the naked guy is dead

Wow. Haven't posted in a month! Guess I've been busy.

Talking to my brother last night, we discussed a random topic -- the death of the "Naked Guy". I found out through an eerie happenstance: I was walking down Broadway in Oakland with Eric, an about-to-graduate UCLA undergrad, heading to Everett & Jones for BBQ with the rest of the Board on Admissions and Relations with Schools for UC. It was quite windy and as we passed underneath the 880, a lot of papers and trash were floating about. Suddenly a newspaper page landed on my leg, and after sticking there for a moment fell away onto the sidewalk in front of me. At the top of the page read a headline proclaiming that Berkeley's "Naked Guy" had died...in jail...of apparent suicide. Apparently he'd suffered from mental illness in recent years (though some would say he did all the way back in the early 90s when he'd strode around the Berkeley campus in the nude) and killed himself in jail.

This revelation juxtaposed creepily with my "Naked Guy" encounter from 1992. A lowly freshman with my nose in a Western Civ text (probably Euripides, whom I always detested), I was walking up the south side of Bancroft Avenue and somewhere in the vicinity of Cafe Milano (still there, I'm happy to say), I literally ran into a pair of buns with the book. My very first thought was, "I hope I didn't cause a paper cut", when the owner of said derierre turned around. I saw he'd been talking to a petite blonde, and he looked down on me as I eeped out an apology. Not that I was intimidated or repulsed by his nudity, but I was awfully embarassed to have run into such a sensitive spot. And I did note that he wasn't walking around naked because of his large...ego.

I remember that we occasionally saw him donning a bandana (large part in front) and we always hoped he sat in the same seat in lecture (I had Anthropology 3 with him, I think) because it would just be too icky to think you might be sitting where he did the previous class. After he'd been expelled for refusing to clothe himself, he supposedly went on a grand speaking tour to lecture college kids about the evils of consumerism that forced Gap tee shirts over our heads (which back then were only starting to break out of the gym clothes-basics that we'd all known in the 80s). I guess one can only go publicly nude for so long (apart from the 12K of Bay to Breakers).

For more on the death of Andrew Martinez aka the "Naked Guy", go here.