If this vans a-rockin well, go ahead and do come a-knockin since the undulations will be due to my marrow-deep existential moaning, not sexualcongress.

For nearly three months now, my accommodations have been vehicular: I live in a 20-year-old converted Chevy van with a dented door and two bald tires. Though I am loath to use the word, I suppose I am, technically, homeless. Mr. No-Fixed-Address. The bottom of the 99 percentbarrel.

My plummet has been precipitous: from a thriving movie-industry career in Los Angeles and sleeping on 400-count Egyptian cotton sheets to a twin mattress in the back of a van with brown shagcarpeting.

How did I gobust?

Slow, thenfast.

The ignominious Readers Digest version: acrimonious divorce, a cancer-riddled mother who hung on for years, an investment fund that turned out to be a fetid Madoff tributary, IRS horrors, being a north-of-40 screenwriter, and, of course, that old standby,hubris.

With a collapsed souffl of a career, no wife or kids, sans Elk Club membership, and living in this mobile mansion, I am by nearly all accepted societal standards an abject failure. Most days I totally concur with the consensus opinion and self-flagellate with wet rawhide thoughts of lack andregret.

Here I am, just one of the more than 100 million denizens of this Great Land of Ours with less than $1,000 saved. Vast numbers of our population with work-a-day jobs living from paycheck to meager paycheck, if they are even lucky enough to have one of those at all. I am no Trotskyite, but something would seem to be amiss here. If this is the land of honey and milk, why are so many sucking hind teat, or no teat atall?

Even as I pinch pennies until Lincoln winces, the day is basically my own. This morning I awoke at 8, parked on a shady S.B. backstreet, opened a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, extracted a half gallon of milk from my trusty red plastic Coleman ice chest, drank straight from the container, and enjoyed breakfast along with the crows pecking a nearby lawn and cursing at the wormyfare.

I strolled to the corner, bought a paper, and read about S.B. businessmen up in arms about homeless gents and ladies invading their hallowed streets and stealing the suns very rays, it seems. I guess they meanme.

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Van Man