Zach Hudson's 'How Dare You' Zine Is Everything Skateboarding Should Be

Andy Roy throwing a Molotov cocktail on 14th Street, from the pages of How Dare You

I never collected zines; I don't really know anything about them. But a few weeks back, I was going through other people's shit here at the VICE office and found four copies of a skate zine called How Dare You. Andy Roy was on the cover, and the inside seemed to be all about the Anti-Hero team. The format was confusing, the words were insane, and the photos reminded me of why I got into skating in the first place.

When you're out skating in the streets you meet vagrants, you have access to drugs, you have confrontations, and every once in a while you can get a ride to a skatepark and have fun. How Dare You seems to represent all of this.

The founder, Zach Hudson, was kind enough to answer some questions for me over email—though he answered them in strange, fragmented sentences, strung together by ellipses. Pretty much the most confusing way possible.

(We edited it for the sake of clarity.)

VICE: Who are you?
Zach Hudson: I'm Zach Hudson, very important person. Insecurities abound. I just shit out things that I'm made to consume.

Tell me about How Dare You.
How Dare You is left-over leftovers and some makeshift platform. I shoot photos, so whatever. I'm around, I shoot, and I’ll throw an article or interview together now and again.

Are you from San Francisco? Why did you end up there?
I can't say I’m from San Francisco. I wasn’t born here. But I've been out here for 25 years. My family’s out here. I lived with my mom in Austin as a boy. I came to SF to skate—Black Rock, Union Square, Miley, and that crack at the bottom of that hill.

Cool. Were you ever sponsored?
New School B-team. Eventually I ended up on Pete Mihalenko and Hondo Soto’s couch. I was barely 17.

Then, in SF, Jim Thiebaud and Tommy Guerrero flowed me boards. I tagged around with the 151 dudes for a bit, Neil and Zach and Pig. Always been Anti-Hero at heart.

Who do you skate with? Do you have any good stories?
A story? OK. Nothing incriminating. It was Julien Stranger's birthday, and we drove my pretty, white Nissan Infiniti into the Piedmont cemetery in Oakland. Picked up a fifth of Jim Beam on the way. Julien and I end up passing out, drunk, on some tomb. We came to and found that the sun had set and the cemetary gates were locked. With us and my car inside.

We got into the car, and I drove up to the locked gates. I nudged it with the front bumper, and it gave a little bit. So I put the car in reverse and backed up 30 or 40 feet. Just as I was revving it up, Julien said, ”Hey dude, hold on," and he climbed into the back seat. "Safety first!"

I put the car into drive, with one foot on the brake the other on the gas. Both of them floored. I let the brake out, and we went zero to fifty in like two seconds. We had to break outta there, but the myth was busted. It doesn’t happen like in the movies, where the chainlink fence busts open.

The chain that held the gates together was strong, so it didn't snap. The shit just lifted up, my car went under, and the bottom of the fence smashed down on the windshield and scraped both rearview mirrors off. I was like, Fuck. Julien was in the back seat, cracking up.

So then I had to drive down Piedmont Avenue in Oakland at night, drunk, with a bashed-in windshield, headlights busted out, and some dude cackling in the backseat. We got lucky. Made it out alive. No cops.

Do you have a job now?
Ive had every job, from nude model to oil-refinery mechanic. Right now, I have a job chauffeuring yuppies around their very important lives.

It seems you have no problem calling out companies you perceive as not being authentic. Which are they, and what are your reasons?
Hey, you want to do a collab with Star Wars and Disney? Name your company Bacon or Slave? Go ahead and juggle, tie your moustache in a knot, get a fake accent, be a hippie or the first underwear skateboarder. Gimmicks are for kids. Ridicule is the fate of the ridiculous.

What's the most fucked-up situation you and a skateboard have been in?
Once I'd been up for days, floored out at the Newell house. Joe Byrnes's band was playing the Hemlock Tavern. I juiced up, and we all piled into the back of Stone's pickup truck. He took us to the top of the hill.

Leavenworth Street has this peak and descends—it's one of those streets that was too steep to lay asphalt on so they laid graded concrete. Everyone jumped out of the pickup and bombed down the hill toward the Hemlock. I jumped out, half blind, and the hill was no joke. The rest of the crew bombed the hill. I grabbed my own board—a fucking cruiser board with 60-millimeter softies—and went down Leavenworth Street.

There was a car at the intersection, creeping across the road. Stone was following behind me in his pickup truck and clocked me going around 35 to 40 miles per hour. I ran right into that fucking car with all I had in me. I remember thinking, I survived the collision! And then realizing that my body was still spinning through the air. I had another hit to take.

The ambulance showed up, and then the cops tried giving me shit for skating after dark. I was just so fucking spun at this point. The cop and the yuppie I smashed into were distracted, so I sweet-talked the ambulance driver into taking me to the Hemlock Tavern. My pelvis was cracked and my shoulder was partially destroyed, but I made it to the show. The ambulance dropped me off right there in front of the bar, at the Hemlock.

You can check out more How Dare You on its website.