Here is what I remember about Luke Perry: He played a bad boy who read poetry. A loner whom every girl wanted to make less lonely. A surfer who rarely seemed to get his hair wet.

Probably free verse wasn’t really Perry’s thing, and who knows if he surfed on his own time. But through most of the 1990s, he played Dylan McKay on “Beverly Hills, 90210,” a role that stuck to him like teen idol Super Glue. Of course he wasn’t really a teenager then; he only played one on TV. But if you were a tween and then a teen, as I was in the ’90s, living in neighborhoods that were almost close to Beverly Hills, he was the stuff of notebook doodles and collage walls.

I’m older now, and I know what a disaster men like that can be. (The poetry he read was Charles Bukowski, O.K.?) But back then, if I’d met him outside some lucky-starred frozen yogurt shop, I probably would have passed out. He taught a generation of us, wrongly, that difficult, damaged men were only waiting for you to fix them.