Part 2: Every Time We Crossed A State Line, He Tapped His Gas Tank Twice — I Spent A Whole Summer Riding With Him Before I Understood Why
Frank Delgado was born in 1966 in a small town called Belen, New Mexico, about thirty-five miles south of Albuquerque on the I-25.
His father’s name was Hector Delgado. Hector was a long-haul trucker for the first half of his working life and a transmission mechanic for the second. He had ridden motorcycles since he was fourteen years old. He had owned a 1965 Harley-Davidson Panhead since 1971, paid for with a year of overtime on a refinery job he hated, and he had ridden that Panhead, by his son’s count, in forty-seven of the lower forty-eight states by the time he taught his son to ride at the age of twelve.
Hector taught Frank to ride on a beat-up Sportster behind the transmission shop in Belen in the summer of 1978. He taught him to ride the way men of his generation taught their sons to ride, which was without much talking. He taught him to roll into a corner. He taught him to look through the corner, not at it. He taught him to keep his weight on the pegs in crosswinds.
And he taught him the tap.
The first time Frank crossed a state line on his own bike — coming back into New Mexico from Texas on a Saturday afternoon in 1984, eighteen years old, on a borrowed Sportster — he was riding next to Hector on Hector’s Panhead. The state line sign came up. Hector tapped his gas tank twice. Frank, who had ridden with his father for six years by then and had seen him do it a thousand times, finally asked.
Frank told me this part word-for-word, sitting at that diner counter outside Rawlins, three thousand miles into our ride.
Frank had said: “Apá. What’s the tap?”
Hector had said: “Mijo. The bike got us across. The tap is how you tell her you see what she did. And how you tell her you’re going to keep going.”
Frank had said: “That’s it?”
Hector had said: “That’s it. Two taps. One for thanks. One for let’s go. You don’t talk to a motorcycle with your mouth. You talk to her with your hands.”
Frank started doing it that afternoon.
He has done it every state line since 1984.
I want you to understand what Hector Delgado was like, because the rest of this story does not work if you do not understand him.
Hector was the kind of biker who did not belong to a charter. He had ridden alone his whole life. He had crossed the country eleven times on his Panhead. He had taken his wife Esperanza on the back of that bike to twenty-six national parks before she died of cancer in 1991. He had taught his only son not just how to ride but how to live next to a motorcycle — how to clean her, how to listen to her, how to know which sound meant I need attention and which sound meant I am fine, leave me alone.
Frank rode with Hector every weekend from 1984 until 1994.
A decade.
Five hundred and twenty Saturdays.
They rode the same routes over and over. Down the I-25 to Hatch and back. Up the 550 to Cuba and back. Out the 66 — what was left of it — to Tucumcari and back. They did not need to talk. They tapped at the state lines when they crossed one, and they tapped at certain other places that were private to them, and they rode home, and they shared a beer in Hector’s garage, and that was a weekend.
Frank told me — at the diner, three a.m., with the waitress at the other end of the counter pretending not to listen — that he had spent more hours next to his father on a motorcycle than next to his father anywhere else on earth. He had spent more hours next to his father at seventy miles an hour with the wind making it impossible to speak than he had spent at his father’s kitchen table.
He had loved his father in a way that did not need words.
The tap had been their language.
In the spring of 1994, Hector Delgado was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
He was fifty-three years old.
The doctors at the hospital in Albuquerque told him he had six months. They told him the treatment options were limited. They told him the best he could hope for, if he started treatment immediately, was maybe twelve months of life that would be increasingly difficult.
Hector listened to all of it.
He went home. He sat in his garage. He looked at the 1965 Panhead for a long time. Then he called his son and asked him to come over.
Frank was twenty-eight years old. He had been married for three years. He had a son named Marco who was eight months old.
He drove over to his father’s house in Belen on a Saturday in May.
Hector was sitting in the garage on a metal folding chair next to the Panhead. The garage door was open. The light coming in was that specific New Mexico late-afternoon light that turns everything the color of an old photograph.
Hector said: “Mijo. They told me six months.”
Frank said: “Apá.”
Hector said: “I’m not doing the treatment.”
Frank did not say anything for a long time.
Hector said: “I want to ride out the 66 to Tucumcari one more time. Next Saturday. You come with me.”
Frank said: “Apá. Let me drive you in the truck. I’ll drive you wherever you want.”
Hector said: “Mijo. I don’t want the truck. I want the Panhead.”
Frank told me at the diner counter that the only argument he ever had with his father in his entire adult life was the one he had in that garage that afternoon, about the Panhead. He wanted his father to take the truck. His father wanted the bike. They went back and forth for almost an hour. Hector finally stood up out of the folding chair — he was already thinner than he had been a month earlier, Frank could see it then — and he put his hand on his son’s shoulder.
Hector said: “Frank. If I die in that hospital, it kills your mother twice.”
Esperanza had been dead for three years.
Hector said: “I’d rather go on the bike.”
Frank rode out with his father the following Saturday.
They took the old 66 east. They stopped in Santa Rosa for breakfast. They stopped in Tucumcari for lunch. They had a beer at a roadhouse called The Blue Swallow that has been there since 1939. They rode back toward Belen in the late afternoon with the sun behind them and the New Mexico sky going pink and orange.
About forty miles east of Albuquerque, on a stretch of frontage road that runs alongside the I-40, Hector pulled over.
He got off the Panhead.
He took his helmet off. He set it on the seat. He walked to the edge of the road and he stood there with his hands on his hips, looking out at the high desert.
He stood there for a long time.
When he came back to the bike, he looked at Frank.
He said: “Mijo. I’m done.”
He said: “Take me home.”
Frank rode in front the whole way back. He told me he watched his father in the rearview mirror every thirty seconds for the next forty miles. Hector kept up. Hector did not falter. Hector rode the Panhead into his own driveway in Belen at six-twenty p.m. on a Saturday in May of 1994 and he shut the engine off and he sat there for a second.
Then Hector Delgado reached down with his right hand and he tapped the top of his gas tank twice.
Tap-tap.
He got off the bike.
He walked into his house.
He died in a hospital bed in his own living room eleven days later with his son holding his hand.
He never rode the Panhead again.
What Frank told me at the diner counter at three a.m. outside Rawlins, Wyoming, with a piece of cherry pie between us that neither of us touched, was this.
He said the two taps before 1994 had been thanks and let’s go.
He said the two taps after 1994 were different.
He said for the first ten years after his father died, every time he crossed a state line on the Road King, he would tap the gas tank twice and he would say one word in his head, just one, just for himself, just to keep the rhythm: Apá.
He said for the next ten years after that — once Marco was old enough to ride with him on the back, then later on his own bike — the two taps became a small private thing he did to tell his father, who was twenty years dead by then, we’re still going.
He said the tap on the Road King’s gas tank was never about the motorcycle.
It had never been about the motorcycle.
The motorcycle was just the place his father had taught him to put it.
He said: “My old man told me you don’t talk to a motorcycle with your mouth. You talk to her with your hands. But mijo —” and this is the part where Frank Delgado, sitting at a diner counter at three-fifteen in the morning with his face down and his coffee cold, said the thing that has been in my chest for three years now —
“— mijo. You don’t talk to your dead with your mouth either. You talk to them with your hands. Every state line he ever rode with me, I’m telling him we crossed another one, Apá. We’re still going. That’s what the two taps are.”
He looked at me.
He said: “You don’t tell anybody.”
I said: “No, Whiskey. I won’t.”
He said: “That’s between me and my old man.”
I said: “Yeah, brother.”
He took a sip of his coffee. He looked at the napkin holder for a long time. He did not cry. Whiskey did not cry, ever, in the three years I rode with him after that night.
But his right hand on the counter — the hand that had tapped a Road King’s gas tank somewhere north of four thousand times — was shaking just slightly. And the waitress at the other end of the counter, who had been pretending not to listen, walked the long way around the kitchen on her way back to the coffee pot so she would not have to look at us.
I want to back up and tell you the things I did not understand the first time around.
The banner on Whiskey’s neck — the one with the name I could not read for the first two weeks of our ride — said HECTOR.
The saint candle tattooed on the inside of his left forearm was a Virgen de Guadalupe, but the candle had a date underneath it: 5–28–94. The date Hector Delgado died.
The coiled rattlesnake on the inside of his right forearm was his father’s. Hector had had the same one in the same spot. Whiskey got his copied off his father’s body the week after the funeral.
He never told me any of this. I figured it out the way you figure these things out about a man you ride with for three years — by watching, by sitting next to him at funerals and weddings and Saturday-morning breakfasts and bar fights and long highway stretches, by being there long enough that the man stops bothering to hide what he has been carrying his whole life.
The Road King he rode for thirty-eight years — the one he put four hundred and sixteen thousand miles on — was bought in March of 2004 with the money from selling his father’s 1965 Panhead, which had sat in the garage in Belen for ten years after Hector died, and which Frank could not bring himself to sell until his son Marco was old enough to understand what the money was for.
He sold the Panhead in February of 2004. He bought the Road King in March.
He told me, on a different night, on a different ride, that the day he picked up the Road King from the dealership he rode it straight from Albuquerque to the cemetery in Belen where his father is buried. Thirty-five miles. He shut the engine off in the cemetery driveway. He sat there for a while.
Then he reached down. He tapped the new gas tank twice.
He told his father — out loud this time, because his father was right under him, and out loud was different — he told his father: Apá. New bike. Same hand. We’re still going.
He rode home.
That was the first tap on the Road King.
He did it four thousand and some more times before he was done.
Whiskey died on a Tuesday in February of this year.
It was not the motorcycle. It was a heart attack, at his kitchen table, at fifty-eight years old, with a half-finished cup of coffee in front of him and a paperback novel open to page sixty-three. His wife Linda found him at seven-forty in the morning.
The funeral was the following Saturday.
There were about ninety bikes in the parking lot of the church in Belen. Our charter rode down from Albuquerque. Three other charters came from as far as Tucson and Amarillo. The Panhead crowd showed up too — old guys his father had ridden with, men in their late seventies and eighties on bikes older than most of our prospects.
His son Marco — who is thirty-one now, who has ridden with his father since he was old enough to fit in a sidecar, who got his patch in our charter four years ago — Marco gave the eulogy.
Marco kept it short. Six sentences.
He thanked the brothers for coming. He thanked the old Panhead guys for being there. He thanked his mother for forty years of putting up with his father. He said his father was a quiet man and a good father and the kind of biker the rest of us had been trying to be without knowing what we were trying to be.
Then he stepped down from the pulpit. He walked out the back of the church. He walked across the parking lot to his father’s Road King — which we had rolled in that morning and parked out front — and he reached down with two knuckles.
He tapped the gas tank twice.
Tap-tap.
He said one word out loud. Loud enough for the brothers standing closest to hear.
He said: “Apá.”
Then he got on his own Road King — a 2014 he bought used three years ago — and he led the procession to the cemetery.
We crossed exactly one road on the way to the burial. A two-lane state highway between the church and the cemetery. As we rolled across it, ninety bikes deep, every single rider in that procession — every single one, even the prospects who had only ever met Whiskey twice — every single one of us reached down with our right hand and we tapped our gas tanks twice.
It was not planned.
Nobody had said anything.
It just happened.
The sound was small. Two knuckles on metal, ninety times, in a rolling wave, lost in the V-twin roar.
I think Hector heard it anyway.
I crossed the Colorado–New Mexico line two months ago coming home from a ride.
I was alone. Sunset. The Spanish Peaks dropping behind me. The high desert opening up south.
I took my right hand off the throttle for a half-second.
I tapped my gas tank twice with two knuckles.
I said one word out loud, just for myself, just into the wind:
Whiskey.
Then my hand went back on the throttle.
The Road Glide kept rolling south toward Albuquerque, toward home, toward a garage where a Road King with four hundred and sixteen thousand miles on it now sits under a tarp in the corner — Marco’s garage, not mine — waiting for him to figure out what he is going to do with it.
I don’t think he’s going to do anything with it.
I think he’s going to leave it there.
I think every once in a while he is going to walk out into the garage at night, alone, with a beer he is not going to drink, and he is going to lift the tarp off the back, and he is going to reach down with two knuckles, and he is going to tell his father — and now his father’s father — that the family is still going.
Tap-tap.
Two knuckles. The gas tank. Twice.
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