Behind the Mask - A Sequel (of Sorts) to A Star Is Born

Our Secret

Our Secret

I agonized for weeks, prodded by my friends' concerns, and the narcissistic question of whether our music was actually any good. Maybe Phil had just been a bad judge of music, and that's why he stuck with my dad all those years, I pondered angrily, before reminding myself being an asshole wouldn't fix the problem.

Leave it to Hektor. One day, while we were tweaking a few lyrics of a new song, he made an offhanded suggestion. "Why don't you play the music in disguise, so nobody knows it's you?" Impossible, I thought. "Hear me out, man. You could show up on stage in a mask, play your set, and make off without anyone knowing."

I couldn't believe he was dragging me into this insane idea to the extent that I actually started to mull the details. How would we set up our equipment? How would we ensure our fingerprints weren't all over it when we finished? The amateur detective in me met a surprisingly authoritative response from Hektor. "Look, I don't talk about it much because I'm not supposed to, but I used to do this kind of thing as a living."

Now, I was even more confused. Lowering his voice for effect, Hektor continued. "Look, I used to work for a part of the CIA that was in charge of deception and disguises. It was our job to make people disappear."

I was stunned, and felt a bit stupid. As bad as it sounds, I guess I had figured Hektor was cagey about his past because he sold marijuana or something. This would take a while to process.

Hektor explained how it would work. To protect a secret, the basic principle was what he called "compartmentalization." Everyone only knew what they needed to know. Equipment setup would be centralized in one team that would deliver, test, and remove it after the show. Transportation to and from a gig was another team, and would entail each of us taking random routes to pickup points, where trusted drivers — who couldn't see our faces due to shaded partitions — would shuttle us to and from the venue.

This is crazy, I repeated to myself again and again. But maybe it was worth floating the idea with Phil and the band.

We called a pizza and beer session the next Friday night, and I let Hektor hold court. Brian and Jose looked at each other in amazement, more because they were in the presence of a sort-of-spy than because they were enamored of the idea of playing in a band decked out in halloween masks.

But Phil once again put on the serious face I saw when he first heard our album. "This might work," he said after an impossibly long pause. "I need to find a label willing to play by our game."

As was his way, Phil disappeared for weeks without telling us anything.