Doug Supernaw

While out on bail, Supernaw headed south to Mexico, ostensibly to perform a few shows. Originally, the plan was to stay a week, but Supernaw extended his sojourn for quite some time. Soon enough he started getting in some trouble down there, and he was eventually deported by the Mexican government, White says. They shipped him back to Texas, and he was greeted at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport by squads of police from several agencies. According to The Eagle, Supernaw would later grouse in courts that he “would expect no less for Osama Bin Laden.”

At some point around this time, Supernaw went to France on a vacation with friends. “He went with a bunch of people and he got separated from them, and the plane was leaving and he wasn't there and so they left,” Tisdale says. “And supposedly they found him in his underwear. And of course over there in Amsterdam or France or wherever he was, you can buy whatever kind of weed you want, or mushrooms.”

White remembers it differently. “He was butt-naked, and he was mumbling something about how he was running from the people who had chopped his wife's head off. Debbie wasn't even on that trip.”

White and Tisdale both say that Supernaw didn't know his own name when he was picked up, so he was taken to a psychiatric ward — the so-called “mentally retarded home for terrorists” — until he collected himself. Doctors there patched together his identity and sent him home, where there was another surprise in store for him — an intervention. White was there.

“He accused his dad of arranging the whole thing,” White says. “And his dad just said, ‘Yeah, Doug, I got you stoned, stripped off all your clothes and pushed you out into the street.'”

According to Tisdale, Supernaw agreed to go to treatment at the intervention and then backed out. Meanwhile, his legal woes continued to mount. 2003 was a fairly quiet year by his standards, but the springtime of 2004 brought a new tide of arrests, dutifully reported by The Eagle. According to Eagle reporter Craig Kapitan, Supernaw was arrested twice in April for possession of marijuana, once each in Austin and Fayette counties. In May, he went to court on a bail-jumping charge.

The next month, Supernaw would add a few more pages to his rap sheet with one of his most bizarre capers yet. According to reports in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times and the Amarillo Globe-News, former Houston Astros outfielder Glenn Wilson, who was then the manager of a Robstown-based, unaffiliated minor league baseball team called the Coastal Bend Aviators, invited his old buddy Supernaw to ride the Aviators bus with the team from Corpus Christi to Amarillo. Later, the Caller-Times reported allegations from several players that Supernaw smoked marijuana in the bus's bathroom. The players would also say in the Globe-News that Supernaw was “just a groupie,” while the singer himself claimed to have been slated to pitch every fourth day in the team's starting rotation. Before the road trip was over, the singer would get arrested in Amarillo three times in one week, on charges of marijuana possession, trespassing and for missing yet another Washington County court date. Despite singing Los Lonely Boys' “Heaven” on the stand in his own defense, he would end up spending two months in Amarillo's Potter County Jail.

Save for a bail-jumping charge and a driving while intoxicated rap in Austin County, all was quiet until March of 2005, when he was arrested in Bryan for the “Gin and Juice” escapade.

According to Kapitan's arrest log in The Eagle, the month after that, free once more, Supernaw traveled north of Texas, where he was arrested in Lawton, Oklahoma, for disturbing the peace. Later that same month, Fayette County authorities issued a warrant for his pot possession case there, while July found Brazos County authorities issuing yet another warrant, this time after a bondsman told a judge that Supernaw had been AWOL for three weeks in the aftermath of the “Gin and Juice” caper.

Last November, the Chronicle reported that Supernaw was arrested and charged with marijuana possession after an incident in an Humble nightclub, and The Eagle reported that he was arrested a month later in Conroe and charged with his second DWI. Then there was another Montgomery County public intoxication charge on April 13.

And then on April 25 he was picked up again for missing a hearing after the Humble pot bust, which is how I finally got to talk to him face to face in Harris County jail.

"...And the brightly painted ponies / They have feelings inside / Like me do they ever want / To get off of this ride”

— “Carousel”

Tisdale was with Supernaw on the night of his Humble pot bust. There had been a disagreement with some of the other patrons that night, and Supernaw believes they called in a favor with some powerful friends. And just like Supernaw says, she thinks it did look like he was set up. “We did not have one thing on us and when I saw that guy get that out and light it — I thought it was a cigarette but then I smelled it and I said, ‘Doug, we need to go. Let's move away from this person. This is not gonna be good.'”