Steve Cross is a fugitive.
Cross is actually a pseudonym. He requests that a reporter not use his real name.
A teacher at Oak Park and River Forest High School, Cross isn`t a forger or robber. He isn`t a murderer either, though some might accuse him of that.
Cross, in his late 20s, is so afraid of being found out that he won`t even let a reporter say what subject he teaches for fear someone might put two and two together.
His crime? Cross smokes cigarettes. ”I`d prefer that some people not know that I smoke. So I can`t say too much that would identify me,” he said warily, after finishing a Marlboro Light in the school`s faculty smokers lounge.
He`s worried that insurance types who learned of his dirty little secret might raise his rates or drop him. Then ”there are some people close to me who don`t know I`m smoking again,” said Cross, who once kicked the habit for nearly a year.
Like who?
”My wife,” he said.
How can his wife not know? ”I don`t smoke at home,” said the teacher, who smokes up to a pack a day. To mask his habit, he chews gum constantly and steadily pops breath mints.
”I never smoke in the car,” he said. ”Well, sometimes I do. But I keep the cigarette out the window. And I use an air freshener. I don`t know. She may assume I`ve started again. But she hasn`t confronted me, and I haven`t told her.”
These are tough times for Cross and other smokers. Many feel persecuted by the rest of society, which seems to grow more hostile with each passing month.
They see themselves as fugitives from an America whose health establishment has vowed to create a ”smoke-free society” by the year 2000.
They`re hounded, they say, by the barking bloodhounds of the anti-smoking movement.
Of course most Americans are down on smoking for sound health reasons. A 1988 survey by the Gallup opinion research group, for example, found that 60 percent of Americans favored a total ban on smoking in public areas.As more public spaces, offices and airplanes become off limits, many of the nation`s 50 million to 70 million smokers, about 29 percent of the population, are left with ever fewer places to indulge their scorned but legal habit. And more no- smoking signs are bound to appear, a result of reports like that recently released by the Environmental Protection Agency, which said secondhand smoke can kill nonsmokers.
So smokers-nicotine-driven pariahs of the 1990s-increasingly find themselves trying to cope by stealing away to stairwells and restrooms. Or slipping off to inconveniently located smoking lounges. Or leaving parties and offices to stand in the great outdoors. All for the sake of a smoke.
Andrea Ford, a smoker for 27 years and a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, figures, like many smokers, that she now does most of her smoking outdoors.
She`s loath to use a smoking room provided by her employer because it`s
”too smoky” and has a window that faces into another part of the newspaper`s offices. Nonsmokers ”who walk by look in and sneer at you,” she said. ”Today smokers are easy targets.”
Smoking outdoors, even in smoggy, sun-baked L.A., is preferable to some experiences indoors. Two years ago, Ford absent-mindedly lit up in a Tucson coffee shop. ”Everybody in the place went bananas and shouted, `Get out! Get out!` ” she said.
”God, I went flying out of the place. I didn`t even realize what I did wrong for a few minutes. You would`ve thought I molested a child.”
Realizing her sin as she stood outside the shop, she thought to herself:
”`God, I`ve become this criminal overnight.` Then when I went back inside, people glared at me like I was a worm.” Ford sometimes even feels like a fugitive at home. Last month, she was watching the news on TV with her two teenage sons when a report came on about the EPA`s passive-smoking study. Her sons turned and stared at her as if they had just seen her on ”America`s Most Wanted.”
”I said, `I guess you guys have to move,` ” she said.
Ford terms the heat nonsmokers are putting on smokers ”cultural Nazism.”
”It`s really quite frightening,” she said, ”and it`s part of this general feeling that permeates society that says people can tell you what to do, from whom to sleep with to what to put in your mouth.”
Ford and other smokers are not unsympathetic to non-smokers` distaste for their habit, but they object to the nastiness that often accompanies it.
On a trip to Phoenix a few years ago, Walker Merryman, a vice president at the fervently pro-smoking Tobacco Institute in Washington, visited friends at the city`s newspapers, which are published in the same building. ”I saw 30 or 40 guys milling about outside, and this was summertime in Phoenix. I thought the pressmen were on strike.” Instead, they were smokers trying to adjust to their newspapers` new smoking ban. ”I thought it was embarrassing for the newspapers,” Merryman said.
Smoking restrictions appear to be pushing some people to desperate acts. A woman who works in a smoke-free Michigan Avenue office building usually smokes in her company`s smokers lounge. But sometimes she cheats. She has twice been caught smoking where she shouldn`t, once in a stairwell, then in a deserted corner of an office floor at 2 a.m. If she`s caught a third time, she`ll be fired.
Even so, not long ago she lit up in a restroom. A passing guard, smelling smoke, banged on the door and asked who was smoking. She hurriedly put out her cigarette, then upon leaving the restroom encountered the guard.
” `Were you smoking in there?` ” she said he asked.
” `It wasn`t me,` ” she told him.
”The moral is, don`t get caught,” she said. ”And if you do, lie.” She now has a personal smoker`s speak-easy in a plumbing closet on her building`s 10th floor.
A USAir pilot recalled a passenger who, after the first airline smoking ban (for flights of two hours or less) took effect, entered his plane`s lavatory, removed the batteries from the smoke detector and began to smoke. A flight attendant told the captain after smelling smoke when the man left the restroom.
”I went back and told him, `You know, you destroyed a safety system on my plane by removing the batteries from that smoke detector,` ” said the pilot, who, because he also smokes, declined to be quoted by name.
” `So what? It was the only place I could smoke,` the passenger said.
” `You know you`re fortunate I`m the captain,` ” the pilot told him.
” `Another captain might have the authorities waiting for you on arrival.`
That scared him.”
Although not a common sight, smokers have been led away in handcuffs. On a Trans World Airlines flight two years ago, a man created a furor when he refused to put out a cigarette on a Boston-to-Los Angeles flight. When the plane landed, he was arrested.
Accusations flew. Some passengers accused the flight attendants of rudeness and said one had wielded a fire extinguisher and threatened to spray it on the suspect.
But the airline`s charge against the man, that he interfered with the duties of a flight crew, was the one that stuck. He was convicted and sentenced to jail.
That, however, was before the federal government banned smoking on all domestic flights. Now, some smokers intentionally make their trips longer, just to get in a few puffs. For example, Merryman of the Tobacco Institute is planning a trip from Washington to San Jose, Calif. But instead of flying direct, which would take 1/2 hours, he plans to ”hopscotch” across the country, spending an extra hour apiece at airports in Chicago and Denver so he can satisfy his tobacco craving.
Sometimes it`s the house rules that are bent. Jennifer Boznos, an administrator at the Remains Theater on Chicago`s Near North Side, recently went with her husband to a party for about 50 at the 15-room Lake Shore Drive apartment of a famous Chicagoan, an adamant anti-smoker.
”When you go to people`s houses, you`ve got to respect their wishes,”
Boznos said. ”But it`s a real drag. Well, we went (to the party) and the apartment is a major no-smoking zone. A friend said: `Come on. I know the smoking zone here.` So we went there.” Eventually, 15 smokers had crowded into the little room.
The hostess finally made it back to the room to investigate her guests`
disappearances. The smokers asked for mercy. ” `Well, if you have to smoke, then smoke,` ” she said in exasperation, Boznos said.
There are signs of a smoker backlash. Boznos said a new co-worker angered her and other smokers in her office by launching an anti-smoking campaign. He posted notices over smokers` desks that read: ”Smoking results in a slow, painful and horrible death.” The smokers burned so many cigarette holes into the signs that they looked like Swiss cheese. Then they threw them on his desk.
In perhaps a pipe dream, a group in Oak Park called Mourning Electra Inc. advocates that smokers hold an all-out boycott against retailers each Christmas until the anti-smokers lay off. The economy would be fatally wounded, the group contends. With some understatement, its manifesto warns,
”If you have children, a boycott of Christmas will be very difficult. . . . Tell (them) there are mean people out there who would put you in jail or take your job away from you, just because you smoke.” Among alternatives to gift-giving: window-shopping, walking hand-in-hand and building a snowman-”
and be sure he has a great old pipe in his mouth. Glue some cotton balls to a pipe stem, and insert it in the bowl to simulate smoke for all your neighbors to see.”
Fred ”Derf” Collier, a founder of the American Smokers Alliance, lives in the mountains of Colorado. Like many other smokers, he thinks the transformation of smokers into outcasts has taken some strange turns. He tells of his own recent trip to the hospital. In March, after 70 inches of snow fell on Ft. Collins, he made his way to the town`s main district only to be conked on the head when a mini-avalanche of ice fell on him from an International Order of Odd Fellows sign.
After clearing his head at the hospital, he asked staff members if he could have a cigarette. No, they said, citing the hospital`s no-smoking policy. But eventually they caved in.
Because the hospital didn`t have a smoking area, they wheeled him, shirtless, out into the snow, where he was allowed his cigarette, he said.
”There were old men with bags of clear liquid feeding into their arms who were there smoking too. It wasn`t too bad. It was 20 degrees and sunny. Then they wheeled me back into smoker`s hell.”
He later sent the hospital`s chief executive a letter. ”Is it hospital policy to throw patients out into the snow so they can smoke? . . . If it is, you`re not doing your job,” it said.
Hospital employees who smoke feel especially like fugitives. ”Don`t even say what building we`re in, just that we`re hospital employees,” said a young woman on a smoking break with two colleagues in front of a building near Northwestern Memorial Hospital on a recent chilly afternoon.
”As health providers, we agree with the hospital`s no-smoking policy,”
she said, taking the role of unofficial group spokeswoman. ”All of us are seriously considering quitting. It`s not healthy and not socially acceptable. ”People give you looks. I used to think they just hated it. Now I think they look at me because I`m so incredibly stupid.”
So why haven`t they quit? ”I readily admit I`m a nicotine addict,” a man in the group said. The others agreed nicotine is a tough habit to kick.
”It`s been 20 below zero when I`ve been down here,” the unofficial spokeswoman said. ”Then I ask myself, `Why am I doing this?` I do that not only on lousy days.” The others nodded.
The banishing of smokers to formal or informal smoking areas has had at least one unintended consequence. ”They`re very social,” said Mary Kay Caloger, who works in Illinois Bell`s office tower on Randolph Street. ”I`ve been here 13 years, but I`ve met people I never knew before. You see them sitting there every day puffing next to you.”
