| There was a time I was wild, young, and handsome
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| I was smokin' cigarettes at age thirteen
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| At seventeen I was drinking in the taverns
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| With Irish poets, racketeers, and libertines
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| At twenty-one I was a full-time gambler
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| A card-squeezer who blistered the
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| I carried a .32−20 in my pocket
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| And I heeded not The Gambler’s Fallacy
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| Thereupon I was asked to be a procurer
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| By a young woman of desire named Olivia May
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| So for mutual financial benefits
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| We opened up the House of the White Rose Bouquet
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| Olivia was a beauty and quite flirtatious
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| She enjoyed the company of rakish men
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| And we fell deeply in love with each other
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| And prospered in our house of ill-repute and sin
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| And even though I was in love with Olivia
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| There were other girls and indiscretions
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| A patron of the house was a physician
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| And he gave me a cure for my transgressions
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| One night Olivia found my hidden blue bottle
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| With tablets shaped like coffins inside
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| She mistook them for opiate narcotics
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| And swallowed the mercury chloride
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| How my heart died when I found her
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| In her green beaded dress, dead on the floor
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| At her service, I cocked my .32−20
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| For I could not stand the sorrow anymore
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| Now the House of the White Rose Bouquet
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| Oh, it fell into disarray and was torn down
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| The place is now a beacon of decency
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| For it’s a theatre known as The New Amsterdam
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| At night after the audience has departed
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| Never knowing where they was once was a brothel
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| A figure walks across the darkened stage
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| In a green beaded dress, carryin' a blue bottle |