[Verse 1]
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 [beat?]
I carried a .32-20 in my pocket
And I heeded not The Gambler's Fallacy

[Verse 2]
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

[Verse 3]
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

[Verse 4]
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
[Verse 5]
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

[Verse 6]
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

[Verse 7]
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

[Verse 8]
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