Doug Supernaw

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.

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"...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.'”

But Tisdale doesn't deny that the charge is legitimate. “I told Doug that ‘Even if it was a setup, well, you fell for it.'”

She believes that Supernaw has fallen in every trap in his path for years. Two women have gotten pregnant by him out of wedlock, she says, both when he was living high on the hog. He's a famous guy, prone to screwing up. The police all know when he's in the vicinity, and he seldom fails to give them legitimate reasons to haul him in. If his paranoid fantasies were just that in the beginning, his actions have made them real.

And there's just enough truth in his ramblings to make Tisdale wonder about some things. Her own sanity, for one: “He's been living here a long time and there are some times when I think, ‘My God, I am starting to believe this crazy shit,'” Tisdale says. “You start to think you're goin' flippin' nuts yourself.”

And then there's that implanted microphone. Supernaw said the French put it in there in 2002. He has even shown Tisdale where it went in. She doesn't buy his idea of what it is — “He says it makes it so everybody always knows where he's at and what he's doing. And I'm like, ‘No Doug, you tell everybody where you are.'” But there it is, anyway, a little bump that gets bigger and smaller.

“I pulled up bipolar disorder on the Internet a while back and I read that sometimes they will put something in your head under your skin that releases chemicals to help the situation,” Tisdale says. Nobody really knows what happened in that French hospital — Supernaw was all alone, and all anybody has of his stay there is his account. “I'm starting to think there really is something up there,” she continues. “Maybe it's that chemical thing, or maybe there's something else. Maybe there's something up there that is twisting against part of his brain. Who knows?”

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“Somehow through the pain / I'll grab hold of the reins / And all will end up well / When I stop this carousel.”

— “Carousel”

As of this writing, Supernaw is in jail for failing to appear on the Humble pot charge. After his bond was initially set at $10,000, it was doubled. Tisdale doesn't know how to break the news to Supernaw. “I'm afraid to tell him because he's gonna think they're railroading him,” she says.

Supernaw could walk on this simple marijuana possession charge, if only he would plead guilty, Tisdale says. He would be fined, maybe be sentenced to a few days in jail, perhaps be released for time served. But Tisdale says he would prefer to have another day in court, where he could prove that the arrest was a setup. “To me, he sees it as a fight against the judicial system,” she says. “I think he is just addicted to being a rebel. Is that something? Some people are addicted to sex, so an addiction doesn't have to be a drug. He thinks that he knows what he's doing and that it's what made him big. And I'm like, ‘Negatively big!' For some people that works, but for him it isn't.”

And Tisdale isn't sure she wants him released, at least not on his terms. Tisdale says a mutual friend had offered to pay the $10,000 bond if Supernaw would consent to a psychiatric exam. “I told him that our friend wanted to do it his way,” Tisdale says. “But he said he wanted a friend to come get him out, not a friend that was gonna come get him out and put rules on him.”

And yet, she's not ready to sever ties with him. She can't quite bring herself to put the tough in her love. “He wants to go cut his hair and get cleaned up and go to Nashville,” she says. “We were gonna drive there. All of a sudden it was ‘we.' At least now he is almost acknowledging that I am somebody that's in his life that could actually be his girlfriend.”

“There's any number of things that could happen to Doug right now,” White says. “He could say the wrong thing to somebody in a bar and get the livin' shit beat out of him. Or he might lunge at a cop the wrong way and get plugged, or he might get drunk and drive and run over somebody.”

On good days, Tisdale says, Supernaw is still a good father. “Doug sent his daughter's present to her school on her birthday just the other day,” she says. “He's got the biggest heart, a heart of gold when he's in the right frame of mind. But when he's in that anger mode, he could care less about anything. He doesn't care about being arrested and he tells me that and I go, ‘You need to care! Stop that!'”

And she says his talent is still more or less intact. “He's got this fabulous new song about his no-good buddies called ‘The Company I Keep,'” she says. “It's a slow ballad that will put chills on your arm. It's classic Doug Supernaw. And that's what sucks. That's the talent that he's got. I mean, people will record him all day long, but who is gonna put him on a label and take the chance on him? He's saying all these wacko things.”

“He just wants to be such a rebel,” she says. “He thinks that being a rebel has got him where he is today. And I say, ‘No it didn't, because you weren't a rebel then.' His talent got him where he is, and his rebel-ness became his downfall.”