Whatever the initial attractions the drug culture had an adverse impact on Brys and by his own admission he was in a very sorry state at the end of 1967. He enjoyed the company of such musicians at the time as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead and was rapidly drawn into the hedonistic lifestyle of that period. In the space of six months an outpouring of seemingly endless invention in sketchbooks and drawings had been reduced to repetitive and meaningless doodling. His occasional bedfellows of the time have kept several of the paintings that he left at their homes. Those that have reappeared suggest that he was attempting to capture the full majesty of the psychedelic experience but, particularly in the light of later digital trickery, failing rather miserably.
The Foundation is seeking to acquire further examples of work from this period for the sake of completeness.

The concerns of his family were apparent but ultimately it was again his grandmother and not his mother that made the decisive action. As noted in the introductory paragraph she gifted Brys the studio in Paris and almost certainly exerted her significant influence to secure him a place at the Beaux Arts in Paris. Her determination to extricate him from San Francisco also went further and she arranged what has been termed his ‘voluntary deportation’ from the USA.

This story has been both embellished and distorted in the telling but the facts are that one evening he was greeted outside a local venue - the Avalon or Fillmore ballroom, depending on the teller - put into a car and taken away not to be seen again in San Francisco for many years. Friends assumed first that he had been arrested then that that he had been forcibly deported but there is no record of any official arrest or action. He had certainly exceeded the limits of a visit to the USA at that time, technically violated work permits and definitely been involved in what the authorities would term undesirable activity. However it is probable that his family accelerated the process of ‘deportation’ privately.