the NA hug: Roy Tony's coerced sincerity

Roy Tony's fury is the scene's deepest joke about the register war: the sincerity Erdedy is fleeing isn't even native to the people performing it. Roy hates hugging too — "I done had to give four hugs my first night here and then I gone ran in the fucking can and fucking puked" — and does it anyway as an act of surrender, of will given over to the Program's directives. So Erdedy's ironic refusal isn't resisting some tide of natural warmth; it's refusing to make the same unwilling surrender everyone else has already made, and Roy reads that refusal, correctly, as a claim to be above the surrender the rest of them swallowed. The single-entendre earnestness is itself coerced, a discipline rather than a feeling — which makes Erdedy's fastidious opt-out not just cowardice but disrespect "in front of my whole clean and sober set."