Diamond Dave's Next Break

Dateline: Hollywood, California. It's a short building with a maroon Spanish-tile roof, its once yellow stucco facade bleached near-white under the Frankie Avalon sun. Upstairs, on the third floor, is an office. There's a desk and swivel chair, and on the desk sits a punch bowl filled with a medley of carob power bars. The blinds on the lone window are pulled up, scattering clumps of dust that don't so much loll through the sunlight as plummet right through it. The office is crowded. There's a camerawoman and a rotund man with a boom mic scrunching behind a svelte lady with church door teeth and petrified hair. A concert poster is on the wall behind the chair. It's of David Lee Roth who's standing and smiling next to an older overweight gentleman with grey hair and big round glasses wearing a flame jacket, Vegas style. Underneath in embossed blue it says "Van Huard, the Band." I initially think it's Van Halen but I look again and it says Van Huard.

The older overweight gentleman is seated behind the desk. Thank you for coming to our press conference, he says. DLR is beside him, smiling. He puts one foot on the desk and then the other, leaning in and grunting softly with the stretch. Can't jump without stretching, or much of anything else, he says with a wink. How did you come up with this idea, asks the on-camera talent. DLR picks up a guitar and starts to sing a country song:

I don't even know where ta put ma hainds on the gitar
Come and watch me play gitar, Van Huard

It is damn funny and I laugh, trying not to shake the boom mic. Then he picks up another guitar that only has one long string on it and he tries to play it. I am cracking up. It's a hit.