House of the White Rose Bouquet - Ray Wylie Hubbard

There was a time I was wild, young, and handsome

I was smokin' cigarettes at age thirteen

At seventeen I was drinking in the taverns

With Irish poets, racketeers, and libertines

At twenty-one I was a full-time gambler

A card-squeezer who blistered the

I carried a .32−20 in my pocket

And I heeded not The Gambler’s Fallacy

Thereupon I was asked to be a procurer

By a young woman of desire named Olivia May

So for mutual financial benefits

We opened up the House of the White Rose Bouquet

Olivia was a beauty and quite flirtatious

She enjoyed the company of rakish men

And we fell deeply in love with each other

And prospered in our house of ill-repute and sin

And even though I was in love with Olivia

There were other girls and indiscretions

A patron of the house was a physician

And he gave me a cure for my transgressions

One night Olivia found my hidden blue bottle

With tablets shaped like coffins inside

She mistook them for opiate narcotics

And swallowed the mercury chloride

How my heart died when I found her

In her green beaded dress, dead on the floor

At her service, I cocked my .32−20

For I could not stand the sorrow anymore

Now the House of the White Rose Bouquet

Oh, it fell into disarray and was torn down

The place is now a beacon of decency

For it’s a theatre known as The New Amsterdam

At night after the audience has departed

Never knowing where they was once was a brothel

A figure walks across the darkened stage

In a green beaded dress, carryin' a blue bottle