Paradise Isn’t the Same With a Roomie

I had a friend in town last week who thinks I’m the luckiest guy in the world. If true, why do I cry myself to sleep every night?

Turns out that he bases his assessment about my good fortune on the fact I live in Orange County. Newport Beach, to be exact. But I’m not that kind of Newport Beach resident. I’m the other kind.

I rent. I didn’t go to USC. I don’t drive a luxury sport vehicle. I’m just a working guy with a carport, bugs in his apartment and who has to go outside to the apartment complex laundry room to do his clothes. Two ten a load. I’ve had rainwater in my kitchen twice in the last year.

What’s so lucky about that?

None of that dissuades my friend, who kept telling me how good I have it. We’ve known each other for 30 years, and he’s lived in New Jersey for the last 10 years or so. But he’s starting to make strange noises, noises that when you put them together come out sounding like, “I’m thinking of moving to California.”

I think he said it most emphatically after he phoned me from Long Beach airport last Sunday and informed me his flight home was canceled by the closure of JFK Airport in New York. Two feet of snow will do that to an airport. When I retrieved him from curbside, it was about 70 degrees and he had a look of contentment on his face -- like a man whose future had just crystallized before him.

That’s the back story.

And now for our object lesson. Wouldn’t it be interesting, my friend suggested, if he moved in for a while? Not forever, of course. But surely a couple of old buddies could cohabit until one of the old buddies got his footing.

Roommates? Two aging lions in their 50s sharing a bug-ridden home? One of them a man who blithely allows crumbs to collect on the kitchen counter, and the other who knows that crumbs are a bug’s most delectable lure? One who believes that two adults can live under one roof and the other who knows it’s impossible?

Let me take you through the rest of our Sunday. Later that very afternoon, we decided to escape the cares and woes of Newport Beach and head down to Laguna Beach. We rolled down the windows, opened the sunroof and hit Pacific Coast Highway like a couple of carefree renegades. Songs came on the radio and out of respect to each other, neither of us sang. We played music trivia, however, and had a grand time.

We walked Main Beach. We patted strange dogs on the head. My friend used the restroom in a classy restaurant. As the sun set, we walked up Park Avenue toward my car. We looked back toward the west and saw a wedge of the Pacific in all its unspeakable beauty. I felt like holding my friend’s hand, or at the very least, buying him an ice cream cone.

We drove back to Newport Beach, flush with our wondrous time.

Later that night, about 10, I decided to do a test run on the timer-recording mechanism on the new VCR I’d bought the week before. Good idea, my friend said.

I set the machine. You’re doing it wrong, my friend said. No, I’m not, I replied. Yes, you are. No, I’m not. He informed me he’d been setting timer-recordings for 20 years and knew what he was talking about. I countered with my own VCR credentials.

Within two minutes, we were just shy of screaming at each other. If I’d had a steak knife in my hand, I’d be in Orange County Jail today.

I went to bed with a headache. I hope he did, too. I lay there, realizing I hadn’t had a row like that in a good long while. And hadn’t missed it one bit. Sleep didn’t come easily.

By the next morning, all was well. That night, we had a delightful dinner with a friend.

When he left Tuesday morning, we were wiser than we’d been two days earlier.

He thinks Orange County is heaven on earth. Now he knows that if he and I start sharing quarters, Southern California can turn into New Jersey in no time flat.

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Dana Parsons’ columnappears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.