Friday the 13th Clobbers Bridegroom

Michael Tubbs says he isn’t superstitious.

But on Friday the 13th, the day before his wedding to a Costa Mesa law school graduate, he was muttering like a man twice jinxed and running for cover.

First the federal government informed Tubbs, a 31-year-old businessman, that he is not a U.S. citizen and denied him a passport for his honeymoon to French Polynesia.

Then the Irvine hotel where the wedding party was booked could not find the reservation when the anxious bridegroom tried to check it. A bit of hand waving and several adjectives turned up the rooms.

But Uncle Sam was not as easily moved. So Tubbs will marry Janice Berkowitz today while wondering which country he belongs to.

“Don’t talk to me about Friday the 13th or full moons or black cats,” he moaned before the wedding rehearsal at an Irvine restaurant Friday. “Somebody must not like me.”

The trouble began Thursday night when a friend went to Tubbs’ house in Danville in Contra Costa County and found a letter from the U.S. Passport Office. Instead of a new passport inside, there was a form letter telling Tubbs that the government does not consider him to be a citizen. When Tubbs heard the news by phone, he was furious.

“What a wedding gift!” he said.

Although he was born Sept. 9, 1956, in West Germany, he has always considered himself a U.S. citizen. His father, a U.S. serviceman stationed near Munich, married a German woman, and Tubbs was born to them. The couple returned to the United States by the time Tubbs was 3, settling in the San Francisco Bay area.

At 18 he registered to vote. Three years later he signed up with the Selective Service System. In 1979, he graduated with a degree in business from UCLA.

He had never thought twice about his citizenship--until Friday.

“It’s absolutely weird,” he said of the passport snafu. “I’ve always been the patriotic guy. I always got up to sing the Star Spangled banner at (athletic) games, and if anyone else around me did not I would motion for them to get up too.

“Suddenly, I’m a man without a country.”

Tubbs said he applied for the passport a month ago after the couple decided to spend two weeks at a Club Med in Tahiti for their honeymoon.

But passport officials apparently would not accept his U.S. birth certificate, which was obtained by his father when the family returned from Germany. He needed a second document that his father filed with the U.S. consulate in Germany at the time Tubbs was born, said Lisa McCombs, an aide to Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.), who unsuccessfully tried to get an emergency passport for Tubbs on Friday.

All babies born to U.S. citizens overseas are recorded with the nearest consulate, McCombs said, and copies of those records are forwarded to the State Department. But because this took place so long ago, she said it will take two weeks to find the document.

“It’s just a shame,” McCombs said. “He’s a victim of red tape, I guess.”

Tubbs was seeing a little red himself Friday. Without a passport, the couple stands to lose about $2,800 because part of their Tahiti trip expenses were not refundable.

But worse than that was the uncertainty about his citizenship, Tubbs said: “It isn’t the money so much . . . but to be told I am suddenly not a U.S. citizen, not able to vote, it hurts. What are they going to do, deport me? I don’t speak a word of German.”

Tubbs’ fiancee took the news a bit better. Under U.S. immigration law, once the couple is married, she could sponsor him for citizenship.

“He’s going to have to be nice to me, isn’t he?” said Berkowitz, a law graduate of San Diego University who is awaiting results of the bar examination.

As for the honeymoon, Tubbs said the couple will probably go to to some other warm-weather spot, like Hawaii.

“With a suitcase full of swim suits, shorts and suntan lotion,” he said, “I’m hardly going to go skiing.”