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

The End of the Beginning

The End of the Beginning

We played a few more shows without incident, and managed to get out a third and fourth album before the end of our senior year. By this point, we were getting some serious recognition, and our shows kept getting bigger. We had graduated to headliners at the major venues, which meant 40-60,000 screaming fans, but more importantly, increasing difficulty keeping our protocols intact. A show in Denver ended with a few fans rushing the stage, and one nearly pulled Brian's mask off before security caught him. Data geeks tried to figure out our identities by hacking flight data to and from our shows, forcing us to change our patterns and use other forms of transportation when we could. A hacker tried to track our cellphones through a backdoor in an app, but he mistakenly targeted one of the stage hands' phones rather than ours, leading to a hilarious paparazzi showdown at the poor girl's apartment in Sacramento a week later that her roommate mistook for an immigration raid.

Still, I always had an unsettled sense that the walls were closing in. Had it been up to me, we might have just stopped touring after high school, but Brian and Juan were still into it, and I felt a certain sense of loyalty to keep going into my freshman year of college.

That all changed with the Wembley show. I still don't know exactly how it happened. We had all flown in separately from our respective schools, linked up, and played a great show before the other shoe nearly dropped. Maybe our security team didn't know the details of an away game in another country. Maybe we were getting complacent. But as we were leaving, we got ambushed by some paparazzi just after our security cars dropped off the motorcade. Our driver knew better than to make the situation worse by trying to run the roadblock they had set, so he stopped the car, locked the doors, and called our security cars to come get us. The paparazzi surrounded us, and tried their best to get our pictures through the tinted windows. We stayed still, with masks on, but it was clear our protocols weren't going to be enough. Our fame had changed things, and anonymity was going to be an increasingly costly and untenable proposition. We ended up stuck for half an hour while our team cleared an exit.

After the Wembley mess, we had a natural hiatus as we all headed off to college that fall. Brian and I stayed in touch, Jose a little less so. The band's dissolution was almost like the way a guy breaks up with a girl in high school without directly telling her. We eventually all just stopped talking. Phil didn't push the issue of what was next for the band either, probably because he knew better. So by the spring of my freshman year, Black Mask was essentially defunct, even though our four albums were already among the top sellers of the decade, and a few albums' worth of songs remained unrecorded.