Lazy Enchiladas—A sincere picture of a selfless love
By Lou Christine July 25, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

How many times have you heard someone say, I am going to write a book? But how many organize thoughts and put them to paper? Not many.

Yet, Lazy Enchiladas: Redefining Success (Bodega Publishing 2009) has come to fruition from fingertips belonging to Denny Durbin.

Some remember Durbin as the one-time affable operator of Agave Azul, a restaurant-bar located on Mesones, a few steps from Teatro Ángela Peralta. After a few years here Durbin and partner, Yvonne, moved to Arizona and opened up another bistro. Between then and now he’s penned Lazy Enchiladas, a nonfiction/quality of life gem.

Durbin was an action guy who provided good times, partied with his clientele, was a trusted friend with a ready shoulder to cry on, an avid animal lover while providing pretty, fair faire. He flashed panache as a diligent barkeep.

Upfront, the book is plain-speaking. Durbin tells the saga of a kid reared in Indiana who first came to Mexico with his adventurous mom to hook up with a pair of older brothers who earlier had left the roost to sniff the world.

They settled in the Lake Chapala area and thus began his right of passage. Later he returned to the States, making his mark in the construction business. Durbin then branched out and accepted other entrepreneurial challenges. As written in the book, it’s never all work. Durbin found time to play, to ski, fish, hunt and partake in other robust activities including copious amounts of wine, women and song. He accumulated material wealth and big-boy toys, all the while sprinting on that nonstop treadmill.

Durbins home-spun story depicts how he grasps onto life itself, a method mirroring his own boyish enthusiasm. He chronicles, step-by-step, the highs and lows after he was whisked from Indiana and ventured into Mexico, to Colorado and Arizona, to San Miguel and back to the States. He modestly recounts firsthand encounters with notables like author Clive Clusser, and how he’s rubbed elbows with actors Johnny Depp and Scott Baio. He shares lessons learned good and bad. Durbin postulates that success is strictly subjective but perhaps “doing,” on its own merit, is the key to success. More than anything Durbin paints a sincere picture of a selfless love that’s blossomed between he and his long-time partner, Yvonne, who for some reason he refers to as Marisa within the book.

Durbin adheres to the old adage, “beauty is only skin deep.” There’s more to love and devotion than showing off a trophy wife with an hourglass figure, sultry lips who might be wrongly deemed as a possession to die for. Yvonne’s (or Marisa’s, if you will) absolute devotion to Durbin is a gimme throughout the yarn. He hammers home how he’s come to appreciate her and how she’s been his rock through thick and thin.

Within the pages of Lazy Enchiladas are mouth-watering recipes the restauranteur has aptly discovered. If one isn’t enthralled with his story, the reader has a bevy of yummy meals at hand.

Lazy Enchiladas is light reading stoked with valuable information and entertaining escapades that might include business, fun-loving or aspects of love. Loyalty too is one of the book’s linchpins. Further advice rendered by Durbin says that even those who consider themselves milquetoasts may be cooler than they think, and that a second career might be sweeter than the first. The author constantly advisies people to “Live Their Dream.”

What might make it intriguing for sanmiguelenses is that about 25 percent of the book is dedicated to the era Durbin spent in San Miguel. Many will recognize rogues he mentions, if only by their first names or affiliations. He also paints a realistic picture of our town. Despite the book not being all that filled with comparisons and similarities, like those that make for thought-provoking literature, descriptions pertaining to San Miguel are vivid. Many of you, like me, will relate to the initial tinges of awe we all may have experienced when first arriving here, like the ancestral charm our town has to offer in architecture and atmosphere.

Also, what I especially liked about Lazy Enchiladas, besides that I am proud of my old buddy being an author (which was sort of surprising), is that Durbin writes in his authentic voice. While taking in Lazy Enchiladas it was as if we were both sipping our favorite repasado tequilas on the edge of his old bar and Denny was just rattling off tasty stories as he did often for my benefit during the old days.

Durbin, within the confines of his story, accepted his boons with a sense of modesty and took his defeats with dignity without casting blame. Seems telling his engrossing story has nurtured a therapeutic effect within his inner self.

All and all the book depicts a man who remains optimistic, is comfortable in his own skin, has come to know the difference between chickenshit and chicken salad and shares much that has formed the man whom I consider a solid dude.

Lazy Enchiladas can be purchased at La Conexión, Garrison and Garrison Books inside Hotel Sautto, or at www.bodegapublishing.com/. 

Lou Christine is a local writer and long-time contributor to Atención.

Book Fever
By Marcia Loy

Three novels from 2005

The most influential books of fiction repeat, rearrange, and clarify the lessons of life.

—Robert Louis Stevenson

Here’s a trio of novels written in the same year, yet very different. One takes place in Indiana in 1972. The next takes place during the Civil War and the last takes place in Pennsylvania and New York and takes a girl from childhood to her mid-thirties.

The Bright Forever, Lee Martin, 2005. This is quite a novel: a suspenseful literary book full of deeply flawed characters who shouldn’t be as likeable as they are. This book was shortlisted for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize; I think it should have won. The story centers around the disappearance of a young girl in a small town in Indiana in 1972. It’s told from the alternating viewpoints of several of the characters.

Excerpt: On the night it happened, July 5, the sun didn’t set until 8:33.

I went back later and checked the weather cartoon on the Evening Register’s front page: a smiling face on a fiercely bright sun. I checked because it was the heart of summer, and I couldn’t stop thinking about that long light and all the people who were out in it… Some of them were on their way to the drive-in theater east of town—a twin bill, Summer of ’42 and Bless the Beasts and the Children.

Others went downtown. Teenage boys were ducking into the Rexall or the new Super Foodliner to pick up a pack of Marlboros or Kools. Couple were strolling around the courthouse square, lollygagging after supper at the Coach House or a steak and a cold beer at the Top Hat Inn. They were window-shopping, the ladies admiring the new knee-high boots at Bogan’s Shoe Store, high school girls looking at the first wire-rim glass at Blank’s Optical, the flared-leg pantsuits at Helene’s Dress Shop, the friendship bracelets and engagement sets at Lett’s Jewelry.

March, Geraldine Brooks, 2005. Here’s an intriguing premise: the story of Marmie’s husband and the father of Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy from Little Women. In that book he was absent, a chaplain in the Union Army during the Civil War. In March he’s the main character through most of the novel. The book has its flaws (especially a sudden shift in viewpoint near the end) but it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006.

Excerpt: I made my way a few rods through the mud and then, where the bank dipped a little, scrambled with some difficulty into a mown field. In the flicker of firelight I discerned a small bad of walking wounded sitting listless in the hollows of a haystack where they would shiver out the night. I inquired from them where the hospital tents had been established. “There ain’t no tents: they’re using some old secesh house,” said a private, nursing a bandaged arm. “Strange place it is, with big white statues all nekked, and rooms filled up with old books. There’s an old secesh lives there, cracked as a clay pot dropped on rock, seemingly, with just one slave doing for him. She’s helping our surgeon, if you’d credit it. She probed out my wound for me and bound it up fine, like you see,” he said, proudly raising his sling, then wincing as he did so. “She tol’ me they was more than a dozen slaves on the place before, and she the only one ain’t ran off.”

The Wonder Spot, Melissa Bank, 2005. The author’s first novel, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing was a huge bestseller. Bank returns with Sophie Applebaum, a lovable young woman with a penchant for bad relationships.

Excerpt: “So,” I said, “what do you do besides wait tables?”

He said, “You know, not every waiter in New York aspires to something else.”

“So you’re a career waiter?”

He said, “I do this and that.”

“Like name one thing.”

He said, “I smoke cigarettes.”

I wasn’t sure why I was uncomfortable, but I thought facts might help. “How old are you?”

He said, “How old do you think I am?” and I thought, Actor.

I said my age: “Thirty-three?”

He picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue. “Why do you want to know?” he said. “You want to pin me down? You want to say, ‘Bobby Guest is a thirty-three-year-old waiter?”

Coming in August: a look at contemporary American mysteries. Happy reading.

Marcia Loy is a member of the steering committee of the Authors’ Sala and a volunteer at the Biblioteca Pública.!