Hazard lights on, around fifteen cars park, in single file, in front of the Manouchian home in Vitry-sur-Seine (Val-de-Marne). They are registered in Paris, “in Essonne, in Val-de-Marne or even Bas-Rhin”. Windows down, their occupants place orders with merchants in anoraks. “What do you want, uncle? », asks one of them, who then goes through the grate of the foyer before returning, a minute later, with a box of six FastGas canisters of nitrous oxide diverted into laughing gas. Some of his colleagues warm up around a brazier, a steaming coffee and, sometimes, a hookah.
It’s 11:45 p.m. on this freezing Friday in January and the drive-thru is running at full speed. Here, in the middle of a depressing area of warehouses, very close to a rugby field, a railway line and the two giant chimneys of the old thermal power station, you can obtain, seven days a week and twenty -four hours a day, a bottle of “proto” with a plastic tip and ten balloons for 15 euros. “If you come back tomorrow, you ask for Guindo, it’s me,” reveals a dealer before giving change.
