Generally you can achieve the same result by using a global variable. Sometimes you may need to constrain the scope of such a global variable to the context of a sub. You can do that by:

{
my $pseudoStatic = 0;

    sub usingPseudoStatic {
        return ++$pseudoStatic;
    }
}
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That's not what a static variable does in C.

A static variable in C does two different things depending on what scope it's defined in: if it's in file scope, it is local to a source file (compilation unit); if inside a function, it's a variable that has only one instance and not separate instances in every function. C also has static functions and static class members in C++ but those also mean something like one of these and not default values like you're saying.

Perl6 has a similar thing to C-style static vars. Except they're declared with the state declarator. In the following code the variable $x will maintain its value across successive invocations of the subroutine and is only visible within the subroutine:

sub foo {
    state $x = 1;
    say $x++;
}

foo;                      # outputs 1
foo;                      # 2
foo;                      # 3
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Perl6 is full of all sorts of interesting declarators. See http://dev.perl.org/perl6/doc/design/syn/S03.html#Declarators