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Pam had practically skipped out of the office as they went to Poor Richard’s to watch the ad air. Over the next few days, there had been begging and pleading on her part and even one instance of bargaining of sexual favors in exchange for The Story of Jim Halpert and His Guitar, as Pam had come to title it.
Jim told her how he came to be a guitarist (her choice of word): after a basketball game at a neighborhood park when he was 13, he and his friend Drake were walking back to his house for lunch. They passed a yard sale in Jim’s neighborhood with the usual assortment of yard sale crap. Drake bought a catcher’s mitt for $3; Jim bought a guitar with two strings missing for $11.
Like most males, Jim had purchased the guitar with hopes that it would send loose girls his way. It didn’t take him long to learn that 1) guitar was hard to learn and 2) girls’ clothes did not magically fall off when they heard 13-year-old boys play said guitar.
That was the official story, according to Jim, in all its glory. Somethings he could not bring himself to tell Pam.
Like the fact that while guitar does not equal girls with loose morals, it did provide a wonderful solace for him. When he had a rough day, which wasn’t too often for a boy with shaggy hair, an easy smile and endless charm, he retreated to his room to fool around with it. It was something he messed around with on dull weekends and when he was feeling introspective.
When Jim was 13 and when he was in his twenties and everywhere in between, his guitar had been his expression when words failed him. He felt through the combination of chords.
But, things change as they often do. Jim fell in love with a curly haired girl who was in love with someone else. He turned to his semi-forgotten six-string for the love his curly haired girl couldn’t (wouldn’t) give him. A lot of nights, Jim went home after work and made himself endless rum-and-Cokes and threw himself into play songs he had learned when he was during the horrors of puberty and learning new ones during the horrors of….whatever this was.
He doesn’t tell her that since he bought the old instrument at that yard sale, it was (is) a solace for him when the world isn’t as sunny as he would like. Something he retreated to many times when she was in a different home, with a different man.
Even while he dated Karen, playing guitar was still his haven, but he didn’t drink and play like he did with the Pam-and-Roy fiasco. He wouldn’t let himself slide back into that.
And now, Jim still loses himself when he plays guitar. He turns into himself, and to the music. He becomes introspective and quiet and it’s obvious enough for any viewer lucky enough to witness his playing to see. The afternoon sun illuminates him, as he contorts his lanky body around his guitar.
And Pam likes to watch. She loves guitarist Jim—the way his passion for the music is evident in every strum and every word he sings.
He always plays barefoot, with his eyes closed, hair hanging in his face.
She watches and listens and soaks him in as he plays modern stuff, very angst-riddled music that teaches Pam the meaning of the line I emptied out my veins onto the page. He’ll play Cinderella Story by the Plain White T’s and lose himself in the emotion of it. She tries not to think about any personal connections he might have to this song.
Why don't you tell me to believe?
Why did you let me leave?
It's not the way it's gotta be.
What's wrong with me?
It’s funny, actually. She knows that he knows Hey There Delilah and teases him mercilessly for knowing all the words and chords to every twelve year old girl’s favorite song of the summer. Friends Don’t Let Friends Dial Drunk is also in Jim’s Songs of the Shower compilation, which Pam likes to listen to from her bed, half asleep and giggling at his asinine early morning antics.
You only call me after you've had a few
You only want to hang out when you've got nothing to do
A friend of Pam’s from one of her art classes had introduced her to Taking Back Sunday. She was not a big fan of theirs; she thought you were supposed to sing lyrics, not scream them. But Jim loves them. And he plays their songs. A lot.
It’s with their songs that Pam wonders how Jim lived through the hell she put him through, he plays and sings with such conviction, emotion written all over his face.
When he sings why can’t I feel anything from anyone other than you, and all of this was all your fault, she can’t help but feeling guilty for how close she came to destroying this wonderful man.
And she is so unbelievably thankful that he didn’t stay wrecked, as the song says.
This all was only wishful thinking,
this all was only wishful thinking
He starts playing Hurt, telling her before he begins that it is homage to the Johnny Cash version, not the original, to which Pam really doesn’t understand why that is important. He only makes it to I hurt myself today/To see if I still fee/I focus on the pain/the only thing that’s real before she abruptly clasps her hands on the neck of his guitar and asks him not to play it again.
What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know goes away
In the end
He knows more Jimmy Buffett songs than she can recognize; he has well over a hundred of Buffett’s songs on his iPod. She calls him a closet Parrot Head and he tells her, indignantly, that he has no secrets nor he is a closet of any sort.
He plays Playing the Loser Again, the saddest Buffett song she has ever heard.
Don't give me hope
Then take it away
Cause I'll show my weakness
And beg you to stay
Don’t give me something to build all around
And just for a thrill, you tear it all down
He has a play list on his iPod entitled “SIWTL” that they listen to nightly as they fall asleep. Pam struggles for a few days with what it stands for. She comes up with “sleep inducing” and then stalls. Some of the songs aren’t even remotely sleep-inducing.
When she asks Jim, he replies, emotionlessly, “stuff I want to learn.” The songs on this list are even more varied than the ones he knows how to play.
Warren Zevon is on this list. Pam had never heard of him until this SIWTL list and Jim makes a ridiculously huge deal about her never listening to him, going as far as to pull up a page on Wikipedia about him. Jim wants to learn to play My Shit’s Fucked Up, which Pam finds is a lot less humorous than it sounds.
It has to happen to the best of us
The rich folks suffer like the rest of us
He giggles every time Unrequited to the Nth Degree comes on at night. He had also made a big deal about not knowing who Loudon Wainwright III was, but she has come to realize Jim, sometimes (most of the time), can be a music snob.
Oh, I'd be dead but you can bet your life, I'm gonna get you back
He knows how to play some of Wainwright’s stuff, like So Damn Happy. When he plays it, he tells her he could’ve written it about his break up with every girl before her. She hears “every girl before her” as Karen and gives him a dirty look. Pam doesn’t like to talk about her. And, she feels bad about the whole… debacle with her.
The sun should not shine when there's rain
I should be in a lot more pain
At least I should feel slightly crappy
But the sad thing is I'm so damn happy
Jim just tells her he loves her, because (one of many reasons, he clarifies) that if he had stayed with Karen, she wouldn’t have felt bad for Pam.
Something Corporate songs are like that, too—some are on the stuff-I-want-to-learn list and some he knows how to play.
His favorite is She Paints Me Blue; hers is Letters to Noelle—she loves it for the guitar solo halfway through the song. But she loves the way he dances, in all his goofy glory, to Babies of the 80s when it comes up on shuffle while they wash their dishes after dinner.
She smiles, taking off her shirt
Standing still, this world moves faster
In bed one night, as he moves on top of her, sweaty and naked, and tells her in that breathy voice, of his that she’s his reason for breathing, that he relies on her like yellow does on blue as She Paints Me Blue plays on the little speaker he has. After that, she decides her favorite Something Corporate song is She Paints Me Blue after all.
When Death Cab’s What Sarah Said starts, he’ll sigh heavily, and even in the dark, she knows he has that far away, distant look in his eye. Sometimes, he’ll roll away from her. She knows not to ask why; she gets the feeling she may not want to know his answer.
'Cause there's no comfort in the waiting room
Just nervous pacers bracing for bad news
Sublime’s Garden Grove is in the want-to-learn list. She knows Jim occasionally blazed up with Mark, and once, comically enough, with Ryan, to appreciate the song’s place on the list. She always though Sublime was overrated, though.
If you only knew all the love that I found
It’s hard to keep my soul on the ground
The next day, she asks him to play the last thing he learned. He plays While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Listening to him play this makes her want to rip all of his clothes off, right then and there in his living room while Mark is in the bathroom.
With every mistake we must surely be learning
Still my guitar gently weeps
But then he’s leaning the guitar against the wall and sliding his feet into well-worn sneakers. He’s smiling again. His hair hangs against his forehead, no longer hiding his eyes. Jim is back to being regular Jim. Pam’s boyfriend. Mark’s best friend. Best Dwight-pranker. Assistant Regional Manager of Dunder Mifflin, Scranton.
Then he’s shrugging off his talent, saying it’s nothing. Saying it’s just a hobby. Something to occupy lazy weekends.
And it’s then that Pam hates him. Hates the fact that he denies that he is passionate about anything. Hates the fact that he doesn’t take his talent seriously. Hates the fact that he calls it “nothing”. Someone other than Jim told her many times that her talent, her love, her art was “nothing.” So much that she had begun to believe it herself.
Pam hates this about Jim because it’s this aspect of his life that reminds her of her own past, when she dismissed her talent and passion. Hates the fact that he is settling, like she once fought so hard to do.
And she hates herself for not knowing how or when or the best way to push Jim like he pushed her to realize that she was more than she thought.
She worries about that. Sometimes, it keeps her up at night.
Story Notes:
This is my first story, so let me know what you think please. Also, there were somethings that got messed up when I uploaded it; I think I got them all straightened out. Anyways, I apologize if I missed something.
katiej is the author of 0 other stories.
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