He was known around the world in the early 1990s as the "Naked Guy," the 6-foot-5-inch-tall student who went to class and strolled around the University of California at Berkeley campus wearing only shoes and a backpack.
For Luis Andrew Martinez, clothes were a symbol of elitism and repression, and he planned to spend his life challenging the status quo.
Martinez died this spring at 33 in the throes of schizophrenia, though stories about his death made only vague references to mental illness. His nearly 10-year descent into a dark world of jail and hospitals was too painful for his family and friends to talk about right after he killed himself May 18.
But in the nearly six months since, the people who knew him best realized there was much to celebrate. They honored his short life at a public memorial last week in Cupertino, Calif., the city where he was a star football player and wrestler, where he took his first nude walk and where his dreams to change the world were born.
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"Andrew once wrote, 'It would really be sad if all I was ever known for was the Naked Guy," said his mother, Esther Krenn of Cupertino. "He wanted to be known as someone who made a difference."
"At a time when everyone is so concerned with what everyone else thinks and what they're wearing, Andrew never did," said Bryan Schwartz, a civil rights lawyer in San Francisco who had been best friends with Martinez since junior high.
They met on a class field trip to the opera and traded Eddie Murphy jokes to pass the time. Their bond grew in leadership class in the eighth grade.
"He started to exert an influence on a lot of people around him," Schwartz said. "I suppose being that way, having such a strong sense of self in the eighth grade, is pretty radical."
In high school, Martinez stood out on the varsity football and wrestling teams. He was honored as best offensive lineman by his team his senior year; the league the school played in named him best defensive lineman.
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He was often late for class in Advanced Placement economics because of pickup games on the school's sand volleyball court. "The teacher couldn't get mad at him," Schwartz recalled. "He was an exceptional student, and the teacher would simply shake his head and say, 'Andrew, Andrew, Andrew.' " Until his senior year of high school, Martinez planned to be "a prosperous business guy," Schwartz said.
Then he read Thoreau and Emerson and found himself deeply moved by ideas about living a simple life. He joined the speech and debate team, discovered a talent, and began to reframe his ideas.
Lauri Dietz was Martinez's girlfriend then.
"Many of our dates were spent going to the library," said Dietz, now an assistant professor of English and director of the writing center at Angelo State University in Texas. "He was researching nudity laws at the time."
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Martinez, she said, wanted to know whether nudity laws were based on hygiene. "If that were the case, he'd wear clothes," she said. "But if they reflected puritanical values, then he'd proceed with his statement."
His first nude outing was right after graduation. He walked around the block clothed first to ask neighbors whether they would be offended if he went nude. Many were indifferent.
Martinez entered UC-Berkeley in the fall of 1990 with 14 credits from Advanced Placement courses. He became active as an advocate for the homeless, and he shaved his head when he joined the judo team.
He became the Naked Guy in 1992.
Martinez started going to class naked and fulfilled his dream of speaking out in Berkeley's Sproul Plaza when he organized a nude-in. He was an instant hit with the media; stories about him, many with carefully cropped photos, ran around the world.
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"He felt that people should be free to be who they are," said the Rev. Jamie Dollins, associate minister at San Dieguito United Methodist Church in Encinitas, Calif., who met Martinez during their freshman year, when they lived in the same dorm. "He talked about how these were Victorian, antiquated principles that kept us repressed."
Martinez was on CNN and appeared nude on "Hard Copy" and "The Maury Povich Show." He was asked to wear a bikini brief for "The Montel Williams Show."
His philosophy and celebrity came with a price: The school and Berkeley banned public nudity, which led to his arrest and expulsion. He was suspended first but showed up nude for a meeting with the UC-Berkeley chancellor.
"Nude wasn't his cause. Freedom was his cause," said Micaela O'Herlihy, a painter and filmmaker in Milwaukee who counts Martinez as her first boyfriend. "He could convince anyone this was a righteous path."
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The university expelled Martinez in January 1993, but he remained in Berkeley, studying judo and traveling to competitions in France and England in 1995.
That fall, signs of trouble appeared.
"He was more and more finding himself in jail and not knowing what was going on in his head," O'Herlihy said.
Martinez's words became jumbled; confusion and fear replaced his good cheer, paranoia his zest for life. The man known as a consummate communicator could no longer connect.
"It seems like he time-warped the last 10 years of his life," O'Herlihy said. "At one point, it seemed like he gave up and succumbed to the system when he realized the help he needed wasn't possible to get."
Martinez sank deeper into a disease no one could seem to control, spiraling from jail to hospitals to halfway houses and back to jail again.
"He was a brightly burning fire," Dollins said. "That may be why the blaze went out so early."
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