Lyrics House of the White Rose Bouquet - Ray Wylie Hubbard

House of the White Rose Bouquet

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