Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories

by Lucia Perillo

  The Doobies like to station her at the door, because my sister is surprisingly a Nazi when it comes to body odor and sobriety. That’s what happens when you spend twenty years in special ed: you come out an enforcer for the social contract. My sister is the only person I’ve ever met who knows the correct usage of a cocktail fork.

  When the bramble-sleepers first presented themselves, the Doobies took a hard line against letting High Tea be overrun by homeless men, though Doctor Doodle countered by saying that he wouldn’t have loaned them his shop if he’d known about their “petty-boojwazh Anglo frou-frou mercantilistic trip.” So they’ve reached an admission policy by group consensus: before four o’clock, Louisa will tell everyone that there’s no coffee, only tea, and furthermore they will have to cough up three dollars for the entire pot.

  But after four o’clock, when whatever’s left is only headed for the trash, they throw the door open, come-one come-all. Stinky Tea, that’s what I call this last hour of Wednesday afternoon, which is when I’ll also drop in to cop some free leftover scones. A half dozen widows will still be sitting there, eating cucumber sandwiches and draining the last of the Earl Grey from their lukewarm pots, and — though it’s probably just a fluke — some of them will even have their pinkies sticking out.

  “Four o’clock,” Louisa’ll announce from her post by the door when the big hand on her watch comes round. And to the outside world she’ll holler, “Okay, you guys can come on in for Stinky Tea!”

  DOCTOR DOODLE was born Leonard Katzenberg, but that’s a hubcap that dropped off a long ways back. Dimly I remember him as a tall kid in the marching band, playing John Philip Souza on his clarinet. But now the Doobies are the only people left in town who still call Doctor Doodle “Leonard,” as in: “Leonard’s a good boy”—this my mother speaking—“but the way he looks frightens people off.” When I observe that the donut business seems to be humming along at a brisk enough clip, she says, “Well, people would buy donuts from Charles Manson if he had any crullers left at ten a.m.”

  At such junctures, I resist leaping to Doctor D’s defense. I’m not exactly eager to have my mother find out that for the past two months I have been doing the deed with Doctor D. We need not go into the pinball game I was playing with him at King Arthur’s Reef, where in the frenzy of my being up three hundred thousand points I spilled a Black Russian on the machine and lapped it all up before any of it ran off the edge, the whole time keeping my ball in play.

  “Nice tongue,” he said.

  Black and antigravitational, the Doctor’s hair can usually be found stuffed into the crochet job that he prefers to a hairnet, a tam that rides his head like some giant rainbow-colored mushroom. He is the kind of stunningly agile fat guy who moves as if his body were fashioned out of space-age gel, plus he has these very tiny feet I found myself nose to toe with later that night when he helped me climb aboard his boat.

  It is, in fact, a boat I sold him, a Chris-Craft cruiser from the thirties, which Doctor Doodle has named The Elsie. Before he bought it, the guys in the shop stripped and varnished the deck so the mahogany’s highlights gleamed; the hull below the waterline they painted a bright shade of red. Then to push the envelope they dropped in a Chevy inboard big enough to have powered a Cadillac, which when taken up to speed made the boat shimmy like it might splinter into matchsticks. And when it didn’t, the guys began to bark and crow in their native tongue, which employs various animal noises coupled with a lot of homoerotic body contact.

  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.

  WHEN THE MAN with the feather in his brown hat returns, I tell my mother, “Don’t worry, it’s only Hangman.” He’s sitting with my sister again, business so slow on this fine day that my mother can’t even scold Louisa for shirking. “Wino weather” is what Doctor D calls it, weather into which he himself has taken off, leaving a folded scrap that reads, Grab some cocoa butter and meet me at the Elsie. From the way my mother hands it over I can tell she’s read the note, but is too busy pacing — and every few seconds craning her head toward the pass-through slot — to worry about what’s going on with me and Doctor D.

  I tell her a little Hangman’s never gotten anyone knocked up.

  “That’s not funny,” she says.

  They’re drawing the Hangman on a paper place mat Louisa’s retrieved from the kitchen, one of the pretensions of High Tea being that the only paper products that can be on view are the doilies on the plates; everything else must be replaced by the Doobies’ flowered chintz. Sometimes it touches me to see the melting pot in action via the microcosm of Stinky Tea, the men from the shelter passing the butter patties to the ladies from the fancy condos down the block, while the Doobies glide in white pinafores across the grimy linoleum.

  When she came back for the place mat, Louisa also slapped some marmalade on a scone, moving quickly so as not to give my mother a chance to stop her. Afterward, my mother mused tartly, “Is Frederick paying for that, I wonder?”

  From Louisa, Mum learned that he goes by the name Frederick.

  “Isn’t that odd? Not Fred? Not Rick?” she asks.

  “You’re being paranoid.”

  “What about the way he never takes off his hat?”

  “Maybe he’s cold.”

  She bristles. “I’ve had a hundred discussions with Leonard about the heat. The thermostat’s set at seventy.”

  “Maybe he’s bald. Maybe he’s afraid she couldn’t love a hairless man.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “What?”

  “The day your sister moves in with you we’ll start having these conversations. Until then, I want you to get out there and intervene.”

  But instead of doing my mother’s dirty work, I stop for a quality moment with Florence Pratt, one of the pastel-haired ladies who come in every week, her skin as fragile as a baby bird’s.

  “Ooch,” I say, parking myself in her booth by the window. “That sun is murder.”

  The way the years have loosened her tongue has made it hard for Florence to find a lunch date — she doesn’t want to share air-time with anyone. Now she starts telling me about how being inside on a day like this always reminds her of the London Blitz: “We were always inside, blinds drawn, the plaster raining on our heads. You kids have no idea what it’s like to be trapped in your own home in a city under siege.” But my attention is two booths away where the man in the hat is pantomiming a word. Which is, apparently, chicken.

  “. . my father insisted that meals go on as always. He was not about to let the Germans interrupt his dinner.” Pointing to a scar on her lip, Florence says, “This is where I once stabbed myself with a fork.”

  The man in the hat flaps his elbows.

  “Once there was a strike across the street that blew two of our windows out, and my father just sat there, picking glass from his cup. He waited until the rest of us had gotten up from underneath the table, so we’d be sure to see him swallowing the last drop of his tea.”

  While she’s saying this, I try to ESP Louisa about the chicken, but instead of C she goes for S. And that does it, she’s hanged, and while the man in the hat draws the noose, my sister dies in a fit of laughter.

  YOU CAN PICK your word for what he is: a weirdo, a wino, a loser, a tard. No one knows for sure what label to slap on him, since the Doobies say as little as they can get away with saying to the unwashed men who stumble in. Oh, yeah, you can talk about the melting pot in action, just like Doctor Doodle can extol the virtues of the bottomless cup, but let’s face it: open your heart to those who sleep in the hobo weeds and all it’ll get you nine times out of ten is a story that begins with the guy’s brain being controlled from outer space and ends with your being hit up for your spare change.

  So when on the third week Louisa’s suitor comes back, I can understand why Mum announces she’s had enough. She’s got her sandwiches arranged on a serving platter with a silver stalk that rises from the middle, and she heads out of the kitchen swinging it like a priest swinging incense, something to purify the space when she orders my sister to start cleaning up.

  “No, it’s not time yet,” my sister says. Her words ring in the nearly empty shop, causing the rest of the Doobies to freeze like a Greek chorus.

  “Okay, fine,” my mother grumbles. “Make me do all the work.” When she starts whisking the cloths off the tables, Frederick stands up to help. He sweeps the ketchup — and the salt-and-pepper shakers, the little rack that holds the Sweet’N Low — onto the booth’s seat, then grabs one side of the tablecloth whose other side my mother’s already clutching.

  “Thank you, I’ve got it,” she says.

  “Let me help you, please.”

  But she insists,
“I’m perfectly capable,” and to prove it she gives a yank to the cloth, which separates with a chirruping sound. This puts Frederick off balance — he stumbles backward with half the tablecloth in his hands, as mortified as if he’d been caught holding a pair of women’s panties. He’s off balance enough that he falls into the booth, his feet sticking out, his hat flopping into the abyss under the table.

  And it’s the hairline that gives him away when he sits up: a peninsula of red hair growing down the middle of his scalp. I know that I know him, only I don’t know from where, until finally the voice of Florence Pratt stabs at the air like the fork that once went through her lip:

  “Oh, dear, it’s him.”

  “Him who?” the Doobies scream.

  “From the paper,” she says, raising a finger of one hand while her other hand sets down her porcelain cup. “I very distinctly remember him. In the photo, that forelock was combed to the left—”

  “For god’s sake, get to it,” my mother snaps.

  Here Florence withers. After lowering her pointer finger, she brings her napkin to her lips.

  “Good lord,” she stage-whispers into the cloth. “He’s the pervert who’s been sent down here to live.”

  IMAGINE WHAT it must be like to walk his walk, how the past must ride him like a half-ton jockey who will not be shaken loose. Every town he comes to will run another sidebar in the paper, announcing that another pervert has been set free in our midst. And he’ll carry that rider everywhere — to the grocery store, the library. The mailman will see him and think: Pervert. The bus driver: Pervert. The police will give flyers to all the people on his street, and they’ll squawk the word like chickens: pervert pervert pervert.

  The Doobies too came from the back of the room like chickens, as if some corn had been scattered at Frederick’s feet. They squawked him toward the exit, though what they said was only, We think it’s time for you to leave. Even when they’re dealing with a deviant, the Doobies adhere to their Masterpiece Theatre manners.