Just as some find fortune in driblets of bird ordure scoring a free throw on their face, people say rain on your wedding day is good luck. Regarding the relative advantage that the arrest of the best man bestows upon the wedding party, the folklore is mum.

Shortly after he was adopted from Kenya, my brother Calvin made a pact with my brother Tyler that should he be married, he would be given honor of best man.

Calvin, who was new to our family and country at the time, did not realize that he was making a pact with a future outlaw of the law.

Tyler arrived several hours after I did in the Minneapolis airport, shortly after 11pm, two days before Calvin’s wedding.

Our brother who lives in Minneapolis values sleep and not picking his family up from the airport, so I had given instructions to Tyler to take the light rail from the airport to Minneapolis’s downtown and from there take a taxi to meet me at the friend’s house where we were crashing.

Just off and international flight myself, I was running on 24 hours sans sleep, and stood up in the apartment as I waited for Tyler so as not to fall asleep before he came. 

Tyler called just after 1am.

“Are you outside?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said, “I got a free ride to jail!”

Tyler for the last seven years had been unknowingly traveling in an out of Minnesota with an outstanding warrant for his arrest for failure to show proof of insurance in 2007.

“Is this a joke?” I asked. It was no joke and if Tyler was not bailed out by that morning, the state of Minnesota was going to extradite him 8 hours away to a jail Moorhead. 

While looking for the light rail, Tyler had ventured to a part of the airport where, as the officer who stopped him said, “we don’t get a lot of foot traffic here.” So the officer had asked him what he was doing and then offered to give him a ride to the train. As a formality he ran his ID. The officer thoroughly regretted having to arrest him, but once the warrant popped up he was married to process and barred from independent agency.

Tyler’s bail was more than my daily ATM withdrawal limit, and I was without a car.

I called up my brother who lived in Minneapolis a half dozen times, but he did not answer. It was his birthday and he assumed any call at bar close was a drunk someone calling to wish him happy birthday.

I called my bank to raise my daily withdrawal limit. Then I called a taxi. It being bar close in the twin cities, the wait time was over an hour.

Mohammad from Somalia was a sympathetic driver. I explained to him my situation and he seemed the revel in the fact that instead of driving drunk people home, he was on a mission with me–find an ATM and then the jail to liberate my brother in time for the wedding. 

A night of grueling, frustrating due process began; grueling because I had an empty tank of sleep; frustrating because due process dragged. When the sun rose six hours later, the security guard at in the lobby complained about the “bureaucratic bitches in the basement” who drew the process out longer than he said they needed to.  

“I don’t know what the holdup is,” he told me, shaking his head, sympathetic to the absurdity of our situation, but powerless to do anything about it. 

At the heart of our criminal justice system, you will find some of the most unhappy looking people in the world–the paper pushers who long ago tied stones to their dreams and threw them overboard. When I went to the basement to pay the bail, there was a room full of scowling middle aged woman seated at desks.  

The lady who gave me bail-paperwork to fill out had a face stuck in the grimace of a bridge troll. Instinctively, I tried find a glimmer of shared humanity and make her smile. In front of us was my brother’s mug shot. I regarded it and offered, “Wow, my brother needs a haircut.” Her avoiding eyes then met mine with such a look of disdain that I retreated back to the paperwork at hand. But shouldn’t she, I wondered, be the one trying to make me laugh? She’s at work, and I’m the one surprised to find himself in jail spending more than half of the money I have to my name to bail my brother out before another brother’s wedding.

Likely, it was a vacant paper pusher like that which led to Tyler being arrested in the first place. My brother was arrested in 2014 because he was pulled over in 2007 and was not carrying proof of the insurance he had. He remembers though, has three witnesses who remember, that he made a copy of his insurance and brought it to the courthouse in Moorhead as they asked he do. Somehow, this one slipped through the cracks and the process of the system stabbed the throat of reason.

If Tyler had not had someone to bail him out, and some people don’t, he would have spent two weeks in jail before his court date. As it is, he still has to appear in court in Moorhead in a week (he lives in Colorado).

I had a lot of time to think while waiting hours for his liberation and I wondered why they don’t have an ATM in a courthouse for people like Tyler to allow themselves to make their own bail. Why doesn’t the courthouse, like any Seven Eleven, take Visa?

I sense that at the heart of these questions are answers that also answer questions like,“Why does the US, land of the free, have 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prison population? Why do poor and minorities spend inordinate amounts of time incarcerated compared to their white, economically better-off counterparts?”

After the sun had risen that next morning, Tyler and I emerged from the courthouse, joking, laughing–just glad our ordeal was over.

Two days later Tyler stood beside Calvin at the altar and I watched as my brother, who at nine was orphaned in a rural village in Kenya, added another chapter to his unlikely tale and exchanged vows with Kaley, the women who is now his wife.

After the ceremony Calvin looked at me with solemn eyes and said, “Now that I’m married, I need a PS4.”