VIBE MAGAZINE

Joker’s Wild

Dave Chappelle is rich, beeotch! But he’s definitely paid his gotdamn dues. By Serena Kim

Tonight, the artist formerly known as Dave Chappelle is making sweet love to a basketball missionary style. He’s resplendent in a tight purple suit, mad makeup, and high-heeled violet boots. His legs splayed out behind him look extra gangly in bellbottom trousers. Ruffles cascade from his gold-brocaded sleeves as he sweats beneath a wig of black ringlets.

It’s another day in the life of Dave Chappelle, 30—an endless schedule of writing, acting, shooting, editing, and joking. From playing a black Klansman to a basketball–loving Prince, Chappelle churns out the gags like a laugh factory. After twelve tedious hours, the taping of a sketch for the second season of Chappelle’s Show draws to an end.

Once out of costume, Chappelle is appallingly exhausted, as though he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in years. “You can’t imagine the burnout that this show is,” he says in his countrified drawl. “It looks like fun and games on TV, which is good, that’s how I want it to look. But it’s a lot of work.” Smudges of eyeliner cling to his droopy eyes, as he chugs down multiple cans of Red Bull in hopes of a second wind. For a second, a morose Krusty the Clown comes to mind. He chain smokes American Spirit cigarettes, and explains in a low mumble the inspiration for the Prince skit.

Eddie Murphy’s brother Charlie is a regular on the show and loves to tell Chappelle tall tales of the decadent ’80s. He’s got one yarn about how he and Eddie played basketball at Prince’s house. “Charlie and them think that Prince and his team are gonna change clothes, but they come out to court in ruffley shirts and tight pants—their Prince and the Revolution clothes,” says Chappelle. “So Charlie goes, ‘alright it’s gonna be the shirts verses the blouses.’”

Chappelle, along with Neal Brennan (who he wrote Halfbaked with) developed the first pilot of the show in the summer of TK. His HBO Special, Killing Them Softly, though funny as hell, hadn’t quite garnered the recognition he was hoping for. Chappelle had taped a total of 11 TV pilots and had reared his goofy head in over 15 movies. He wanted to do his own thing. “I realized I’m the kind of guy that Hollywood likes, but would never figure out what to do with on their own,” he says. “If I don’t show them, then they’ll make me Urkel.”

Since then, Chappelle’s Show has become the second highest rated show on Comedy Central after South Park. Most of Chappelle’s humor revolves around one simple premise: subverting stereotypes, racial or otherwise. “Dave’s a culturally erudite guys,” Brennan says. “He can think three dimensionally about sketches, ideas, and movies.” Chappelle wields enormous control as executive producer, and the show is an intensely personal vindication of 16 years of watching other comics with less experience make more money and win more attention.

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Chappelle was the only one in his family to not go to college. He describes his parents as a combination of hippies and black intellectuals. His mother, Yvonne, taught black studies and ministered for the Unitarian church in D.C. “We done had the velvet painting of Jesus over my mantel,” says Chappelle. “We had Malcolm X books. We had Dick Gregory records. And when Roots came on, it was like everybody gotta get around the TV.” After his parents split up, his father, Lou, moved to a city in Ohio near Columbus to teach music, and Chappelle went to live with him when he was 11.

“Ohio gave me a lot of perspective,” Chappelle says, “That’s where I soaked up the most white culture.” He realized how popular he could be—he was funny, urbane, and he could snap up a storm. Once, when he was mercilessly teasing a white kid in middle school, the boy exploded and blurted, “You nigger!” Everybody gasped. “I guess I was getting him so bad, and he just looked so frustrated, that when he said it, it was actually funny to me,” Chappelle says. “But I punched him in his face. And then later, I saw him drinking at the water fountain, and I smashed his face in the water fountain.”

Chappelle returned to D.C. in 1987 to find a city overrun by crack, but was never tempted by the trife life. He had written a paper on Bill Cosby for school, and was inspired by his path to fame and fortune through comedy. Chappelle was absolutely confident he was funny, too, and soon began performing standup at Byron’s Comedy Club at the age of 14. First his mother chaperoned him, and then fellow comics like Wanda Sykes would look out for him until he became a fixture. He won the crowd over with smart-ass jokes about Alf and black presidents. And Chappelle was officially addicted to the adulation.

He graduated from the Duke Ellington School of Performing Arts when he was 17, and left for New York. Inspired by Miles Davis’s autobiography, he sought out a mentor in legendary street comic Charlie Barnett, the way Davis had apprenticed himself to Charlie Parker. Both Charlies were drug addicts and brilliant. Though Barnett died of AIDS (“I fucked hookers, and shot up heroin with them,” Chappelle remembers Barnett saying) by 1995, he had taught the young comedian a wealth of hard-earned show business knowledge, such as how to work a subway car, a park crowd, or a street corner. “Some of the shit he told me back then was over my head, but as I went along, I understood,” says Chappelle. “He was like the master on that show Kung Fu and I was Grasshopper.”

Chappelle went on to conquer the elite standup circuit in New York and Los Angeles. He even had the opportunity to make Tupac laugh on several occasions. Once ‘Pac, Suge, and the whole Death Row crew went to see him perform at the Comedy Store on Sunset. “They were heckling me really bad,” says Chappelle, “so I started snapping on them with everything I had. But they didn’t get mad; they laughed so hard, they even sent a bottle of Hennessy up to the stage.” Chappelle said it was the most he’d ever seen Tupac laugh, who frequented the Comedy Store. “He usually he sat in the back, sullen, as though he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.”

By the spring of 1997, Chappelle and Brennan found themselves in the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. It was the night before a meeting with Hollywood executives to pitch a concept for a weed movie. All they had was a stack of index cards and no THC to speak of. Still, they managed to outline the basis for the cult classic Halfbaked.

But according to Mustafa Ab, Chappelle’s manager, the comedian is ready to move away from the constant Halfbaked associations. When we ask Chappelle to pose for a mugshot and as a squeegee man for this story’s photo shoot, he gently rejects the idea on political grounds, and says that Chris Rock was portrayed as the president for his VIBE pictorial. “Two million black men are in jail, and you want me to pose for a mugshot?” Chappelle asks with disbelief.

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The Red Bull has kicked in, and Chappelle wants to supplement that boost with refreshments from the Coffee Shop. The studio, which is on 106th and Park, shuts down for the night, and Chappelle drives downtown to this Union Square hipster hangout in his black Lexus jeep. He pulls his hoodie down over his closely shorn head—exuding a little honest-to-goodness shyness and some fear of being recognized. But if he doesn’t want to be recognized, the Coffee Shop is not the place to be. It’s a notorious haunt for show business types. He’s approached by six different people during the course of the midnight meal; they are white, Asian, black. One very sexy waitress flirts with him.

Chappelle nibbles on a veggie burger and says how seriously he takes his marriage. “I think adultery is one of the worst sins you can commit,” he says. He has a farm in Ohio with his wife, Elaine, a Philipina American, and their two children Suleyman, 3, and Ibrahim, 1. “Some black women give me dirty looks for marrying outside the race, but I refuse to believe that my kids are any less valid because they’re mixed.”

It becomes clear that Chappelle, himself an embodiment of resisting stereotypes, is up to the task of pointing out the absurdities of prejudice and discrimination. “Race is the ultimate paradox,” he says with a sip of jo. “It’s hilarious, it’s tragic, and it’s true.”

MISS CONGENIALITY

She’s addicted to the tabloids, obsessed with control, and determined to diva. But is there more to Amerie than the beauty contestant poise, the exotic looks, and angelic voice? Serena Kim investigates the scandal-less star.

“Music is not just about singing the right notes. It’s a connection thing. And it’s… why are you laughing at me?” asks Amerie over a plate of crab cakes. “Your eyes are red, and you look like you’re about to bust out laughing.”

“No, I’m drunk,” you say between nervous giggles, sipping on your second rum and coke.

“Ohhh. Is that what happens?” Amerie says, her eyes quizzical. She’s taking advantage of a little downtime from her promo tour inside a nondescript hotel restaurant in Charlotte, N.C. “Let me tell you!” she exclaims. “I did a photo shoot, and my manager was like, ‘Did you notice the dude was high?’ I was like, ‘No, I didn’t know that.’ He was like, ‘Yeah, his eyes were puffy and glazed over.’”

“That’s nothing,” you say, remembering that time you interviewed a DJ while on shrooms.

“What are ‘shrooms’?” Amerie asks, as if she’s trying to pronounce a foreign word, elongating the o’s.

“Oh, they’re hallucinogenic mushrooms. When you take them, you hallucinate and have revelations about life,” you say. “It’s kinda like when Buddhist monks meditate to achieve nirvana, but it’s a shortcut.”

“What do you mean by nirvana?” asks Amerie.

“It’s kinda like what you were saying about why you loved performing, about how you were yourself to the tenth degree, but without all the hard work,” you respond.

“So five years from now if you see me on Behind the Music and I’ve become some kind of drug addict, it’ll be your fault,” Amerie says with a look that’s hard to tell if she’s serious or not. “Won’t that make you feel bad?”

Maybe so, but it’s hard to believe that during Amerie’s years as a college student, she’d never heard of shrooms, but that’s the kind of sheltered lifestyle Amerie has had on her path to divadom. “I never had a rebellious period,” she says. Though she’s the “exotic” combination of Korean and black, she’s really the all-American ideal; she doesn’t drink or smoke, never gains weight, prays before every meal, and rarely curses. She makes you want to shake her model-sized frame and shout, “What are your vices, woman?” But it dawns on you with terrifying clarity that Amerie’s vice is in fact her vicelessness. The “1 Thing” is no thing.

This frustration comes largely from the pressure that celebrity journalists must shoulder, for better or for worse, to dig deep in their subject’s lives, find the scandal, expose the flaw. This is what makes the readers feel better about themselves, right? Celebrities are just like you and me! But are they? With their drug addictions and their pedophiliac scandals. With their domestic pistol whipping and pornographic spreads, celebrities aren’t like us at all. They’re rich, they’re famous; they’re difficult and sensitive. They have nervous breakdowns. And that’s mainly because, artists like Mary J. Blige, Faith, and Mariah Carey are, well, artists.

But Amerie offers an alternate celebrity paradigm: a Disney version of an R&B diva, a tireless entertaining machine, impervious to the temptations of fame and fortune, who produces a gleaming smile for every photo op and a cheerful signature for every autograph seeker. “I feel like I give a lot when I’m around people,” she says. “Like I don’t like to say no to autographs. I don’t like to say no to my fans ever.”

But don’t confuse her good girl naiveté for air-headedness. Vicelessness for Amerie is a form of control. It’s what she expects from herself and it’s what she wishes she could assure in others. Leave nothing to chance. Order is primary. When Angela, her 26-year-old sister, leaves her flip flops splayed out in a dance studio, Amerie will stop rehearsal to set them straight. When out eating dinner, she monitors the butter intake of her manager Lenny Nicholson like a hawk.

Amerie went above and beyond conceptualizing a video treatment for “1 Thing,” she meticulously drew up a storyboard. “I’m anal to the point where nothing goes without my approval,” she says. “My cereal boxes in my house all face the same direction.”

Spend any amount of time with Amerie, and you’ll begin to realize how her desire for a pristine and orderly world translated into how she manages her career and relationships. “I’m a Capricorn. And Capricorns are control freaks,” she says.

She believes that every obstacle can be overcome with sheer will, work ethic, and iron clad discipline. Every obstacle, that is, except the most difficult challenge of all: expressing realness, emotion, or as they say—soul.

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A few weeks later, Amerie has shifted her attention to mastering the choreography for the “Touch” video shoot. This is her first rehearsal. At the Soho Dance Studio in downtown Manhattan, Amerie is bent over, butt out, face set in determination, trying to put what choreographer Jamaica Craft and the dancers call a little “stank” in a complicated hip movement. With her hair in a loose bun and wearing maroon velour track pants—Juicy Couture track suits paired with furry moccasin boots are de rigeur—Amerie struggles with the slinky parts. While the dancers move through the routine effortlessly with the undulations emanating from the small of their backs, Amerie is simply jerky and awkward, bringing to mind a baby giraffe. Earlier that day, the Making the Band choreographer Lauri Ann Gibson (who also previously worked with Amerie) was heard subtly dissing Amerie’s dancing ability on the syndicated Star and Bucwild morning show.

“I’m not jiggling! Nothing’s moving,” Amerie whines. “I gotta learn to release my hip. Something’s not unlocking.” They put their hands on each other’s hips, communicating the nuances that way.

Amerie breaks only to kiss Nicholson goodbye when he and Angela have to run an errand. When she realizes that she’d slipped up while a reporter was present, she makes a feeble attempt to downplay the smooch: she quickly kisses Angela goodbye, too.

Nicholson and Amerie refuse to confirm that they’re a couple, but they also won’t deny it (“What made you think I’m in love with Lenny? What makes you think that?” she’d say, coyly). But even this faux scandal is about as juicy as a stale potato chip.

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Nicholson is meticulous about his appearance. He wears sneakers only once, keeps his jeans pressed and his Range Rover minty. He’s known for shamelessly rocking shades indoors and at night and prides himself on his reputation for stubbornness and arrogance. “I’m never going to be the first person in the room to back down in an argument,” Nicholson says with a slight lisp as he steers the Range Rover around the streets of Chelsea and Soho while waiting for Amerie to finish rehearsing. “I can never see myself in a submissive position to anyone. That’s why so many people feel like I’m pigheaded or aggressive. Because honestly at this point, I’m in business with myself, and if the chips fall, there’s no one there to help pick up the pieces but me.”

Ever since Amerie and Nicholson have linked up, they’ve wrested the creative control away from Rich Harrison (Amerie’s svengali, who wrote and produced her entire debut, All I Have) and Ed Holmes, her previous manager and close friend of Harrison’s. While putting together the second album, Touch, Amerie made a gangsta move—following in the footsteps of many divas like Janet Jackson and Britney Spears—that surprised everyone who underestimated her tenacity and business acumen. She fired Holmes, and hired a new management team, which included Nicholson, who had recently been laid off as VP of A&R at Sony. She also added industry heavyweight James Lassiter, who manages Will Smith and Jada Pinkett, to help her get more film roles.

“Last time, I kind of just stepped back and tried to learn to take control of the stuff that I knew, like hair and make up, and obviously, the things that I would talk about on the record,” says Amerie, who executive produced Touch. “This time, it was really just about me taking a lot more control of my destiny.”

The new team, along with Amerie, took the kind of aggressive approach that she felt was lacking with Holmes. They gambled on their relationship with Sony Urban (she’s actually signed to Harrison’s Richcraft, which is signed to Sony) by leaking “1 Thing” to radio, even though her label wanted her to make changes to the record before releasing it. “We told her we wanted the choruses to be a little bigger and we wanted some additional music production on the record,” says Lisa Ellis, executive vice president of Sony Urban. And Nicholson and Amerie chose the Lil’ Jon produced “Touch” as the second single, though Harrison disagreed. “Oh my God, let me tell you the fight we had over that shit,” says Harrison. He later admitted that maybe because the record wasn’t his production he opposed it.

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Harrison has been the hot producer du jour ever since he scored three Grammys. Today, he settles down on a sofa in his Beverly Hills suite, taking a quick breather from his hectic recording schedule with Christina Aguilera. To Harrison, Amerie is his “musical soul mate” and “a sweet person who enjoys a dumb joke.” But he also doesn’t shy away from portraying her as single-mindedly ambitious. “I think there’s people that get into the business because they want to be stars and then people that get into the business because they love music,” he says.

And you’re the latter?

“I dig music. I just like making records.”

And Amerie?

“She loves singing—don’t get me wrong,” he says, “but A wants to be a star. From the beginning that’s what she wanted. She knew she could do it. She knew she had the personality.”

And through a determined set of actions—converting chance meetings into tangible opportunities, Amerie has been succeeding on that initiative. Back in 2000 when Ron DeBerry discovered her at DC Live Nightclub and “gave” Amerie to Rich Harrison for what DeBerry calls the “handsome finders fee” of $10,000, she was supposed to be just a harmless vehicle for showcasing Harrison’s vibrant gogo-inspired R&B production style. But she surpassed expectations by becoming a powerhouse in her own right.

From jump, Amerie was hot and hungry. But Harrison, who had cut his own musical chops working under Mary J. Blige’s producer Chucky Thompson, had a lot of work to do. According to De Berry, Harrison had to bring soulfulness and emotion to an inexperienced vocalist. He had to make her confident enough to transfer that energy into the mike of their basement studio. Through tears, Amerie would push herself to get it right take after take. “Amerie is totally egoless in the studio,” says Harrison, who compares her work ethic with that of Beyoncé. “Ask her to do a take again, again, again, and she’ll do it without losing any enthusiasm, without mentally breaking.”

Back then it was just the two of them, no production deal, no stylists, no music industry people—just a hungry singer and a thirsty producer laying down the foundation. They’d work for hours, and then goof off, wrestle each other and play video games like brother and sister. “Honestly, I think Amerie is over me,” says Harrison with a tinge of sadness in his voice. “I’m not saying that our relationship is over, but it probably…well I’m sure it won’t be like it used to be.”

And in case you’re wondering, they both vehemently deny sleeping together.

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Back at the dance rehearsal, a teacup Yorkie Amerie calls Jean Pierre, wears a striped sweater and looks around drowsily at the sweating dancers. He then hops into a Louis Vuitton dog carrier. “When Amerie first got Jean Pierre, she demanded filtered, bottled water and had organic dog food shipped in for him,” Angela says from the sidelines, pausing from a conversation on her pink Baby Phat phone. “But once he started peeing and pooing, she realized she couldn’t have a dog. Then I became his Auntie-slash-Mommy”

Along with Nicholson, Angela is a key figure in Amerie’s inner circle. Though her sister has an outspokenness that’s hard to locate in Amerie, they definitely share a family resemblance, emphasized by similar hairstyles and builds. Amerie consults with her on everything from outfits to career decisions. It’s a closeness that had been fostered in their nomadic military family upbringing. While Angela was off being the “bad” one in the family (cutting school; sneaking out), Amerie always strived to please her traditional, conservative parents. The Rogers are so, well, Pleasantville—the type of family that makes the Cosbys look like the Sopranos. “My dad would go to work,” says Amerie. “He’d come home at 5 o’clock. During sports season he would pick us up from school. My Mom would have dinner ready when we got in the house.”

Born in Fitchburg, Mass., Amerie is the eldest daughter of Charles Rogers, a high-ranking officer in the Army and Mi Suk (Pronounced ME-SOOK) Rogers, a Korean homemaker. They met each other at a small military supplies shop in Seoul in the ’70s. People assume she got her voice from her Dad, but Amerie says it was actually her Mom who sang well.

Amerie maintains she has no issues about being of mixed heritage and gets irritated at the suggestion. She doesn’t come up with clever names like Tiger Woods’ Cablanasian to describe her ethnicity. “I’m just as Korean as I am black,” she insists. “I never want to get to the point where I feel like I’m just black, but I happen to have a Korean mother. It’s like, I’m both.”

Growing up in a military base, she was used to being around other mixed kids. She fully reps both sets, and it’s true, when you hang out with her, you can’t help but notice how her features and mannerisms are a perfect mélange of two different ethnic backgrounds. She’ll slip effortlessly into the shrunken, submissive demeanor that’s prized in Korean femininity and she won’t hesitate to snap on members of her entourage in a way that could be described as African American humor.

“Black people and Korean people have a lot in common,” she says. “Both are very soulful people. People don’t understand that, but if you listen to Korean traditional music, it is all soul. It’s from the heart. You can hear the drama, the suffering in the voice. And that’s what soul music is. That’s what the root of black music is.”

As a performer, Amerie has had to reconcile her sun side (her father’s outgoing, exuberant nature) with her moon side (her mother’s introverted and conservative personality). The moon side wasn’t too stoked on Amerie wiggling her well-educated behind on stage, in pum pum shorts, no less.

“At concerts, my Mom wouldn’t let us stand up and clap. It was more or less sit down and clap politely at like an Atlantic Starr concert,” she remembers. “So when I first started performing, it’s almost like I kind of felt like I was in a shell. It was hard for me to throw my hip out or just let loose on stage.”

Though she loved reading fantasy books and writing unicorn stories as a shorty, by the time Amerie was in her senior year of high school she was certain she wanted to pursue singing professionally. When Amerie’s mother, who speaks with a heavy Korean accent, heard of her daughter’s plans, she wept out of disappointment. She couldn’t understand why Amerie didn’t choose to become a professor or a writer—respectable professions by Korean standards.

“She didn’t take it seriously for so long that when I was really like, this is what I’m going to do, she was upset,” Amerie remembers. “She blamed my dad. She was like, ‘This is what happened because you let her do those talent shows and now look what she wants to do.’ They thought that it was going to be just a hobby.” Eventually, Mi Suk found peace with Amerie’s career and now supports her decision.

“I always say, ‘There’s a reason Lucifer was the head of the choir, when he was in heaven before he fell,’” Amerie says about her commitment to singing. “It’s because music is the only universal language. It can get into your subconscious, change your mood, and change your way of thinking. It can bring out the things that are bad that exist within you. But it can also bring peace.”

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City Crab, a Manhattan industry hotspot, is a good place to cop some crab cakes. It couldn’t be more different from the anonymous hotel restaurant where Amerie was enjoying them last. Instead of the quiet rest home ambience, you’ve got loud music, the clatter of silverware, reality TV celebs and their entourages, like Camille McDonald from America’s Next Top Model, and captive lobsters peering out from an aquarium. Rehearsal is finally over and Nicholson, Angela, and Amerie are absent-mindedly looking at menus, while Jean-Pierre catches some z’s in the Range Rover parked outside.

The “Touch” video shoot is to take place in L.A. in less than a week, and Amerie is intensely focused on her science fiction-inspired video treatment (“it’s 4500 AD and we’re on another planet”). She and Nicholson are quibbling over the barefoot issue. She thinks it will be sexy if she and the dancers don’t wear shoes during their routine.

“Wouldn’t it look weird if you and the girls go into a club barefoot, when everybody else is wearing shoes?” asks Nicholson, over his open menu.

“No, because we’re coming from the jungle,” presses Amerie. “It’s supposed to be another time and another place. It’s sexy and surreal. That’s why we can be barefoot.”

“I think that’s gonna look weird,” says Nicholson.

“But it didn’t look weird when they had on roller skates in Usher’s video,” she says. “Nobody wears roller skates in the club. It doesn’t have to be that realistic.”

“We’ll see,” says Nicholson, agreeing to revisit the issue later.

After dinner, Amerie looks genuinely relaxed. Her eyes light up with real enthusiasm when discussion turns to her favorite guilty pleasure: celebrity tabloids. “It’s so bad, because it’s gossip, but it’s just so good,” she confesses. “I mean, I fiend for them. Like Wednesday night, I’m like walking from place to place, like, ‘Do you have the new…? How about the latest…?’”

Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise had been in the news and it immediately comes up for discussion since Amerie played Mia Thompson, Holmes’s bitchy, brazen, boy-crazy roommate in the fluffy Forrest Whittaker directed First Daughter. “People think I’m the total opposite of Mia, but I know better,” she jokes. Amerie is tempted to call Holmes to ask if the highly publicized relationship is legit, but thinks better of it, since the last time she called was to congratulate Holmes on her engagement to Chris Klein. Then the conversation drifts to Ciara and the rumor that she is a hermaphrodite. “If that rumor went around about me, it would really hurt my feelings,” she says. The subject of Amerie rumors inevitably comes about, like the one going around about her and plastic surgery—a nose job.

“No, I didn’t have a nose job,” Amerie says, laughing. “Even my relatives in Philly heard that rumor and thought it was true.”

Angela chimes in, “I kind of liked it when that rumor was going around because at least it was juicy.”

So maybe Amerie does have a vice—somewhere. Maybe she’s deeper than her beauty pageant demeanor conveys. But no amount of shaking her could unhook it, at least not these days. It’s not drugs, it’s not alcohol, and—aside from being a tabloid junkie—it’s hardly scandalous relationships. “I haven’t lived through horrific pain,” she says. “My pain is like most, the average person’s grief who hasn’t led a horrific life. But pain and hardship are all relevant. I think what a lot of what people can relate to me is that I’ve gone through typical things. I’ve had, I think a typical American existence.” A Miss American one, at that.

Ride or Die

As one of only a few black pro-pros in the white world of snowboarding, Keir Dillon is a chocolate chip in a giant vanilla cookie.

The first time Keir Dillon saw a superpipe (a huge half cylinder carved directly into the snow), he was 16 and utterly blown away. “It was like seeing a spaceship,” he says chuckling. “But now that I’ve seen them for the last 10 years, if they’re not perfect, I’m complaining.”

His pickiness is well deserved. Last February, Dillon, now 27, won first place and 15 G’s in the 2004 World Halfpipe Championship in Park City, Utah. Burton gave him Raven his own line to apply his years of shredding experience. “He’s a perfectionist and definitely one of the top 10 snowboarders,” says fellow Burton pro Trevor Andrew. “But he’s also one of the cockiest dudes I know!”

When Dillon—usually laid back and quick to grin—speaks, he sprinkles so many “likes” throughout his convo, he comes off more like a surfer dude from the O.C., than a kid from East Strausberg, Pa., a small town near the Poconos. But, if he makes the team, he plans on competing aggressively in the upcoming winter Olympics.

Winning contests is just one part of being pro; it also means landing magazine covers and parts in videos. Dillon does this with effortless style. In the snowboarding world, style has a specific meaning. “It’s the way you put your spin on tricks that have already been done a thousand times,” Dillon says. “But I try not to concentrate too much on style. I just think about going fast and big. You have to slow everything down so you’re not moving all quick and jerky.” The more time you’re floating in the air, the bigger you’re going.

When asked if he’s faced racism from the ski resort world, he says, “In North America, not too much, because there are so few blacks out here. But when I go over to Oslo, Norway, it’s like they have a huge infiltration of Middle Easterners. I feel it more there because they think they’re being infiltrated. They say if you have color, you’re pretty much on the wrong side.”

Though not usually sensitive about race, these days, he’s become conscientious of his influence as a black pro-snowboarder. “It drives me to go to the Olympics and win,” he says. “Although I’m one in a million, snowboarding is not just a straight white sport. Well, maybe it is right now, but in like 30 years, I don’t think it’ll still be that way.” Serena Kim