From my teenage years on I had the indecorous desire to lead a less healthy lifestyle. My rock n’ role models were the Replacements, and my inspiration was the band’s singer/songwriter Paul Westerberg. The band was shitfaced drunk in almost every image I ever saw of them, and their studio recordings were as glorious, clumsy and passionate as the fourth beer of the day. They broke up when I was in high school and I never got to see them play live, but the live recordings I had heard were sometimes as glorious, clumsy and passionate as the fourteenth beer of the day.

     Westerberg’s songs to me communicated the difficulty of communicating with other people, and then celebrated that frustration. His were anthems about being the sons of no one and ballads about other people’s winds blowing out of key with your sky. And they were performed with such boozy bravado.

     On “I Will Dare”, the lead off track from their 1984 classic, Let it Be, I heard him sing, “bacon and cigarettes [are] a lousy dinner.”

     To me that line represented everything the band was about, and everything I wanted to be about at the time. I took it to mean that you know you’re doing something that’s not good for you, but you do it anyway because it’s fun.

     On baptismal Replacements mix tapes I made for friends I would title Side A: “Bacon and Cigarettes” and Side B: “A Lousy Dinner”.

     I even believe I sang the line to myself as I prepared that same meal several times during this period of self-imposed debauchery. Hey, I thought, somebody else has been this unhealthy and has gotten through it, so can I.

     Years went by and I gradually stopped drinking myself blind every night. It’s sometimes as simple as realizing that the reason you feel so bad the next morning is because of how good you thought you felt the night before.

     I bought Westerberg’s first solo album when it came out, and enjoyed that quite a bit, but he was definitely older and not as risky. I lost track of him after I sold his second CD Eventually, back to the store after two listens. I never stopped being a fan of the glory years though. Even though I didn’t live it quite as much anymore, it still touched the same nerve it had touched before.

     Last May I got to meet the man who had informed my diet during my late teens and early twenties. I bought his newest two-disc album Stereo/Mono the day it came out at the Boston Virgin Megastore, which earned me a wristband to stand in line and meet him after his in-store appearance the next day. I liked the two discs too. They have that raw risky feeling that I felt had been missing in much of his post-Mats work.

     I brought with me my vinyl copy of Let it Be.

     After the performance, which featured stellar readings of the new songs and some surprising gems from his past, I stood in line with likeminded music geeks and we became fast friends based almost entirely through our appreciation of his work. Westernerds. The camaraderie afforded to independent music fans can sometimes be as close as I imagine the Masons to be. I was nervous as we got closer to the autograph station, because I have been starstruck many times before by people whom I admired less than him. In third grade I followed a local sportscaster into the bathroom at the beach for an autograph.

     As my turn was called I walked up to the table and he asked me to hang on a second while he cut and lit another cigar.

     “How long have you been smoking stogies,” I asked, if for no other reason than it was the first thing that came to my head. I wanted to know how long he had been smoking stogies.

     “About four years,” he replied.

     “Do you still smoke cigarettes,” I asked, wondering whether or not he was still holding onto any of his vices/foodstuffs from the early days. His abstinence from alcohol was well publicized enough that I knew not to ask him about drinking.

     “I quit smoking cigarettes about five years ago and started smoking those little cigars, but all I’d do was inhale them so I began smoking these,” he held up the fat, hand-rolled Cuban for me to observe.

     Just then I remembered that I was talking to an idol of mine, so before I could get nervous I dropped my copy of Let it Be on the table in front of him. He examined the picture of himself and his other misfit friends sitting on the roof like hoodlums looking over the city to see where they could raise the most trouble.

     I said, “Could you write, ‘bacon and cigarettes, a lousy dinner’?”

     He looked up at me through those thick blue Lennon glasses that have become his solo career trademark, and asked, “What song is that from?”

     “It’s from ‘I Will Dare,’” I reminded him.

     At first I thought he was bullshitting, but he just stared at me with a confused look on his face. His eyes like vacant little commas behind blue cough drops.

     The silence became uncomfortable so I sang the line to him.

     “I ain’t lost yet, so I gotta be a winner, bacon and cigarettes, a lousy dinner.”

     As he looked at me his puzzled look was washed away with a relieved expression. “No, no, that’s not what I say,” he said, like he figured out the answer to a riddle we had been working on together, “I say, ‘fingernails, cigarettes, a lousy dinner.’ You know? Like you’re nervous and you’re chewing your fingernails and smoking?”

     He opened his eyes wide and made a motion like a nervous cartoon character with his teeth chattering on his fingers.

     “Oh,” I said, and my entire scope of perception shifted one degree to the left. I was also slightly amused that my case of lyricosis was remedied by the actual songwriter.

     “It’s a whole different meaning, isn’t it,” he asked.

     “Yeah, I thought it was an ode to unhealthy living,” I admitted.

     “Nope,” he said, seeming excited that he had set me straight.

     As he wrote the correct lyric on the album jacket, I asked what his formula for good songwriting was.

     He said, “if it scares ya, you know you’ve written a good song. If it gives you chills.”

     I nodded my head and said, “Thank you for saving me during my teenage years.”

     We shook hands and I realized, although I thanked him for saving me, my own lyricosis and misinterpretation of his words could have damn near killed me with the lifestyle it advocated, putting roadblocks in my arteries and paving my lungs.

     Either way bacon, fingernails and cigarettes are all lousy dinners.

Pat Healy is a founding partner at the small indie label Handsome Records and he writes songs, sings and plays guitar in a band in Providence, RI called International Pen Pal.