Cube the Nine
“She’s the kind of girl I’d cube the nine for. Know what I mean?”
I did not, but nodded my head knowingly. This was maybe the third time I’d heard the expression “cube the nine” in the past month. Every time it was in a different context, and every person who said it, assumed I was familiar with it.
“Cube the nine for sure,” my younger co-worker repeated as he drooled over some girl at the food court.
Was it a sexual innuendo? Perhaps nine referred to his penis, assuming he was very well endowed. Did the cube refer to a vagina? Or was it a math thing? Wasn’t there a “cube” term in skater’s slang? This expression made no sense.
The following weekend, I was jogging with my friend, Charles. He had been my best buddy since college, so I had no inhibitions asking if he knew what ‘cube the nine’ meant. “To be honest,” he said. “I have no idea. I’ve heard some girls using it when they see a cute guy.”
That worked with my sexual innuendo theory.
“But you have no idea what it means?” I asked him.
“Not a clue.”
I dropped the subject. It really wasn’t important, but curiosity was slowly killing my cat. I always had my finger on the pulse of pop culture. I was there for “hell of” and “the bomb” and even as far back as “gag me with a spoon.” But this “cube the nine” business had me baffled.
I could recall no disc jockey trying to make the phrase popular, or any advertisements using it for their slogan. It wasn’t a tag line for some one-dimensional television show character or movie quote. The term seemed to come out of nowhere. And worst of all, the meaning was not clear.
I was in the bank one Friday when I overheard some tough guy telling a story to his friends.
“Joey was really being a pain in the neck,” he told them. “So I told him to get the hell out of here, or I’d cube the nine on his ass.”
My eyes widened. Cube the nine was now an act of violence, not sex? My surprise was so obvious, the man turned to me and said, “I really wasn’t going to cube the nine on him. I was just trying to scare him, that’s all.”
It was pretty obvious that he had no idea what cube the nine meant either.
I saw the first “cube the nine” shirt today. It was a black t-shirt with large white letters on the front. Each word took up its own line.
Some high school kid who I spotted in the mall on my lunch break wore the shirt. I found myself following him, watching people’s reactions to it. Some smiled, some laughed, others looked at him with shame. But there were no people like me, looking utterly confused. All of us were too afraid to admit we had no idea what this new phrase meant.
Perhaps this was the every-phrase, an attempt to simplify the language by having only one phrase in it. A mass market “Fergettaboutit.”
Or perhaps I was getting too old to know what today’s kids were talking about.
After that, the phrase’s popularity exploded. Not a week went by without some talk show host making a “cube the nine” reference. There were at least ten types of t-shirts now, and every other person was wearing one. It was already incorporated into sitcoms and soap operas; it even turned up in a few popular song lyrics.
Cube the Nine, the book, was no help at all. It was only a collection of cartoons that used the phrase in different situations.
I tried to search for the phrase’s origins on the Internet, but there were hundreds of thousands of results, with “cube the nine” being used in various context.
“I can’t believe how popular three little words have become,” I told Charles on one of our jogging outings. “And I still don’t know what it means.”
“What does it matter?” Charles asked. “It’s just a stupid phrase those stupid kid use.”
But it did matter to me. I didn’t like being so far removed from our culture. First it’s a phrase, then new music becomes noise, and finally teenagers begin looking scary.
How long until I was chasing them off my lawn?
Before I knew it, all the “cube the nine” merchandise was in the bargain bin. People wore their shirts only to do housework or change the oil in their car. And you could tell how old a sitcom was by the use of the phrase. Nobody cool said it any more.
I was relieved to see it and the mystery of its words gone.
That was until I went out to lunch with another one of my young co-workers and he suddenly looked at me with incredulity and uttered, “What’re you, some kind of spiro jurt?”