RUBBLE-ROUSING : He May Have Missed the Big Event, but He’s Sensitive to the Nuances of Post-Quake L.A.

I have lived my entire life in Los Angeles County. And like almost everybody else in Los Angeles, I have measured out my life in cataclysms: the Sylmar and Whittier quakes, the riots of ’65 and ’92 and the annual Malibu fires. And I relate events to them the way the old geezers in Ma and Pa Kettle movies wheezed about the winter of nineteen-ought-six. As the narrative of Europe is written in its wars, L.A.’s is written in its calamities, and their rhythms say as much as anything about what it means to be an Angeleno.

But during the Northridge earthquake, I was standing just behind the slam pit at a rock ‘n’ roll show in Australia, and my biggest worry at the time was whether the drunk guy sloshing beside me was planning to turn his head away when he heaved. I found out about the quake soon enough; it seemed as though half the people in the hotel left me messages about the thing. I spent eight or so hours trying to get a line out of the country so I could call my wife (she was all right), but it seemed like an abstract event, even as I watched television pictures of collapsed roads I had driven often, almost daily. There is limited information one can glean from watching German newscasts in Australia. For the rest of the trip, all I could think of was getting back home.

As much as people tell me I am lucky to have been out of town, I’m sorry I wasn’t around. And I know nobody wants to hear that, any more than they wanted to hear all the newly conservative ‘60s guys a few years ago when they regretted not having served in Vietnam.

It’s not that I’m particularly bummed about missing the quake itself, the jolt, the overturned bookshelves, the stoves that suddenly took terrible flight. I don’t like earthquakes any better than anyone else. And it doesn’t, I think, have that much to do with survivor guilt; that would probably be shared by the people in Venice whose sustained damage amounted to a single shattered champagne flute and a dented can of peas.

But when I came back three or four days after the event, it seemed as though I had come back to a different city--one with different traffic patterns, a different personality, even a slightly different language--than the one I had left just a week before. A careful reading of a week’s worth of newspapers eventually provided plenty of information, but I missed the context, the shared experience, the camaraderie of fear, the compulsive 27 hours of television watching--the initial misguided newsguy chatter, the calm authority of Dr. Kate Hutton, the helicopter shots of the San Fernando fires and the shattered freeway overpasses--that everyone seemed to share.

I blanked on allusions to the guy trapped in the Northridge parking structure. Among my friends, I, alone, seem optimistic about the jobs that several billion dollars in federal disaster relief will temporarily pump into the region. I have noticed differences between me and many of those friends: They are jumpy when a large truck rumbles by, because they have bonded in catastrophe.

Still, even though I missed the quake, I live in a city changed by its history. I inch down Adams instead of soaring over it on the 10 (taking in the splendid ‘30s Art Deco commercial strip that I’d only sped through before), and I lament all the crazily leaning ziggurats, the sagging Moderne facades that will have to come down. My cross-town freeway routes sometimes mirror the ones my father used to take before the Santa Monica Freeway was built in the early ‘60s--up the San Diego to Encino, back down the Hollywood to Downtown--and though the car-pool detour on the eastbound 10 isn’t bad, I sometimes think a long time these days before accepting a dinner invitation in Venice. People I run into sometimes make a point of telling me that the South-Central neighborhoods they now detour through have splendid lawns, beautiful Craftsman houses and prosperous commercial areas, that the vast expanse of African-American Los Angeles doesn’t necessarily remind them of “Boyz N the Hood” anymore. Ummm . . . welcome to the new L.A.!