The man who gained national fame in the early 90s for attending classes at U.C. Berkeley wearing nothing but a G-string, Luis Andrew Martinez a.k.a. The Naked Guy, met his end in a Santa Clara County jail cell where he cinched a plastic bag around his neck and died of suffocation in May 2006. It turns out he was schizophrenic, and after proving "people define normalcy in their own terms" and ultimately getting expelled from Cal, he was in and out of jails and mental institutions where he did not always receive appropriate care. His mother, Esther Krenn, brought a wrongful death lawsuit against the county and yesterday won a $1M settlement on the grounds of "reckless disregard or deliberate indifference" to her son's condition.

Two weeks prior to his suicide, Martinez had attempted suicide and been placed briefly in the jail's psychiatric unit, only to be put back in a cell after promising to try to kill himself again.

See a CBS5 video on Martinez here, and Chip Johnson has a piece about him in the Chron today as well.

San Franciscans who spend any time around 6th or 7th and Market are no strangers to schizophrenia. Lowboy is a new novel that centers on a young man living with the disease who rides the New York City subway believing he holds the key to saving the earth from overheating, and it has something to do with meeting a girl. John Wray, the author of Lowboy -- his third and much buzzed-about novel -- is giving three Bay Area readings this week, including one tonight at Book Passage at the Ferry Building, and one tomorrow night at Diesel Bookstore in Oakland. He sat down with SFist for a few questions (via email).

SFist: What inspired you to write about a schizophrenic, and what research, if any, went into your portrayal of Will Heller/Lowboy?

John Wray: It's hard to say what inspires a given book. I had a friend, growing up, who developed symptoms similar to Lowboy's, but I don't think that's why I wrote the novel. I just saw some kind of possibility there.

As far as research goes, I go about it in the standard painfully boring way, and then, at some point, cut the cord and actually start having some fun. I developed the following M.O. while writing my first book, The Right Hand of Sleep: gather information assiduously until the magical moment when you find that you feel comfortable making stuff up. Then you can really begin.