Richard Ramirez Died Today of Natural Causes

Richard Ramirez died today of natural causes Got amped up on speed and broke into houses Bludgeoned people to death and wrote shit on their skin and left 'em They finally got him and he went to San Quentin His last murder was south of San Francisco A guy named Peter Pan from the town of San Mateo A little girl in the Tenderloin was his first In the laundry room, and took a dollar from her fist His last days were at the Bristol hotel I was reading Night Stalker when I went and rang the bell Doorman buzzed me, said, "You're just like them all" Gave me a key and a black cat led me down the hall Had a flight today from Boston to Cleveland Got a death in the family, gotta do some grieving Lost a relative and it's eating me up And I'm aching real bad and I need a little love Richard Ramirez died today of natural causes These things mark time and make us pause And think about when we were kids, scared of taps on the window What's under the bed, and what's under the pillow? And the Jim Jones massacre got in our heads And the TV headlines: "Elvis Presley is dead" And the Ayatollah Khomeini hostages And Ronald Reagan dodging bullets While I'm there, I'm gonna stroll through the old neighborhood Rick Stan's my age and still lives with his mom When he's not in jail for menacing or stalking Or writing bad checks or cocaine charges Mark Denton had such a beautiful smile We always sat on his porch passing the time And drinking a beer and smoking a pack Until one day poor Mark had a heart attack My friend Ben's got a good job as an electrician His sister married the pool shark, Jim Evans And my next door neighbors whom I love so And they loved me too, but they passed long ago (long time ago) And if you walk just a few blocks down Stahl There's a house that was the scariest of them all A cute little palm with a sign, "For Sale" But those Sexton kids' life was hell And I'm telling the truth and if you don't believe Pick up Lowell Cauffiel's House of Secrets Had to fly from Cleveland to SFO Got three months off until my next show Gonna spend time with my girl, make a record this summer Fix my kitchen up and hire a plumber The headlines change so rapidly Then I came to the studio to work on something pretty And I saw the news on James Gandolfini While I was eating Ramen and drinking green tea The Sopranos guy died at 51 That's the same age as the guy who's coming to play drums I don't like this "getting older" stuff Having to pee 50 times a day is bad enough Got a nagging prostate and I got a bad back When I fuck too much, I feel like I'm gonna have a heart attack I woke up today, I saw the headlines An airline crashed, and two people died And I'm at a barbecue in San Rafael And everybody's drunk and feeling pretty well At 53, Richard Ramirez died But in '83, he was very much alive He was the scariest killer in the band He had a pentagram in the center of his hand And everybody remember the paranoia When he stalked the suburbs of Southern California And everybody will remember where they were When they finally caught the Night Stalker And I'll remember just where I was When Richard Ramirez died of natural causes