Lucia Perillo - Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain - Stories

This is one of the perks of working in the boat shop: on sunny days, which don’t come often in these parts, we’ll take turns test-driving whatever’s on the lot. Another perk is maybe the thrill of seeing guys like Doctor Doodle — who in high school sometimes had to suffer the humiliation of having a yarmulke bobby-pinned to his frizzy scalp — now seeing these boys peel five thousand dollars from their wads of crumpled twenties. We don’t call it money laundering — we just call it selling boats. Because we are rooting for them, you understand, these guys who trade at the fringes of the outlaw realms, who stuff themselves into the cabins of boats too small for anyone with all his marbles to consider living on. And we forgive their haphazard personal hygiene because we know they have to shower in the pay stall at the marina’s public john, where they never have enough quarters, these guys who own nothing that takes up space, who wear one pair of sweatpants until the ass wears out and even then they’ll get by for months with safety pins dangling back there like a bunch of grapes.

Louisa was with me that night at King Artie’s Reef, so it was the two of us walking beside him as he pushed his old Schwinn down the dirt road that runs atop the levee. You get a cheaper moorage here behind the sewage treatment plant, the sewage a moot concern because the mudflats bordering this whole town stink at all but the highest tides.

“Take us for a ride,” my sister commanded. So the Doctor untied the mooring ropes and in no time had us lumbering along at the boat’s top speed, into Puget Sound’s open water, The Elsie chattering so hard I could feel my molars working loose. The lights from the houses blurred into streaks that jerked as the hull went fwop fwop fwop . The cabin swayed and the windows threatened to fly off — the transom groaning, the plywood popping — until Doctor Doodle eased up behind the island that is Indian land. He let us drift there while he disappeared into the cabin and eventually rematerialized with a Mason jar full of dark fluid. Homemade blackberry brandy, he said, warning us to strain the seeds by sipping through our teeth.

With the wind died down, I could smell that he must have taken at least one bong-hit in the cabin, the water so still that when we spit the seeds overboard I heard the tiny sizzle of them dropping: pli-pli-plip . The jar went round, the shoreline began to tilt, and Doctor Doodle started calling my sister Ramon Fernandez .

“That’s not my name.”

“It’s your new name — I just gave it to you.” Then he recited from memory: “ Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know, why, when the singing ended and we turned toward the town blah blah blah, I can’t remember the lights of the fishing boats at anchor mastered the night and portioned out the sea .”

This is what Doctor Do sounds like when he’s stoned and flapping off. He went to the hippie state college that was built in the seventies in the woods outside of town: no grades, and everyone gets to make up his or her own course of study. With Doctor D, it was a combination of poetry and plant genetics. After all these years, he often gets the two of them mixed up.

“You’re talking like a crazy man,” Louisa said.

“No, I’m talking like a businessman. Wallace Stevens, to be exact.”

Unlike most of us, Louisa has learned how to cover her confusions. “You don’t look like a businessman” was all she said.

The doctor spit some seeds out with a ffft .

“That’s just your rage for order, pale Ramon. Now everybody shut up for a minute and listen to the sea.”

YOU CAN IMAGINE how disconcerting it is when he’s there in the kitchen with me and the Doobies, though usually he keeps out of their way by burying himself in his machines, whistling “Rule, Britannia!” as he inserts a wrench into the donut maker’s guts. But sometimes behind my mother’s back he’ll start making googly eyes at me, stroking his beard and rubbing the gold ring that he wears in one ear like Mr. Clean.

And what with these distractions, you can understand why I do not notice right away the man who’s sitting with my sister in a booth. It’s after four, and I can’t tell if he’s a hard-core bramble inhabitant — he could have just lucked out in the haberdashery department at the Goodwill store. He’s wearing a brown sport coat and a brown hat with a green plaid band. It’s hard to reconcile the hat with the man, whose pink face is a little too squirelly for a word like dapper . And his head looks sort of deflated and slack, as if a little air has been let out of him.

When I first spot him, I’m in back in the kitchen, helping my mother with an emergency batch of chocolate fudge. At last she glances up, then out where I’m looking through the pass-through slot.

“Don’t even think it,” she warns.

“Think what?”

“That the two of them look in any way cute.”

My sister is following her usual inclination to put four sugar packets in her tea, and when the man dips his spoon into her cup to taste he makes a face that makes Louisa laugh.

Mum wipes her hands on a dish towel before going out to issue some directive that’ll take my sister from the booth, in this case a task involving ketchup — I can see my mother demonstrating how to wipe the bottle rims. But as soon as she’s back in the kitchen, my mother’s plot is foiled: the man gets up and helps Louisa with the ketchup, ha! In five minutes, they’re both seated again.

I say, “He looks like Mr. Peepers.”

“Those are the ones I’m afraid of.”

“I don’t think he’s worth the worry, Mum. No self-respecting psychopath would wear a hat like that.”

Then she gives me a look that’s like the knife she sticks in the fudge to see if it’s hardened up.

“Those are the ones who think they might be happy with someone like your sister.” That said, she tells Louisa it’s time to load up, even though by the clock there are still officially twenty minutes left to Stinky Tea.

THAT NIGHT on The Elsie and on subsequent nights since, I have climbed the mountain that is Doctor Doodle, his skin shining wherever it’s not covered in the corkscrew curls of his black fur. His great bulk fills The Elsie ’s tiny foredeck, so, positionwise, it usually comes down to this: me on top with nipples stiff from the rank wind off the sewage plant. It’s not a pretty picture, but for the inlet we’re floating in, and it sure ain’t love, I will admit. Something more instinctive and tribal. Something you do because you can.

“While you figure it out, I’ll just be grateful,” he says. “ Om mani padme hum . These days I’ll take what I can get.”

But things are never as simple as guys like Doctor Doodle make them out to be — like when, after these exertions, mainly his gyrating up and down like a marine mammal trying to walk on dry land, Doctor Doodle extracts himself from me. He climbs into the cabin and comes back with something resembling a plastic tackle box.

“Sleep apnea,” he explains.

The mask has a breather bag and flex hose running from the mouthpiece. In it, he is a cross between a robot and a pachyderm. From underneath, his voice is Elmer Fudd’s broadcast from space: “If I dowen’t do dish I fawl ashweep awl day.”

Then he plugs the extension cord into one of the power poles on the dock, and the box begins to make a rhythmic whush-whoosh as the air moves in and out. Somehow he’s able to balance it on the trembling mesa of his belly. And that’s how Doctor Doodle sleeps — spread-eagled on The Elsie , his bicep a small ham that fills the hollow of my neck.