Other People's Gods
Horowhenua / Wellington Citywatching Field Notes June 2025
Hear ye hear ye… This post contains peppery swear words & a dash of mild blasphemy... Consider yourself warned
Walt Whitman via the London Review of Books: “Literature flies so high and is so hotly spiced, that our notes may seem hardly more than breaths of common air or draughts of water to drink.”
We go to the RSA.1 (For reference, this is where you go when the closest pub is 25km away.)
A mulleted youth shows us a photo of the twelve-pointer he shot,2 also a video of a small black piglet he caught, now a kind of pet. “It'll be ready by Christmas,” he reckons. The ex-serviceman's wife savagely pinches his cheeks, deeply embarrassing him.
The sweet 90-something-year-old is drinking a beer & a whisky (Glenfiddich: the only single malt available.) He lifts the beer glass to his mouth with both hands & winks at me.
Fishing: who caught what, where, when.
Some comparison of garden potato yields: high.
The dreadlocked & genial pool shark shows us the two new tattoos he got on holiday. Samurai cat & Shiva— “Male & female, the creator & the destroyer,”— both on his forearm.
The ex-serviceman's wife tells us she has a smiley face tattooed on her arse, but it's quite evil-looking. Her brother-in-law did it, & she reckons he made it evil on purpose.
When the tough lady farmer goes outside to vape, the digger driver mutters under his breath that maybe she parked her broom out there. He razzes Kev at length for using a heat pump instead of lighting a fire.3 Kev says the orchids don't like it when it gets too cold, & I tell him I don't reckon that information will improve their opinion of us.
The conversation turns to electric fences & I reminisce about how we used to grab a friend then grab the electric fence.4 (Subtext: I'm not a townie, believe it or not.)
When the teenage waitress brings their chips over, the tiniest kid says fervently “Thank you!” & throws his arms around her. He’s so little that his hands reach round her hips but don’t meet.
I say that I can kind of see who's related to who. “Bloodlines,” says the lady farmer. She talks without opening her mouth, & drinks two pink ciders in quick succession.
“If you want to know the weather, ask Barry. He's got a sixth sense for it. He can tell you what's gonna happen next week.”
When I was in London feeling like a very small sprat, I would sometimes amuse myself by imagining any one of the shiny people picked up & teleported to the RSA or the Bowling Club… See how you get on, eh…
After writing all that, I woke up in the middle of the night remembering the best quote, out of the mouth of the mulleted youth: “More pig fat fixes everything wrong with a sausage.”
Everyone agreed, he’s so right— “That's true, that is.”
Sammy, later: “I get on well with RSA types & ferals.”
Me: “Me too, except that being female is a disadvantage.”
Sammy: “They get scared you’ll tell them off for saying cunt.”
This is a true assessment. But they’re wrong— in fact it’s one of my favourite words of all time, undisputably the most powerful word in the English language. Besides, in West Auckland, where I’m from, cunt literally just means a person; as in this cunt here, or he’s a good cunt.
It's still dark when I get on the train. As I sit down, a Muslim girl across the aisle stops watching videos on her phone, removes her headphones, lifts her hands (palms inward), & begins to pray, moving her lips & whispering. She prays for maybe three minutes, then puts her headphones back on & goes back to scrolling. That makes me remember how I'd had an idea to drop by the church, talk to the white man’s God.
A bit later, as the silvery silhouette of Kāpiti appears behind the dark hills, I see that the girl has a prayer app on her phone, minimal, green against black. She says a word under her breath & presses an upward arrow. She’s up to 77, 80. She presses that arrow quickly, so it’s a small word— maybe the name of God— a word with an S in it; I can hear the sibilance across the carriage, a small sound like a distant bird call.
I’m thinking about islands, about places you can see but can’t easily get to, the mystique of that inaccessibility, how they remain imaginary. That’s what England was for me before I went there. I couldn’t see it, not like I can see the snow-mountains of Te Wai Pounamu5 across the water, but I could ‘see’ it through other people’s eyes. The house I was born in— now demolished— is imaginary in the other direction, backwards in time. I can’t go there except in memory (another kind of imagination). Then the sea unfolds itself outside the train window, & I think that the sea itself is a kind of island, a place I look at a lot but don’t often go (into).
In Cuba Mall a zealous young man approaches me, down-at-heel, wide-eyed, wielding an industrial-looking Blue Bible, the plastic-coated kind, made tough for hard bashing. Have I heard…?
“Bro, can you give me a random verse?” I say.
I mean bibliomancy,6 so I’m expecting him to flip the Bible open & point to the page, but he falls into step beside me with his shoulder almost touching mine. His voice drops into a low, slow, open tone, a preaching voice, & he speaks: “Come to me, all of you who are weary & carry heavy burdens, & I will give you rest… Matthew 28:8.”7
That’s all. He wheels away to the next customer, & I see that strapped to the back of his head is a grey devil mask. Street omens; whose was that Greek oracle where you covered your ears & walked away from the temple until the God prompted you to uncover them, then the first bit of speech you overheard was your answer? Hermes? It was Matthew I quoted in my last post8— the sheep & the goats— so I decide I will go to church, St Peter’s on Willis Street, my pick for best vibes. I’ve been to gigs & talks there, but when nothing’s on it’s kind of like a library. Open door, feeling of calm. It’s usually mostly empty, but people wander in & out. (It’s also right next to the Free Store, who give out free food. Around 4.30 p.m. every day you can see the Free Store volunteers rushing through the city with their supermarket-style trolleys to gather leftover food from cafés.)9 I'm thirsty, & just inside the big doors there’s a water fountain— but no cups. I put all my bags down on a pew10 & sit looking round at the windows. They're OK, I guess... England kind of ruined me for churches. I gaze at the nearest one for some time, then suddenly I see— it’s all about sheep. It’s an entirely sheep-themed window:
A guy who’s hurrying through the church stops to ask if I’m OK. He has a beanie, glasses, & kind eyes, & I can tell by the feel of him that he’s some sort of preacher, a parallel species of professional Wizard. He looks like my Aunties & Uncles (that is, he is somewhat Polynesian, a characteristic that often endears people to me). I tell him I’m looking at the sheep window & we talk for a while about sheep & goats. I ask him why are goats bad & sheep good in the Bible? He says he thinks it has to do with animal sacrifice traditions. He tells me about the ancient Jewish custom: take two identical goats. One becomes the scapegoat, takes on the sins of the tribe, & is driven into the wilderness, & the other becomes the sacrifice & its blood gets righteously spilled.11
Me: “They both end up dead, though!… Maybe the moral of the story is that we’re all going to die.”
He says that actually, sheep & goats aren’t even that different— like in the Caribbean, where he’s just been, they use sheep to mow the grass outside the church, & just by glancing at them you’d think they were goats. I say that’s what I’ve just been writing about & show him a photo of the Animal. “It’s a dog.” he reckons.
“But look at its ears… the tail…”
“OK, yeah. I see what you’re saying. I think you’re right, it’s a goat.”
I ask him, how was the Caribbean? He says well, it’s different from Tonga, where he’s also spent a fair bit of time. In the Caribbean, he says, it’s not indigenous in the same way. I say yeah, I met some people from a little island & they told me that the indigenous language of that place has been entirely lost.12 He says many people in the Caribbean have done DNA testing to get more information about their ancestry, but basically they already know how their ancestors got there— brought from Africa on a slave ship. “They’re post-colonial.”
Me: “Aren’t we all?”
Whereas, he says, in Tonga & Samoa people believe they’ve always been there: God made them & put them there & that’s that. Strangely, though, the Caribbean felt homelike to him. The same but different.
He says there’s a missing demographic in the Caribbean, though. Do I know what he's talking about? Yeah, I say, the young people have to leave. He mentions Windrush, & I think of all the Afro-Caribbean folks I met in London, & how I felt Brixton was like Wellington. I ask him does he think that’s happening here? Because I feel like my friends are gone. He says “Yeah, my kids say they’re never going to own a house, but I tell them not to talk like that. They will own houses, but not in the same way my generation owned houses. Maybe collectively, co-ownership, things like that.”
Anyway, we agree, something’s got to give.
We’ve been yarning for a while, & I can see it, the moment he decides we’re done. He has offered me counsel but now he has to go. One last thing, though. “Can I pray for you? It’s my thing, it’s what I do.”
I say “Sure, go for it.” (I’ll take any free magic that’s offered, within reason.)
He asks my name, then talks to his God for me. He starts out by praying that from now on my day gets better, & expands from there…
Me: “Amene.”
Just as he’s finishing up, a scruffy young guy comes into the church & asks if he can play the piano. “Of course!”
He sits down & beautiful music flows from under his hands, filling the big empty box. You can never tell what's inside people.
I leave the church & walk to Duck Island. There’s a crowd spilling out the door— which is not unusual— but today everybody’s wearing cardboard party hats. A stressed / excited staff member hands me one from the top of a nested stack (candy-coloured: baby blue, pink, pale yellow, some gilt-edged), saying “Are you here for the free icecream?”
“No.” I say. “But yes!”
It’s their tenth birthday, & they’re giving it away. The crowd is mostly young women, which does make it feel like a birthday party. I go inside & find a space. Everyone is waiting for the stroke of 12, in a few minutes time. A man with a brindled greyhound is holding his party hat in his hand. He tries to put it on the dog’s narrow head. Mine won’t fit over my hair so I angle it to the side of my head: it’s a Wizard-shaped hat in miniature, like a Wizard-fascinator. Without meaning to, I end up second in line, & I get two birthday flavours in a cone— Chocolate Layer Cake & Princess Cake. Sky Dad moves in mysterious ways, I guess.
The truth is, I am not OK.13
I run into my about-town friend B. outside the op shop & we step into the lobby, out of the biting wind. “How are you?” he asks me.14
I have developed a diplomatic gesture to evade this question. I make waves with my hands, up & down. If I’m talking to someone who can’t handle the truth I’ll say “Riding the waves.” If I’m talking to a comrade, like B., I can just say something like “You know.” With my hands I can make the down-sign, the ebb of the wave. “How about you?”
B.: “Well I’m not very fucking happy.”
He tells me about his eye troubles— a detached retina— shows me photos on his phone: in a hospital bed with a bandaged eye. “You have to lie on one side of your face for seven days, & you can’t even read.”
Then he shows me what happened when the surgery failed. He zooms right in on his phone to show me first one eye, the good one: “So this is like you’re alive, right?” —then the other: “And this is like, they found you dead in your flat with a needle in your arm.” The wounded eye: bloodfilled, bruised.15
He shows me a selfie, face half-smothered in white dressings, cheersing with the mug the ruthless Russian night nurse brought him when, half-blind, he couldn’t work out how to turn the light on. ‘Numpty’ it says on the mug, with a dictionary definition.
He says grief manifests in different ways. He says everything’s broken, everyone’s over a barrel. He says it’s coming for everybody, but at this point some people can still ignore it. I say that we’re edge-dwellers, so we feel it first. When I tell him I went to church then immediately got a free icecream, he says remember you’re vulnerable. (He means, to cults.) I say, don’t worry, I don’t believe in that God, I’m not going to get caught in their net. Still, it’s funny how embarrassing it is to say I went to church, as if it’s a shameful secret. (Why? I guess it feels like a form of capitulation or submission. Monotheism— centuries of subjugation— ‘holy’ wars / killing in the name of— what Christianity did to Polynesia, knocking the cocks off Gods— what Christianity did to women, all the witches they burned— etc. etc.)
He shows me a diagram: how they inject oil into the back of your eyeball. “It’s like looking through bubble-wrap. And you do it conscious— they pry your eye open Clockwork Orange-style & you watch the needle coming.”
Me: “OK, that’s worse.” (Than my problems.)
B.: “Yeah, but saying it could be worse can only take you so far.”
What he means is that the pain of others doesn’t nullify one’s own pain.
Me: “The only solace is in solidarity.”
B.: “Can I give you a hug?”
Me: “Yes.”
His scent is unfamiliar, so I don’t think we’ve ever hugged before. He’s very tall, so my head is pressed against his chest, level with his heart.
At the top of Dixon Street stairs, on a grey-bone Winter tree, a single magnolia flower is poking its dark pink snout from the furred bud. Early vernalisation, poor confused tree… No: not one flower, but two.
Returned Services Association: traditionally for war veterans, now open to the general public
That is, a big deer
This makes the digger driver sound like a dick— in fact he is nice. Country humour is rougher than city humour
Provided you grab the friend skin-to-skin before grabbing the fence, they get an electric shock & you don’t
The South Island
Mancy of the literal Biblio…
I know this is what he said, because I wrote it down; but Matthew 28:8 is “And they departed quickly from the sepulchre with fear and great joy; and did run to bring his disciples word.”
The verse he quoted is actually Matthew 11:28: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
Shit news: just after writing this, I saw that the Free Store have announced they’re closing down after more than 15 years.
“The decision reflects a convergence of challenges that mirror the broader struggles many New Zealanders are currently facing. Including:
A significant drop in funding and regular donations
The emotional toll on staff working daily with highly vulnerable people
An increasingly complex and high-needs clientele, intensified by national policy shifts that have made life more difficult for those in our cities who are struggling”
You who carry heavy burdens…
That makes me think of this embroidermation sequence by Nina Paley (from her film Seder-Masochism, wherein she animates her Dad as Yahweh / a dollar bill & herself as a goat kid.) Chad Gadya = ‘one little goat’
It was St. Vincent & the Grenadines— I wrote about it here:
The Trick of Sinuousness
Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files: “Does an ordinary adult go to work only if they feel in the mood?… A committed artist cannot afford the luxury of revelation. Inspiration is the indolent indulgence of the idler. Muses are for losers!”
Omen-feelings… Dark axe-shaped clouds… A backwards ripple in time… A shockwave from some future bang… Which may now be here…
Usually I check with people whether it's OK to quote them, but this guy is a true street-friend (all I know of him is his name, & the only time I see him is when I run into him) so I've redacted his name instead.
And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee… Then again, consider Odin Hoárr (‘one-eyed’)
My friend Deb shared the following story via email:
"I was in a North Taranaki pub with my mate Pete & his mates & another visiting mate of mine, Jane. We were a few jugs in when the youngest bloke's language began to get very slightly challenging, judging by his mates' glances. All was ok, but he warmed to his grievance, whatever it was, & eventually uttered the inevitable c u n t. Which was ok amongst all of them, but not with 2 Sheilas, they wanted the evening to remain harmonious. Not sure what to do. Weight shifting to the other boot. Pete was staring a reflective hole in the table. Someone looked at the unknown visitor, Jane, perfectly capable with nice jeans, glasses & very long hair.
'Aw,' she said, 'I dunno. Cunt. Yeh. I've got one & it's really nice, eh.'
Seemed to solve it."
I like it. Have to be a Kiwi to understand most of it, but thats its charm. Thanks Rosie. Refreshing.