Leaving the Gay Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society

21.

Eight months after Lyndon Johnson’s death, “I conned Texas Monthly into sending me to New York to write about Walter Cronkite,” Al Reinert said. “I stayed at the Chelsea Hotel—right before the Sid and Nancy days. Billy Lee showed up in New York soon after that. He was staying with a mistress he’d once shared with JFK, who was a wealthy socialite in the city now. She had a fancy place on the West Side.”

An “Agreement to Return,” filed with Brammer’s parole officer, said, “I will make my home with Diana de Vegh” in her apartment on Central Park West. He was granted permission to travel by the State of Texas on September 26, 1973.

“I suppose I knew without wanting to recognize it that Billy Lee wasn’t working for the magazine any more at that point,” Reinert said. “He and I stayed in New York for six to eight months. He introduced me to Robert Benton. Billy Lee and I tried to write a screenplay together. . . . We never really nailed it. I had written a private-eye story for the magazine that Billy Lee really liked, and the screenplay was going to be based on that. We were working out of Benton’s office.”

“By that time, I had cowritten Bonnie and Clyde with David Newman, but the partnership was breaking up because he wanted to direct. I was looking for a new writing partner,” Benton recalled. “Al had written a private-eye story, and we all thought we’d do that. We ended up in this fog. We had a wonderful time, and you had the illusion that the work was going well. It wasn’t that it wasn’t any good. It’s just that it didn’t go anywhere. As usual, Bill was blissed out, and his company was beguiling and extraordinary.”

De Vegh had landed a spot in the cast of the television daytime drama All My Children (initially, Brammer reconnected with her when she appeared in Austin, in a play at the Country Dinner Playhouse). Nevertheless, she appeared to be restless. Acting suited her, but she still didn’t seem certain of her long-term career. Clearly, she remained troubled by her old affair with Kennedy. “How do you settle within yourself a pattern of behavior that is a betrayal of someone else’s trust?” she asked a reporter many years later. “There are ‘arrangements’ and there’s a whole rhetoric and a whole kind of nonsense that people talk, but the basic act is betrayal. It’s hard to be a person who is trustworthy, when in your own family you are not.” She appreciated Brammer’s willingness to discuss the vagaries of men and women, and she may have felt a nurturing impulse toward him, given the physical shape he was in. He had arrived at her door more as a friend than as a lover. He didn’t try to minimize the toll the drugs had taken on him—“Absinthe makes the hard grow softer,” he would say. He would fill de Vegh’s antique crystal goblets with Dr Pepper from a can, sit back, and admire her austere beauty in the low candlelight of her dining room.

New York’s literary culture didn’t impress him any more now than it had in the past. “Elaine’s is a pile of shit and the NYC literati ought to get its lumps for all their pompous ‘lit’ry salon’ self-indulgence. Hang around with a recorder and just listen to the bogus boilerplate that passes for La Belle Epoch,” he wrote Grover Lewis. To Lewis, he also complained that the “timorous press and media barons had next to nothing to do” with the “Watergate Apocalypse,” despite their self-congratulations, especially prominent within Washington and New York newspaper circles. Nixon had come “terrifyingly close” to getting away with everything, and would have done so but for a “single Federal judge, a couple of second-line reporters and a tough publisher of one paper.” If Tricky Dick managed to escape prosecution, Brammer predicted he would be “trying to murder these people in years ahead.”

He was paying attention to politics again. He was writing a little—he contacted Don Meredith about doing a piece for Rolling Stone concerning Meredith’s decision to leave Monday Night Football. He was living in a safe, comfortable environment, under the watchful care of a friend. Shelby believed that if he had stayed in New York, he might have had a chance to turn his life around. But his mother died; he felt the pull of home. And under the circumstances—as de Vegh surely knew—betrayal of one sort or another was sooner or later inevitable. So Brammer honored the document he had signed, the one designed to keep him a reputable citizen. He agreed to return to Texas.

It was “one of those roads that made the state of Texas so proud. Graded about the time of Job and paved shortly after the electric cooperatives rendered kerosene lanterns obsolete and rural folks exchanged their outdoor crappers for septic tanks, it served the needs of the farmers and the ranchers and a few reclusive dope-dealers, ushering their produce to market.” So Jan Reid described the trail to Dripping Springs, just off Highway 290 near the LBJ ranch, the path to the first annual Willie Nelson Fourth of July Picnic, a country Woodstock featuring sets by Waylon Jennings, Tom T. Hall, John Prine, Kris Kristofferson, and Rita Coolidge. “It was miserable and great,” Billy Porterfield said later, “one of the glorious heathen stomps between the Americas of J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, and Ronald Reagan.” And it was one of the last glimpses of Texas that Brammer caught before decamping to Diana de Vegh’s apartment in the fall of 1973. In need of money (Texas Monthly only paid about $250 for pieces he couldn’t finish, anyway), he donned a floppy sombrero and a fat red bandanna, stood among air-conditioned Winnebagos in the dusty open parking lot, and hawked concert programs for Willie Nelson. As the sun baked his skin, he recalled standing as a boy in sweltering fields just like this—perhaps this very field—scratching the sticker burrs from his pants and watching as his father and his fellow linemen “clum some,” stringing wires linking the past to the future.

But it was not this old-fashioned Texas he reembraced now, returning from the West Side of Manhattan. It was to the den of the Mad Dogs he came—in a back corner of the Armadillo World Headquarters, in the houses of his buddies Cartwright, Shrake, and Gent. With Dave Richards’s help, the boys had legally declared themselves Mad Dogs, Inc., a loosely affiliated organization dedicated to producing entertainment and serving “writers, lawyers, artists, radicals, politicians, and other ne’er-do-wells.” The group’s rallying cry was “Doing Indefinable Services to Mankind.” Their guiding principle was “Everything that is not a mystery is guesswork.” They invested in the Armadillo, and Eddie Wilson gave them an office in the back. They drew up plans for an underground newspaper, a distribution center for pornographic movies, an Institute for Augmented Reality, and the Mad Dog Foundation for Depressed Greyhounds. They announced their intention to publish the prison poetry of the famous Texas stripper Candy Barr. They looked into buying a town in West Texas where “gambling, saloons, prostitution . . . dueling, spitting in public, lascivious carriage, cohabitation and every other wholesome vice known to man” would be legal. But mostly they got drunk and entertained one another at Scholz’s, performing acrobatics or watching Ann Richards dress up as Dolly Parton.

“I was not terribly impressed with the Mad Dogs,” said Shelby Brammer. “Bunch of silly old men getting wasted and wasting time. I was sorry when Billy Lee came back from New York and got involved with them all again.”

Sidney, still studying acting at the University of Texas, wanted to visit her dad, but “I didn’t like those people,” she said. “Frogs in a self-satisfied pond. They treated Shelby and me . . . well, we were good-looking girls . . . and there’s nothing worse than these leering old men, my father’s friends, hitting on us. And treating us like children at the same time. It was so disappointing.” (At one point, Shrake hired Sidney to do research for a historical novel he planned to write. He told her, “I want you to write the female dialogue for my novel.”) She noted how readily her father meshed with the group: “Bill really did like the women in that scene. And he got a lot of ego satisfaction from being the center of attention with those guys. They were big and drunk and loud. He’d sit quietly and then let out a pithy remark, and they’d fall all over—he enjoyed that.

“Sometimes, I’d go to Bud’s house, and Bill would be in one of his coma-sleeps,” Sidney remembered. “I’d say to Gent, ‘Tell him I dropped by and I’ll come again later.’ When I’d return, Bill had awakened and gone off to Dallas to check with his parole officer or something. I’d ask Gent, ‘Did you tell him I’d dropped by?’ In a drug haze, he’d half stir and answer, ‘Huh?’” She feared her father was finally drifting away from her for good.

At the very least, he was risking hard jail time if he violated his parole. “One night I dropped by Billy Lee’s, and he was on a little trip, and he asked me if I’d take him to 7–11,” Susan Walker recalled. “It was eleven or twelve o’ clock at night, and we get in my car and go to the store. I was so paranoid we were going to get arrested because he walked out with chocolate Popsicles, chocolate soda . . . which I don’t know anybody who did that . . . and chocolate cake icing. I’d always ask him, ‘Why do you leave your goddam spoon in the icing when you put it back in the fridge?’ He’d say, ‘I never know when I’m going to want just one bite.’”

He initiated a brief affair with Bob Eckhardt’s eldest daughter, Orissa, who was living in Houston. “The thing with Orissa—that was a little too incestuous, even for incestuous Austin,” Shelby remarked.

In Austin in mid-May 1975, Orissa’s younger sister, Rosalind, married Stanley Walker, son of a legendary city editor at the New York Herald Tribune. An article about the wedding in the Hays County Citizen reads like a valediction for Brammer’s generation of Texas liberals:

Author Billy Brammer once wrote a book called The Gay Place, filled with charming, frisky people given to politics, romance, and beer drinking in the Austin setting . . . Last Saturday, at an Austin wedding on a hill above Barton Creek . . . people very much like those in the book (in some cases, identical to them) wandered around, sipping, chatting, laughing, remembering . . . Congressman Eckhardt, a Texas legislator of the “Gay Place” era, was at the wedding along with his present wife Nadine. So was . . . Ronnie Dugger . . . Molly Ivins; former state representative Arthur Vance and wife Dorothy. This is not to mention Brammer himself, who padded about with modest mien, thinking who knows what thoughts, as he gazed on the scene, and on the two women to whom he had been married in earlier times: Nadine Eckhardt, mother of his children, and Dorothy Vance. More than a few probably looked at Brammer, too, wondering if he would pull his magic again sometime, and make them live, in a book.

Soon after the wedding, Nadine’s marriage to Eckhardt finally exploded, in another set of incestuous maneuvers. Nadine, bored with her husband and with Washington politics, had moved back to the Eckhardts’ property in Houston. Eckhardt called Celia Morris in New York, having learned of her split from Willie. He told her his marriage to Nadine was a “legal fiction” at this point; they stayed together for the sake of their daughter, Sarah. Eckhardt and Morris became lovers. When Nadine found out, she filed for divorce. She claimed the family houses in Houston and a generous amount of child support. Morris was furious when Eckhardt acceded to all of Nadine’s demands. On one occasion, he returned to New York after a weekend in Texas spent fighting with Nadine, sporting a large black eye. He told Morris a horse had reared on him. “If you think I’m taking a Texas Congressman to a New York cocktail party with a crazy story about getting a black eye from a horse, you’d better think again,” Morris told him. She married him eventually, but the seeds of their future difficulties had been cast.

“[Texas] has had no Homer. Many bards, yes; innumerable village raconteurs, yes; and even, arguably, a few decent writers; but no Homer, and no Faulkner, either . . . no single, greatly-told tragic story. Texas in effect has no vital past.” So wrote Larry McMurtry in the Atlantic. The piece appeared two months before Rosalind Eckhardt’s wedding. He pilloried the state’s fathomless self-admiration:

If I were to choose one example of the Texas penchant for ludicrously overestimating local achievement, my example would certainly be the city of Austin. The Texas intellectual community treats Austin not merely with fond regard but almost with reverence; this, in my view, is the intellectual equivalent of thumb-sucking. My own feeling about Austin is that it is a dismal, third-rate university town . . . I don’t believe it can claim a single first-rate artistic talent, in any art . . . [I]t is a soft-minded city that thrives not because of its intellectual standards, but because of the absence of them.

“Billy Lee was wounded by that Atlantic piece,” Jan Reid said to me.

Absolutely wounded. It was a direct attack on him, and everybody in Austin knew it. People were mortified on his behalf. Let me tell you something about McMurtry. Until his son and grandson became noted musicians in Austin, he had this thing about the town. He hated it because his wife had done whatever she did, you know, ran off with a poet or whatever. His time here had been very unhappy and he took it out on everyone. After Billy Lee was gone, McMurtry was kinder to him. He dedicated his novel Somebody’s Darling to him. He has praised The Gay Place repeatedly in print, for over forty years now, as one of Texas’s finest novels.

Yet in a letter to me dated January 22, 2015, McMurtry claimed he had never read Brammer’s novel. Clearly, he nurtures mighty ambivalence toward Billy Lee Brammer, from residual competitiveness, painful memories, or something else.

In any case, however accurate its portrait of Austin, McMurtry’s Atlantic piece would have fulfilled a greater purpose than literary skirmishing if it had prevented Brammer from becoming one of Texas’s tragic stories. For a while, it seemed to create that effect. On a scrap of paper in his notebook at the time, squeezed over the address of Doris Kearns, Brammer wrote: “Has to do with not being afraid. Or if you are afraid, not letting it show.” Kearns had collected the notes she made when she helped LBJ compose his memoirs; from these observations, she had produced what she called a psychohistory of his presidency, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. She presented Johnson as a true schizophrenic—alternately, a blustering bully and a paralyzed child. Brammer saw an advance copy of the book. Perhaps he recognized this was the volume he should have written. If he had not fallen out with the man, he might have been the intimate confidante living at the ranch during Johnson’s last days. Brammer proposed taping an extensive interview with Kearns “in which we trade off tales of Pumpkin legedermain [sic] and endeavor to confront the unmasked LBJ and shared adventure of experiencing him.” Surely, this was the great tragic story of Texas—of the nation—that McMurtry wanted.

A Playboy editor bit. He encouraged the project. Brammer spent several weeks typing up “Strategies for Pumpkin Article and Doris Kearns Material”—numerous sheets of notepaper covered with dense, single-spaced outlines for an in-depth essay. Though it was simply a set of notes, it was clear, well organized, meatier than anything Brammer had produced in years. Johnson remained his most urgent subject. In laying out questions for his proposed interview with Kearns, he said he wanted to know how she had become the “mother figure to the world’s biggest baby.” “Did she ever get him to discuss intimate biz which find no place in book but illuminate reality of meaningful relationship with Pumpkin (as opposed to brief, brutal never-satisfying conquests characteristic of so much of his time and emotional energies . . .).” “Push [Kearns] for more concrete illustrations of disorder, instability, paralysis in Oval Room.”

For his part, he could supply plenty of illustrations of how “simple distortions of the truth” were a “matter of routine” for Johnson. For example, Brammer recalled how LBJ had developed his ranch lands “as if reclaiming his ‘home’ turf: an aristocratic family gentry pose which he more than half believed. Truth: family relentlessly commonplace; never possessed land in sizable amount, repeatedly in financial squeeze cause of father’s speculation and money panics in early part of century.” “Shacks on ranch cited [by LBJ] as his birthplace. Corrected by mother.”

On a subsequent page, he recorded, “Doris perceives J as devoid of racism . . . not convincing. Not racist in pure sense, but assuredly flawed by preoccupation with racial or genetic stereotypes (smart Jew lawyers, bomb thrower libs, fuzzy thinkers, can-do men, etc., lazy mex . . .).” In a note on “final draft additions,” Brammer concluded that Johnson was a “sophisticated professional who could be unmasked as a helpless, out-of-touch provincial outside [the] disciplines of his crafty, arcane professionalism.” He was only four years older than JFK, “but light-years removed from K’s sensitivity to the mass consciousness of turbulent Sixties. J no sense, never, of these transformations—still in tune with a bucolic Sat Eve Post cover of an America in which citizens honestly believed in July 4th rhetoric.”

As the notes accumulated, as he expended more energy reassessing his old friend and antagonist, Brammer seemed to lose some essential part of his will. He could not overcome whatever fear he felt when contemplating the completed project. He would not see it through. The pages ran out; finally, the typed lines gave way to a barely legible scribble: “One learned a lifetime of lessons from Lyn., and one paid a murderous fee for one’s wisdom—in still another lifetime of mindless abuse and petty humiliation.”

Shortly after the Kearns notes peter out, a page in Brammer’s notebook reads:

Only then, when hands pulled behind and cuffs slapped on, did it occur to me that we were up against some genuinely impatient, pissed-off plainclothes lawmen. Shit. Blubbering, blood dribbling down face, into eyes, blinding, [I] was searched and shoved inside patrol car. At length, we proceeded back round to [the] res, where everyone headed inside except for me and a single patrolman. Perhaps half hour elapsed, passed out a few times, finally cops reappeared, hauled me out of car, asked my name, once again searched me and this time discovering pack of approx. 27 gms. of meth. At this point they yelled a lot of intemperate shit at me . . . and finally sent me to [the] Examining Room—couple hours, diagnostic x-rays, finally to city jail and a place to fall out.

According to Al Reinert, Brammer had impulsively caught a ride that night with a friend—presumably one of his dealers—“who proved to be the subject of a statewide police alert and was soon zooming down South Lamar in Austin barely ahead of several patrol cars. Following the inevitable smash-up, there was a bit of a shoot-out, Billy huddling all the while on the floor of the back seat frantically groping for the plate-glass bifocals he needed to see with. He looked so incredibly harmless that not even the police could take him for a criminal.”

“He was such a trickster,” Nadine said. “He’d play on people’s sympathies.”

It was true, Reinert said: “His many friends were galvanized by pity. Sympathetic journalists censored news of his arrest, several lawyers offered to defend him, bail money was gathered, congressmen and authors voiced respect and even awe for the writer he had once been—all in tones of sorrow for the man he had become.”

On the advice of District Attorney Ronnie Earle, Brammer pleaded guilty—on November 22, 1976, the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. He was fortunate to slip by with five more years’ probation (by this time, he also had on his record a shoplifting charge—he had walked out of a Texas State Optical shop with a pair of glasses). As with his first arrest, he was glad to know his parents would not learn of the incident. His mother had died when he was living with Diana de Vegh in New York. His father was beyond grasping much of anything now, spending his final, frail days in Austin, cared for by Brammer’s sister, Rosa. No amount of electricity in the world could penetrate H. L.’s blindness. “It was really important to Rosa that Billy Lee would come visit his dad, that he stay and have dinner, and he did. He was good about it. In that way, he was a good son and brother,” remembered Rosa’s daughter, Kathy Gunnell. No one said much at the table. His legal troubles never came up. “Oh, Rosa worried about her brother. His parents always did, too,” Gunnell said. “They just wanted to make sure he was safe, had a place to live, had food, had a car. Rosa never really talked about his problems. She just said he lived a ‘bohemian lifestyle.’ A writer, you know.”

Like Sidney, Shelby and Nadine figured writing might save him. Together, they decided Brammer should coauthor a book with Nadine, “a joint memoir about the ‘different trips’ we had taken during the previous decades,” Nadine said. “We thought the contrast would be illuminating” between Brammer’s counterculture prowling and Nadine’s “congressional wife thing.” Nadine pulled together notes from her Washington eras—the parties with LBJ, the workings of the Senate, the illicit affairs of congressmen, the conversations with Daniel Ellsberg (another man for whom she claimed to have played the muse, reportedly telling him that “it would take some event outside of Congress to get us out of Vietnam”; within days, he had released the Pentagon Papers).

One afternoon, excited by the possibilities of the book project, she and Shelby dropped by Bud Shrake’s place in Austin to share their idea with Brammer. “I remember it was a Sunday. There were these outdoor stairs. We climbed them, and Bill came to the door,” Nadine said. “I talked to him for a while.” But then she got the sense that he and Shrake were with a girl, and the three of them were probably engaged in some unsavory game. “Oh my god, I don’t even want to know what was going on,” she said.

She invited Brammer to move into her spacious house in the Houston woods for a while so that they could work on the book together. “I told him I would nurture him, feed him, and so forth . . . trying to get him on a schedule,” Nadine said.

He drove down, bringing a young girl with him. Nadine insisted on a strict nine-to-noon routine, and then a break for lunch. Afterward, they would resume talking and writing together for a few hours in the afternoon. On the first day they drew up a time line. Nadine double-checked facts. He assured her he had been riding in the presidential motorcade on the day Kennedy got shot.

The next morning, he didn’t show at nine. Nadine found him asleep in his room. “He was really like a little old man. He’d get up and look like he just felt terrible, creakin’ around, you know. He was aged beyond his years. He’d been jacked around by cops.” She discovered she really enjoyed talking to him: “He’d resolved a lot of things.” But he insisted he couldn’t write without speed. She offered to take him to a hypnotist who had recently weaned her off cigarettes.

“What shall we work on?” the hypnotist asked Brammer.

“I want to work on my nonproductivity,” he said.

Nadine suggested he also try to lose his kleptomania.

“No, I want to keep that.”

“As soon as the hypnotist began to speak, I went under and got my stop-smoking message reinforced,” Nadine explained. “But as we got into the elevator to leave, Bill pulled out a cigarette and lit it.”

“Ha ha, you didn’t get me!” he said.

He needed to go to Austin to check with his parole officer. As soon as he left the house, Nadine found he had stolen an old pellet gun of her father’s and a few other items he would probably sell for drugs. When he returned to Houston, she confronted him with evidence of the theft. “Insulted and angry, he left the house during the night,” she said. “That was the last time I saw him alive.”

As soon as they were done with the house, once they had all moved on, the place would be uninhabitable for years, maybe forever, until some good soul tore the place to the ground. In the basement, empty two-liter plastic bottles lay beside scattered rolls of aquarium tubing, rusty needle-nose pliers, funnels, Baggies, coffee filters, lithium strips, and little powdered piles of Drano crystals, solvents sitting next to engine starting fluid, boxes of Sudafed and 120-milligram twelve-hour pseudoephedrine. The fumes had seeped into the walls, throughout the house, until the walls, full of carpenter ants—a low, munching hiss—were barely more than pure, hardened smells, evil spirits engulfing the odors of vomit, old shoes, stale clothes. Any new family moving into this house—a suburban split-level on Devonshire, “on the downward slope of its life-cycle,” Sidney wrote—had better not bring a dog. Within days, the poor dog would perish from chemical poisoning. Any child’s toys placed in these rooms—rag dolls, plastic trucks—would need to be tossed. Over-the-counter inhalers would be essential to any family living here, for it was a dead certainty that each member of the family would develop respiratory problems. In Texas, landlords and Realtors were not obligated to warn young couples that the dream house they had just rented or purchased had once been a meth lab, never sufficiently sanitized. “Regulation” was a dirty word in Texas. Any congressman attempting to pass legislation protecting consumers would find himself blocked by powerful lobbyists from the real estate industry. No one really kept track of how many houses, apartments, hotel rooms—or for that matter, open fields, creeks, and drainage ditches—were invisibly ruined by pharmaceuticals.

Periodically, Mexican authorities stopped traffic on the unmapped back roads leading from the mountains of Michoacan to the Pacific coast. There, Chinese ships offloaded precursor chemicals that then made their way to Austin via Nuevo Laredo in the packs of families emigrating from the poor town of Luvianos for construction work; the immigrants, having no choice, were also used as mules by the region’s many drug cartels. Whenever these crackdowns occurred, pseudoephedrine got scarce on Austin’s streets: the “shake and bake” method of making crank, ice, and crystal, using the plastic bottles, was threatened. So Brammer’s new friend, John, a man, Sidney wrote, with “no other cultural apparatus for forming friendships” than cooking meth, substituted phenylacetic acid in the process. He and his fellow smurfer, a dodgy guy named Jerry up from Houston, who shared the house with Brammer and John, carefully measured out sixteenths or eight balls. They figured a two-pound bag of the stuff might bring in ten thousand to twelve thousand dollars.

At this juncture, “low-level violence and motel drug deals were probably an everyday part” of her father’s life, Sidney said. Most of his former connections had either quit using or died. The house on Devonshire became a center of grisly capitalist exchange: John supplied the drugs, and Brammer—still enough of a local literary legend to attract young followers, girls “talking the libber talk but walking the groupie walk”—“got John laid,” Sidney said.

Shelby came by the house one day to tell her father she was moving to New York to act, to write, to immerse herself in the theater world. “He was surrounded by boxes of his stuff. He was so proud of me.” It was the last time she would see him. “When I arrived in New York, he sent me some crystal meth as a present. I was in a show. I took it beforehand. I got so sick I wound up in a medical clinic. But that was what he had to give at that point.”

Most of his old friends tried to avoid him now. “He would come around . . . He’d want to sell you things,” Hugh Lowe recalled.

The things weren’t worth anything—it was a way of trying to get some money without simply asking for money. He’d make these collages, boxes with collages pasted all over them, pictures from magazines and things . . . just speed activity, you know, gotta move, gotta move, gotta dance. They were funny, up to a point, strange little images, but they were onetime jokes. It got so you just didn’t want to deal with him anymore. He was pitiful, he was down . . . but never really horrible, if you know what I mean. He just wasn’t himself. Kind of a shell. But no one I knew ever criticized him, other than to say, “The poor guy’s ruining himself.”

When Brammer’s father died in the fall of 1977, Brammer drove to Dallas in a falling-apart Chevy. He moved back into his parents’ house in Oak Cliff for a few months—mostly to sit alone in the dusty rooms and eat Twinkies, Sara Lee pies, and cake frosting, determining what he could remove from the old homestead. He dumped “table lamps . . . sepia portraits of his pioneer grandparents, his father’s World War I doughboy jacket, his brother’s World War II medals, [and] his own Sunset High School baseball uniform” into the Chevy’s trunk, said Al Reinert. He returned to Austin and conducted a bizarre mobile garage sale. “Sometimes I think [this] was Billy’s revenge for all the gloomy pity we dumped on him,” Reinert said. “He sure didn’t take much pity on himself, and while he may have viewed his situation as uncomfortable, or unbecoming, he certainly never thought of it as tragic.”

Eddie Wilson’s Raw Deal restaurant, a pork chop and steak house, had become a new “in” place for politicians, lobbyists, artists, and writers. It was located on Sabine Street near a police station; inside, a sign above the door said, “It’ll Be Better Next Time.” This referred to the food but might well have expressed its diners’ take on the previous decade. Ann Richards celebrated her election to the Travis County Commissioners Court at the Raw Deal; Molly Ivins showed up with her mongrel dog, Shit; Marge Hershey, a journalist and ACLU activist, entertained people with stories of her distant ancestor, Dr. Mudd. Dr. Mudd had attended Abe Lincoln’s dying assassin, John Wilkes Booth, she said. The Raw Deal featured Brammer in its advertising—the chance to eat with Billy Lee was a heavy local draw. Billy Lee, Jerry Jeff—like these salty ol’ monikers, the place was authentic, it was Texan, it was cool.

“Billy Lee [was] a fantastic conversationalist” over supper, said Michael Eisenstadt, a regular at the eatery. “He knew everybody from everywhere, what they had done and written, and he never, never spoke about his personal problems, which were legion. This was on Friday nights at . . . [the] Raw Deal. He once offered to trade his portable tape recorder for my roommate,” a comely young lady.

With so many old anarchists and hippies moving into the mainstream—owning restaurants, running for office—the time seemed right for a new, upscale alternative newspaper. Jeff Nightbyrd, a former leader of the SDS and the Rag’s cofounder, launched the Austin Sun in the mid-1970s. One of his first goals was to score a piece by the legendary Billy Lee Brammer. Jan Reid had just published a comprehensive history of the Austin music scene entitled The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock. The book was also an elegy for lost dreams: “The world we inherited was a large, disordered mess, and Texas was neither worse nor better than other places,” Reid wrote. Our disillusioned generation was drawn to lonesome ballads in “American taverns,” just as our forebears had been at the end of nineteenth-century cattle drives, places that had “something Puritan” about them, “a darkness without intimacy, as if shame were a requirement for being there.”

Reid’s understanding of the music and of cultural loss appealed to Brammer, and he agreed to write a review of the book for the Sun. It was the last writing he would publish. “From Janis and Threadgill through the acid rockers and up to Willie Nelson’s succession of shit-kicker outdoor agonies—the story is as energized and affecting as the music itself,” he wrote. Nightbyrd was thrilled with the piece, and so was Reid. Like others, so many times before, they believed this assignment might reintroduce Brammer to the muse. “I’m sure he had dark nights of the soul, but he didn’t have that tortured writer sense about him,” Reid said. “I think he was doing what he wanted to do. He was embarrassed that he didn’t have more money. But he was happy.”

Yet even this short review had cost him plenty of sweat. Before finishing the piece, he missed several deadlines. Worried, Nightbyrd sent an aide to Brammer’s place one day to check on his progress. Music was blaring, and Brammer was sitting at his typewriter banging a tambourine on one knee while pecking out the review with one index finger.

For pocket cash, he went to work washing dishes and assisting the chef at the Driskill Hotel—one of LBJ’s favorite old watering holes. Wells Teague, a writer assigned to profile the Driskill for Texas Parade magazine, told the journalist Michael Erard:

I was interviewing whoever I could find there in the restaurant. I’d interviewed the manager, but I had the run of the place, so I talked to whoever was around. When I went back in the kitchen, there was a fellow with this big rack of ribs. He had on a white coat and one of those big hats that cooks wear, and he was just a real nice fellow. We chatted a minute about the operation. When he told me his name, I said, “You gotta be the writer. I’ve read some of your stuff.” He said, “Yeah, that’s me.” And that’s all he said . . . It was real apparent he wasn’t too proud of what he was doing . . . He was mild, and a nice guy. Last time I saw him, he disappeared into the innards of the kitchen . . . to deep-fry several pounds of Port Lavaca breaded shrimp and a box of meat and shrimp egg rolls.

“His friends’ refrigerators [became] swollen with stolen hams, huge buckets of shrimp Newburg, and occasional champagne magnums,” Al Reinert recalled. “Billy himself never wavered in his preference for cake frosting and Pepsi; rather he used his booty to barter for drugs.”

A former colleague from his American-Statesman days, Anita Wukasch, tried to rescue him. “I may have been his last journalistic employer,” she said. “At that time I was working for the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, an entity created as part of the Great Society. Carol Hatfield, Liz Carpenter’s niece, asked me, ‘Do you have anything for Bill Brammer to write? He’s making salads at the Driskill Hotel, and we know that will never do.’ So I commissioned Bill to write a proposal to the Department of Education for funding of a bilingual project . . . Time went by. No proposal . . . On the very last day [before the deadline], here Bill came . . . and [the proposal] was . . . poetic.”

He continued to fill pages in his “Angst” notebook (single-spaced, no punctuation, heavy Xs), but by now he was typing frightened rants (Nadine remained the center of many of these: “She will by god drink yer blood for starters and serve whut’s left for bleeding Mary cocktails”). The house he shared with his new friends, John and Jerry, sat near a federal building out by the airport. He feared authorities kept him under constant surveillance. A woman named Jodi moved into the house, spending most of her days walking topless through the poisoned rooms—Sidney called her, simply, a “crack whore.” Brammer told Jodi he thought he had experienced several ministrokes recently. He thought he was losing vision in his left eye. He did not want to see a doctor, not only because he had no money, but also because he feared a physician’s careful probing would “set free a malignance of such rapacious nast[iness] and bestiality that I will be consumed.”

In one of her last encounters with him, Dorothy saw him at a party at a motel across the street from the LBJ Library. In the pool area, he walked out onto the diving board, fully clothed. He took off his shirt. “He made a perfect dive,” Dorothy said.

“The part of him I never could get was why he so relentlessly strove to quit this fascinating world,” Sidney said. “During the Vietnam era, he’d console my sensitive teen-activist agonies by telling me how Stendhal postponed suicide again and again because of his curiosity about the political situation in France. Stendhal wanted to see what would happen next.”

“I don’t know how much he was looking to stick around,” Shelby said. “If I’d have been him, I’d have been bummed. He had so much potential, and he lost everything. He missed out on us. I have to think . . . He died penniless. He died alone. There had to be a part of him that thought, ‘Fuck.’ I don’t know. But I never heard him articulate it. Always, it was, ‘I know where I’m at. As long as I’ve got my perspective, I’m all right.’”

He called Sidney one day in early February 1978 and told her he had some money in his room—presumably, from a drug deal—and he wanted her to have it. He wanted to help his children buy a house. He wasn’t making much sense. She didn’t know whether to believe him about the money. She told him, “Please, get some sleep.” A few days later, she telephoned the house. A new Richard Dreyfuss movie had just opened locally. She thought her father would like it, and she called to see whether he wanted to go with her. She couldn’t reach him, so she went by herself to a midnight show. “Next morning, he called, incoherent, about the money again. That afternoon, February 11, he died,” Sidney said. He was forty-eight years old.

She got the call from John. In a short story she wrote later, based on the events of that day, her “John” character says, “Somethin’ kinda bad has happened . . . The police’ll probably want something like a next of kin.”

According to the police report, John knocked on Brammer’s bedroom door at about 4:50 p.m. and entered when he got no response. He discovered Brammer gasping on the bed. He attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and then he phoned for an ambulance. Sidney believed he spent some time cleaning up the house before calling anyone. A homicide sergeant named Manley Stevens told the Austin American-Statesman that “several bottles of vitamin B-12 and a syringe were found in the room . . . It appeared that Brammer had been on his bed reading. Several books were found near his bed. ‘It looked like he had been lying [down] with his shoes off.’”

In fact, he had been reading the letters of Ezra Pound: “The intelligence of the nation [is] more important than the comfort or life of any one individual or the bodily life of a whole generation.”

The official cause of death: acute methamphetamine intoxication.