Shortcuts - Jeremy Tate

Car: None, currently. I drive family members’ cars sometimes.

Previous Cars: 1992 Mercury Villager; 1987 Jeep Pioneer Cherokee

How’s your commute? I work for a security company, so I drive all over Southern California to different venues...mostly concerts.

Cheapest Gas? Anything but Arco.

Do you use your cell phone and drive? Yes. All of the time, for any reason — if someone calls me or if I want to call someone or text.

Any good hitchhiking stories? Only ones I’ve heard from friends, mostly about picking up prostitutes on accident.

What do you listen to while you drive? Anything but country.

Tickets? This is where it gets complicated. Just tickets in the car, I have five moving and two non-moving violations. Most notably: smoking a cigarette in O.B., quite ridiculous speeding tickets, and once for kind of being a coyote. Actually for the coyote thing, they only confiscated my car and let me go with a slap on the wrist, but I wouldn’t recommend it. For the record, those years are behind me.

Accidents? I’ve run over curbs while flipping-off random people while also making a left turn in a busy intersection, popping my left two tires, more than once. Another time, in my young and innocent years, I took five of my friends up to the mines in Jamul in my Jeep. There’s an ambitious off-road trail to get up there and even worse on the return trip. After exploring the mine up to the point of swimming any farther, we headed back down this trail in the Jeep. My brother is guiding me, and I’m young and inexperienced at off-roading so I spectacularly roll my Jeep over, landing in a massive ditch. We were able to dig it out, eventually, but one of my friends was in the trunk and still complains about my driving to this day.

Where do you experience the worst traffic in San Diego? In L.A.

What is your favorite drive? Anywhere not in traffic. I hate traffic...also not in ditches.

Your best ShortCut? Proctor Valley Rd. It’s a dirt road that connects Jamul and Chula Vista. Two very important places to be.

What is your dream car? Something that doesn’t break as easy as my other cars. Actually, instead of that, I want an Audi R8 with the new S-Tronic [automatic] transmission because I’m lazy.

Do you use any shortcuts in real life? Never pay for something you can download on the internet.