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After exchanging flirting looks with a stranger seated across from him on the Red Line, Beaumier, a middle-aged gay man, debated whether he should follow the tall, tawny-haired guy from the train. Having worked at the Chicago Reader's personals ad department for nearly eight years, Beaumier was determined not to become one of the forlorn people who repeatedly turned up at his counter to place a "Missed Connections" ad, the kind in which people are convinced they've met their soul mates in chance encounters -- often on the Red Line -- but let them slip away.
As the stranger stood to get off, Beaumier cautiously rose to his feet too, and that's when the homeless man, curled up next to Beaumier, winked at him and said, "Good luck, kid." It was the push Beaumier needed.
Beaumier's new book, I Know You're Out There: Private Longings, Public Humiliations and Other Tales From the Personals, hit bookstores last week and he's making the rounds signing books in Chicago this week and next. Beaumier and the stranger connected in the short time they talked on the crowded platform at Grand Avenue. The stranger, though, lived in Seattle and was on his way home.
"Look at the things that happen to you when you are brave enough to make them happen," the man said after he kissed Beaumier.
At the time Beaumier was filled with self-doubt. He had recently broken up with his boyfriend of 91/2 years; he'd just quit his job at the Reader and was struggling to finish writing his first book, a memoir about his years helping people write Reader personal ads. That chance encounter last fall bolstered Beaumier's belief that he had to take chances to get the life and love he wanted.
This past May, Beaumier moved to New York to pursue writing full time. He is a contributor to "This American Life" on NPR and is writing for Conde Nast magazines. His book chronicles some of the more unusual personals clients he encountered while he was the Reader's "Matches Coordinator."
"I always hated that title, and it always bothered me because it sounded like I was picking out their outfits," Beaumier said. " 'Is this an afternoon thing or is it just coffee or dinner? What kind of shoes do you have?' " he said, mockingly.
Besides detailing his own painful breakup, I Know You're Out There offers a glimpse inside a dying breed of classifieds, the newspaper personals. In the book, Beaumier rants against Internet personals and how impersonal they can be. His resignation at the Reader happened a year to the day the paper began offering its personal ads on-line, he said.
"It was not nearly as much fun for me. There wasn't as much interaction with people as there had been before. I really felt that as a human being, I was not terribly relevant to the equation," said Beaumier.
Beaumier says he understands the convenience of Internet dating sites -- he has used them himself -- but he believes something is lost when people select the characteristics of dates much as they would select from a restaurant menu. He also misses the pithy essays people would write for the Reader's personals.
Over the years, Beaumier got to know many of the personals clients, some of whom had been placing the same exact ads since Beaumier's first day on the job. He admits "a lot of them were a little nutty."
His book is filled with a cast of outcasts, romantics who can never bring themselves to make the first contact, people who for one reason or another don't really want to hook up -- like a woman who goes on dates just to get a free dinner -- or whose personal quirkiness is just too unpalatable to attract anyone. The biggest disappointment about the book is the first page, when Beaumier admits that the characters he describes are actually composites, that the correspondences, ads and conversations have all been "altered." As readers, we find such alterations annoying. We want to believe that the "Sumo Sisters" who "wore their long, stringy hair tightly pulled back, as befits Japanese wrestlers," and had "mouths accentuated with copious amounts of the bright red lipstick which always found its way to their cheeks and teeth" were real people. But they weren't. Beaumier says he did this because he wanted to protect the people who placed ads and he didn't want anyone embarrassed by what he'd written.
This was a luxury, however, he didn't provide his family and friends, including his former boyfriend, whom he portrays as a whining hypochondriac. "A typical evening consists of hearing him complain about his work, agonize about his well-being, worry about money, fret about the neighbors, and be anxious about the dark uncertainty of an unknown future. Everything, everywhere, teeters on the brink of catastrophe, and our life together is a constant state of frantic, exhausting crisis."
The book, he says, is really about his breakup. But it's also about being brave.
"If you are brave enough to place a personal ad, your life can be really fantastic," said Beaumier, who has placed several ads in both alternative newspapers and online. "And that's the attitude that I'm taking. If I see somebody, I'm going to go up to them and say: 'I'm a real big social retard and I don't know how to interact with people, but Hi, I'm Beaumier, do you want to have coffee?' I think that if you did it enough you'd really learn that people actually don't look at you like you're a creep."
A few weeks ago, Beaumier was walking around the meatpacking district in Manhattan, talking on his cell phone, when he nearly ran into another man who was also talking on his cell phone. The man was the stranger Beaumier had met on the Red Line.
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