For a while the board-sports community accepted White anyway, because he was so young and so good and he made goofy videos just like everybody else. That ceased in 2004, the year White turned 18. By that point, says Dave Finger, who oversaw digital media for the X Games for several years and watched White grow up, “White wasn’t just Future Boy — he was Right Now Boy.” The story that White tells himself is that he never clicked with the other snowboarders because nobody likes the kid who always wins. Many riders see it differently. They resented White for snubbing them, not even pretending they were all friends, an attitude that is central to snowboarding’s self-concept. “He didn’t hang out with them,” Finger says. “He didn’t show any of that camaraderie, stoking each other out, knuckle-bumping and high-fiving. He’d just show up and then win and then leave.”

Image White, with Danny Kass, won gold at the Turin Games in 2006. Credit... Mark Duncan/Associated Press

But within a few years — and annoyingly, to many snowboarders — the nonsnowboarding world fell in love with White. At the 2006 Olympics in Turin, White’s energy was infectious. Wearing a white moonsuit and an American flag bandanna, White performed dizzying 1080s (then state-of-the-art) and let out a primal scream when he won gold. His mother cried. Later White told Jay Leno that when the ribbon on his medal got dirty, she sent it to be dry-cleaned.

After the Games, White spent a few weeks sitting in his girlfriend’s living room, watching Disney movies. By the time he got up off the couch, he was making buckets of money. Before Turin, White already had sponsorship deals with Mountain Dew, T-Mobile and PlayStation. White refused to give me financial details, coyly stating only that “winning the gold medal just elevated those relationships.” In 2006 ESPN the Magazine described him as “one of the richest nonheir teenagers in the world.” But money has a way of amplifying things. White wasn’t happy. He became less so. “After the Olympics, if you imagine it was sugarcoated and rainbows, it wasn’t,” he says. White made some rookie nouveau-rich errors. He bought a multimillion-dollar house that he never really lived in. He wasn’t mature about dealing with his social life either. “I was in L.A., and it was so many people, and I was like, ‘Oh, God!’ I couldn’t remember names. You know those social skills you build over time? I didn’t really have those.” White made some halfhearted attempts to become more responsible, but, he says: “I was in my 20s, so I was like: I don’t want to do this — I want to have fun. I want to buy a sports car and [expletive] drive.”

Kevin Pearce, White’s rival leading up to the 2010 Olympics, defined himself as the anti-White, the nice, good-values snowboarder’s snowboarder. White was then training alone in a secret halfpipe Red Bull built for him in Silverton, Colo. Pearce persuaded Nike, his sponsor, to build him a pipe in Mammoth, Calif. Then Pearce invited all his snowboarding friends to come ride there. But just before the Olympic trials, Pearce suffered a traumatic brain injury while working on a double cork, a trick for which White was well known. “The Crash Reel,” a documentary about Pearce, questions whether the snowboarding community should have allowed the walls of competition halfpipes to rise to 22 feet. In the 1998 Olympics, the walls were 11½ feet. Higher walls mean greater height, and greater height means crazier tricks, including one called the crippler, in which a snowboarder spins while upside down. The higher walls also led inevitably to more devastating injuries. In 2012, Sarah Burke, a four-time X Games freestyle-skiing champion, fell and ruptured her vertebral artery while training on the same halfpipe on which Pearce crashed. She died nine days later.

White has the stature to take up the safety issue with the International Ski Federation, snowboarding’s governing body. But he hasn’t assumed that role. While he is credited with normalizing helmet-wearing in snowboarding, he can be reluctant to talk about the sport’s catastrophic injuries. Those around him play down the risks as well. White’s snowboarding “is not as safe as baseball, but it’s no more dangerous than hockey or football,” says Gabe L’Heureux, the Burton photographer who travels with White and is one of his closest friends. “Those are the guys who are always getting head injuries. He knows how to fall. He knows the out.” But perhaps the main reason White is not a leader inside the snowboarding community is that he’s barely even in that community at all. “Physically and mentally, he’s one of the most incredible athletes,” says Jayson Hale, a snowboarder who was on the 2006 Olympic team. “But the truth is he has few friends on the snow. He’s able to put that aside. He has the gnarliest black cloud I’ve seen at the top of the halfpipe of all these dudes who hate him and who are talking behind his back. Yet he still comes out first.”

In the days leading up to Bad Things’ show, four-fifths of the band — Davis LeDuke, Jared Palomar, Anthony Sanudo and Lena Zawaideh — drove a 15-passenger van cross-country, stopping only twice at cheap motels. White stayed at the Bowery Hotel.