Check out this new interview featuring HUF team rider Kevin Terpening as seen on the Jenkem site. In this interview Kevin discusses being banned from the Berrics, leaving Alien Workshop for Fucking Awesome Skateboards, and using shoe stuffing as toilet paper. Check out a preview of the Jenkem interview below, and click here to read the entire interview.

[caption id="attachment_12070" align="aligncenter" width="900"] Kevin Terpening // Backside 180[/caption]

You recently left Alien Workshop for Fucking Awesome skateboards. Do you think Workshop is a sinking ship?

I don’t know, Ave and Dill leaving definitely freaked a lot of people out. I know Grant Taylor left and that’s pretty devastating. I think with Mike Hill, Chad Bowers and the brains behind it all – as long as they are there and allowed to do what they want and not some corporate people telling them you need to make stupid shit or whatever, the Workshop will always be a sick company. It’s their baby. They still have dudes, I don’t think it’s a sinking ship. It’s just a weird time for them for sure. I am still a fan of the company, still friends with everyone, and hope they are still around for a long time.

Do you feel like you took a big chance by leaving the Workshop?

I didn’t really feel like it was sketchy or anything. Dill and Ave, they are the two dudes I skated with, the two dudes who made Workshop sick. Not that anyone else wasn’t sick or anything, but they are like the two older brothers who show everyone the way or whatever. They didn’t really even give me a choice – they were just like, “You’re coming with us.” It totally makes sense, they have great ideas and Dill’s a psycho, it’s sick. I grew up riding Workshop forever, it was kind of a bummer but it made sense and I knew later down the line I would be bummed if I didn’t make the jump with them.

When you moved from Ohio to LA what was your first impression of the skate industry? Some people talk about how “cool” and clicky it can be, did you experience that at all?

Yeah I think for the first few years I was almost kind of turned off of skating, being sponsored and seeing behind the scenes. It bummed me out for a while and made me wanna have a regular job. People are gossipy and everyone talks about everything. It’s fucking stupid. Meeting certain skaters and shit and feeling like that they had this kind of self-importance vibe, like they took themselves more seriously than they should. It was a shock but that’s how it is with anything. If I would have moved to LA to pursue anything else besides skateboarding it would be the same way.

I read in an interview that when you first moved you used to use shoe stuffing as toilet paper.

I don’t know, I was broke and didn’t have any money. I lived in a skate house with all my friends, nobody wanted to buy that kinda shit, so that’s what we used for a while. It’s pretty fucked up [laughs]. I don’t know how we pulled it off, we had a lot of shoes, I was riding for éS at the time. It was definitely fucking harsh, it might have given me a hemorrhoid or something at the time but I don’t know. If I was still using skate shoe boxes now my butthole would be malfunctioning [laughs].