COLUMN ONE : Fissures of Race Tear Fabric of L.A. : A woman who adopted this city as a student sees its myths unmasked. And she knows the rebuilding must be of the soul as well as the structures.

I came here two decades ago to go to college. My mother and father ran out of fingers ticking off the reasons I shouldn’t. Charles Manson. Smog. Bobby Kennedy. Bobby Seale. Earthquakes. Drugs. Watts. Freeways.

The smog was so bad that for the first month I didn’t know the San Gabriels existed. Then it lifted for a brief, clear autumn moment before the Santa Anas whipped the smoke of burning shake roofs back to where the smog had been.

On the sidewalk outside the old Hall of Justice, I stepped uneasily past girls my own age, girls with shaved heads and “Xs” hacked into their foreheads, to sit in the courtroom where Charles Manson was sentenced to death, his mad eyes raking us like lasers.

I got my first bite of tear gas during the SLA vs. LAPD match. My first earthquake knocked down the shelf I had unwisely built over the head of my bed. If I hadn’t already been awake, I could have been killed by my own books--just as I could have been killed by my own typewriter 10 years later, when my car got hit on the freeway. It rolled down the No. 4 lane like a big steel die, and my typewriter--which was in the back to go to the repair shop--was tossed around, too.

It missed me. But what a great reporter’s obit it would have made; I repeated it with bravado.

I never told my folks that stuff. But by God, I loved it. I loved knowing where to get bialys or burritos at 3 a.m., how the SigAlert got its name, and the best songs to ask the mariachis to play. I loved Occidental College’s Tudor rose gardens blooming absurdly below Spanish-tile roofs.

And I loved my job. In this big urban midway, journalists went everywhere, fearlessly, with the blithe air of invincibility that reporters share with teen-age boys with new driver’s licenses. The only color I was, I assumed ingenuously, was the color of my press tags.

The world had L.A. pegged as the epicenter of mellow, but we knew we were tough. We inhaled particulate matter and held off brush fires with garden hoses, and clung to an Earth that tried to fling us off. We could handle anything.

All this time, it turns out, we’ve been preparing for the wrong Big One. The Earth didn’t shake L.A. apart this week. We did that ourselves.

Multiculturalism was the civic mantra, L.A.’s special take on the myth that I chased--we all chased--out here to the edge of the continent: There is enough to go around. My gain does not mean your loss. We can all Make It.

And every sunlit morning, mainline L.A. looked in its mirror, and admired its white, educated, prosperous self, its forward-looking, tolerant self--while the other L.A. has sat in the closet like Dorian Gray’s portrait, getting darker and poorer and angrier.

The fissures of race and class were there, if you bothered to connect the dots. There was no citywide outcry about murdered black hookers, but when the Hillside Strangler started offing “nice” women, there was hell to pay. All of us wrote endless inner-city gang stories, but L.A. didn’t “discover” gang warfare until one night in Westwood, when the cross-fire killed a young Asian-American woman. That raised an outcry; that raised a reward.

Last Wednesday afternoon we all gathered at the city desk to watch the verdicts read. My heart hadn’t hammered in my chest like that since I took my SATs--so much was at stake here.

Not guilty? Of anything? After that tape? I must have made an odd noise, because a black friend glanced over at me. It was the look of tender pity reserved for the last kid to find out that there is no Santa. Poor Patt, it said--now you really get it.

This week, scared, white L.A. got it. So this is what it’s like to be incidental in a city that uses you as window dressing for its rainbow PR. This is what it’s like to sit in your locked home and wonder whether the sirens you hear are on TV or right out front.

At first I was angry at the white-flight crowd who got the hell out of L.A. to escape from what one of the four cops’ defense lawyers called “the likes of Rodney King,” and they aren’t afraid to admit it. They watched the smoke on TV from the safety of their own R-1, 3 bdr 2 ba, and say “I told you so.” They may be bigots, but at least they’re honest bigots.

But then I got angrier at the other white crowd, the right-minded, PC crowd that has piously peddled a sanitized, “We Are the World” boutique multiculturalism of Caribbean music and Native American sweat lodges and Malcolm X hats on $50 blond razor cuts. They preached it at the same time they sent their kids into the safety of private schools. They signed checks at fund-raisers for justice in Central America while the Central American housekeeper at work in their kitchens couldn’t afford to buy the food she was preparing.

They’re thrilled to discover a new Nigerian restaurant, but they’ve never been downtown--let alone to Florence and Normandie. If they have, it’s for the Oscars or MOCA or “Phantom of the Opera.”

“Phantom” was canceled this week. Another mask, a bigger one, got yanked away instead. What’s underneath that one is pretty hideous, too.

I live far east of La Cienega--three blocks from Figueroa. We hear gunshots in our neighborhood, but they aren’t next-door. I’ve bought meals for homeless women, rescued stray dogs, volunteered at my college, played pen pal to a barrio kid, picked up trash off the street.

I thought I was doing all right; to see it written down, now, it looks paltry. For the first time in a long time I feel very white and very middle class. Somebody said of Mike Dukakis that he may speak Spanish but he doesn’t speak our language; suddenly, my good Spanish isn’t good enough. My glibness in English sounds mealy-mouthed and tongue-tied. I don’t feel so much fearful as inadequate.

Thursday night, Friday night, I drove around with more caution than I’d exercised in years. There was a curfew on, but the police enforcing it drove right by me. If they bothered to look twice, they just shook their heads at the foolhardiness of a white lady driving around after dark.

I haven’t cried over a story since the library burned. I didn’t cry this time, until Saturday morning, when I saw the guardsmen along Wilshire Boulevard--dear, funky, passe old Wilshire Boulevard. Whatever we thought we saw in the mirror every morning, it wasn’t a city fit for martial law.

We’re rebuilding this week, as we would after any earthquake, but this is rebuilding soul as well as structures. I haven’t heard the power brokers’ standard line about multiculturalism; that record got broken last Wednesday. Instead, I see black people rescuing a white man and Asian-Americans from a mob, and two days later, white folks in SAABs from San Fernando Valley dealerships bagging broken glass outside a gutted store on Normandie. I don’t have any idea how long it can last--maybe only as long as summer camp friendships; maybe only until the TV cameras go away.

But I do know we shouldn’t get back to normal. In L.A., normal doesn’t work anymore. We don’t live in the city we thought we did.

On my way to work, at the corner of two empty streets, stood a scruffy young man holding a sign: “Please help--I’m homeless.”

Hey, man--today, aren’t we all?