MARSIELLES PAYNE has come far from the days when she shook her thing at the Queens strip bar Kalua, making a handsome living by conning guys into buying her overpriced drinks, and strenuously avoiding the cops.
Even with a cool name like that, she danced under the moniker of “Trini” – for Trinidad – next to a gal named “Desire,” whom she eyed with suspicion.
“She’s competition,” sniffed Trini, as if she still made a career of pole-dancing in a “bikini-style costume” – climbing to the top of a stripper pole, flipping upside-down and performing tricks.
For this talent, she was named “second-best in the city,” she testified proudly. However, she never revealed the identity of the person who won the No. 1 spot.
“It is what it is.”
This was life for the mom of two until shortly after Nov. 25, 2006, an evening that began with promise.
Early that night, she watched another dancer slap a man in the face because he refused to leave the girls’ dressing room.
“He smacked her back,” she said. “In the face.”
That kind of behavior would earn the guy a broken jaw at another club. Not here. Trini and her pal Lizette shoved him out the door.
Just another night at club Kalua.
Trini’s friend, Harold James, known as “Bones” – who she complained bitterly never tipped – was helping his pal Sean Bell celebrate his last night as a single man.
He asked Trini to start “making it rain” in a back room – club lingo for shaking her various parts until the grateful men rained dollar bills at her feet.
Trini told these tales yesterday dressed not in pasties, but in medical scrubs.
She said she got her associate’s degree and a job as a medical assistant for the Department of Homeless Services. She’s gone legit.
At times, though, she waxed rhapsodic about her days as a stripper. But she was pulled to earth by the memory of the night Sean Bell died.
She left the club and a man, who turned out to be a cop, tried to pick her up for money. But Trini, who might have recognized the man as a cop, said, “I don’t do dates.”
Then, she saw a car crash into a minivan. Then a man got out of the van’s passenger door.
“He just started shooting,” she said. She started to cry.
At one point, she claimed the gunfire went on for “minutes,” in which she ran into some bushes. After a three-second pause, it started again. “I just dropped down and put my head between my legs.”
Then she ran back to the club, and screamed, “They’re shooting down the block. They’re killing those boys!”
But it became clear under cross-examination that Trini never wanted to cooperate with authorities.
“I didn’t need to get involved. I’m a single mom! I wanted to get out of this neighborhood. I don’t need this drama in my life! . . . I’m the one suffering! Me and my kids.
“This is causing me so much pain. But I decided to tell the truth and do the right thing.”
Trini sobbed hysterically.
But this time she cried not for the dead man, but for herself.