Deadlock problems

I'm not using any explicit transactions when I use Postgres. I would
have thought this would exclude me from deadlock problems. After all, If
I never have explicit transactions, it's not obvious that you would be
holding locks.

Can I turn off locks altogether? Basicly I'm just dynamically generating
web pages with various joins out of postgres. But even if these simple
queries can cause deadlocks, well it just doesn't work, and performance
dies. It would seem crazy if I had to worry a lot about locks just to do
web page generation/queries.

If it matters, I'm using a 6.5 beta with Perl.