When we moved to the North Shore of Massachusetts in 1989, I kept hearing one name from other doctors: Jon Sarkin. They talked about his hands. He was one of the first chiropractors to use blocks as part of Sacro Occipital Technique, and his results had a reputation.
Later that year I called him and we went to dinner. I was 23, about to get married, and itching to open my own practice. Jon was 36, married with two kids, and had just come through something that would have ended most people’s careers. We became friends almost immediately.
What happened to Jon
In 1988, Jon developed tinnitus and hyperacusis, a ringing in his ears and a painful sensitivity to certain sounds. Surgery to treat it led to a cerebellar hemorrhage, and the hemorrhage led to a stroke. He woke up deaf in one ear, his vision fractured, his balance permanently off. Part of his brain had been removed.
What was left rewired itself. Jon started drawing, and then he couldn’t stop. Making art became the way he recovered. He went back to practicing a couple of days a week, but it was clear where his life was going.
The basement
Jon was the person who introduced me to CompuServe and the early days of registering domain names, years before most people knew what either was. When he decided to sell his practice, I helped him do it. As a thank-you, he invited us over for dinner, and he gave me a framed original chiropractic diploma from 1911. I still have it.
Before we ate, he insisted on taking me down to his basement. I wasn’t ready for it. It was full of sculpture: versions of the Chrysler Building, and a New York taxi door wired to light up with a line from Taxi Driver. It was obsessive, funny, and completely unlike anything I’d expected from the quiet chiropractor upstairs.
The next day I told one of my patients about it. He happened to be the editor of the local paper. He assigned the story, and a few weeks later Jon’s work ran across several pages of the Sunday edition, with photographs. It was one of the first times his art reached anyone outside his house.
The work
Jon’s art pulls from pop culture, literature, and music, layered with words, faces, and fragments that look like a mind thinking out loud. In the years since that basement, it has drawn attention from art experts and from people who’d never set foot in a gallery.
I own many of Jon’s pieces now. None of them has a name.
What stays with me is that night in the basement, and a friend who lost one life and built a completely different one out of what remained.
