”

When did you stop getting paid to skate?

Uh, I technically never got paid to skate. I got photo incentives but I never got a monthly check. But I mean I got perks. I got to travel, I got per diem and every contest I was perpetually 11th, so I’d get $100 bucks. Big purse money back then. I had a good little run, but it was also a different era. Am’s just weren’t getting paid.

How did Max Palmer get on Coda?
Max is from Ohio, and my friend Brendan Nemire is also from Ohio and when we lived together in Portland, Oregon we kinda had access to the Nike park. One time Max was in there and was skating this fucking board that had like no bushings in it, and two bolts holding his truck on. I dunno, Max is Max and you can see how talented and creative he is instantly. I was just like, gotta get him on Coda.

And what about Shinpei?

Shinpei came out with the Kukunochi guys, and Shinpei is a character, same thing, just super talented and I put him on for a little while. He said to me once that the way we did Coda is what gave him the inspiration to start Evisen and make his own thing with his homies. That guy is creative on and off his board and I’m just a super fan of Shinpei. He’s always done his own thing and had a unique take on the world.

Want to talk about your health?

Sure. I don’t know how to have this discussion without being too graphic. I was shitting blood every hour and I woke up one night and nothing worked in my guts. So I went to the doctor and got a colonoscopy and they were like, “You got a tumor. Doesn’t look good.” I went through a bunch more tests and scans and it ended up being cancerous and I’m on chemo now. I’m on a fundamentally new adventure that I’ve never been on and I’m managing it. Leaning hard on my friends and I’m learning a lot about myself. I’m making a bunch of bad, dark jokes that I very much enjoy.

I’m still just trying to do all the things that I love because that’s the whole point of trying to get through this shit. Cancer sucks, it does. But in this day and age a lot of people have cancer and a lot of people have gone through it, especially at my age. I have a really good support group and it sucks that they’ve had to go through similar things to have this knowledge and this skillset. It’s scary, but medicine is also way better than what it was. This isn’t like witchcraft now, it isn’t fun, but my other choices are really not fun.

Is there a new Coda video coming out?

These things take fucking years. Yeah, we sat on a bunch of footage over the years. Started around Tony Farmer just accumulating a ton of pool footage working on a project and in the interim the rest of the team started adding up a bunch of footage. We went on some cool trips here and there. One of the beauties of skateboarding is you can have footage that’s a couple of years old but if your skateboarding is any good, it’s timeless, right? I’m getting excited just thinking about it, the video is gonna be good. Elias Parise is helping us put it together.

After riding for different skate companies then starting your own, was anything different than you expected?

When I started Coda, it was sort of a punk rock aesthetic, contrarian to the status quo by nature. I’ve seen the industry and I’ve seen how it worked or didn’t work. Everybody is trying their best to figure this new thing out. Skateboarding is new. I started Coda to be a brand that was sort of the antithesis to corporate skateboarding. Coda has never made any money and will never make any money. I say that meaning any profit that we make is going to go directly back into skateboarding. When we make a little bit of money from sales or building a ramp or something, that goes back into the community whether it’s giving out more skateboards to just a random friend, or being able to support women in skateboarding, or somebody young, or somebody old like Tony Farmer. But here we are, twenty years later, doing it completely wrong and still doing it.

You got any last words or thanks?

I mean, aren’t I supposed to thank my psuedo- sponsors? Weren’t we supposed to start with “My name is Pat Smith, I’m fifty years old and I live in Brooklyn, New York….”

Nah we can skip all that.

But I do have to thank them! Thank you Vans for keeping me laced up for whatever I’m contributing to skateboarding, I don’t even know why I’m getting free stuff. Noah clothing, Spitfire wheels, Independent trucks for life, questionable tattoos and everything, I got it. I’ve also been trying to kick myself off Coda forever.