Two Stinky Fingers

Nobody knows why it's two.

Not one. Not three. Two.

Every person who has ever been asked — former members, venue owners, the man at the bait shop on Water Street who claims to have been present at the first rehearsal — has been asked why it's two fingers specifically. Nobody has answered satisfactorily. Nobody appears to know with certainty.

The band, in the one interview they gave (to WOYS-FM Carrabelle, 1984, on a cassette tape that partially survived a 1992 flood), was asked directly. Lead vocalist Curtis "Two-Bit" Ladner said: "You know why." The interviewer said he did not know why. Curtis said: "Then you'll figure it out." He then played a harmonica note that lasted approximately eleven seconds.

Nobody has figured it out. This is the central documented fact of Two Stinky Fingers.

Apalachicola, Florida, 1978. The oyster capital of the Florida panhandle. A town at the end of a road that doesn't go anywhere else, on a gulf that has no opinion about anything you have going on.

Two Stinky Fingers formed because Curtis Ladner had a slide guitar, Eugene "Fish" Fontenot had a bass he'd found in a dumpster behind a bar in Eastpoint and repaired with materials from the bait shop where he worked, and because there was genuinely nothing else to do in Apalachicola on a Tuesday night in August that didn't involve sitting very still and sweating.

The drummer, known only as "Damp" — a nickname whose origin is separately mysterious from the band name — was recruited from Carrabelle. They played the blues. Specifically the blues as it would sound if developed in a corrugated tin building near the water: slower, wetter, smelling distinctly of brine.