The ink needled permanently into Patricia Riggins' chocolate-colored chest seems innocuous enough at first. Sylvester the Cat, with his trademark red nose and black-and-white fur, has his animated claws raised in attack position. Cute.

But I notice the tattoo AFTER our 15-minute, Talking-to-Strangers, cut-through-the-small-talk session. I've heard the street-corner version of Patricia's life story, and I know who Sylvester's namesake is. I know who stabbed Patricia in the face with a pair of scissors, leaving a two-inch scar on her right cheek, where about 200 stitches worked their magic.

After five years of marriage, Patricia asked her husband Sylvester for a divorce shortly before Thanksgiving of 1999. "That's when he flipped," she explains, casually dragging on her cigarette.

The two had separated earlier. He drank too much. He hit her one time, and her only son was likely to kill the man if he touched his mother again. Seeing her son sent to prison wasn't a risk Patricia was willing to take, so she served the divorce papers.

It was around 5:30 a.m., before sunrise on a winter day in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Patricia's home state. Heading to work, Patricia went to flip on the porch light but the bulb was out. Sylvester broke it, and was hiding outside with a pair of scissors. She walked into the dark morning.

"He just came around that corner like Psycho," she remembers, following up with a full-throttle stabbing gesture and the horrible "Eeeek, eeeeek" of a slasher-flick soundtrack.

The scissors stabbed her head two or three times first, but her hair was woven into braids that she thinks helped save her. Then they ripped her cheek wide open. She screamed for help. I missed what happened then, who came to Patricia's rescue, where Sylvester went, whether the police ever caught up with him...

At this point, I suppose I should make a confession.

Armed with my notebook, pen, cell phone and a story idea, I took to the streets thinking I would cut through the bullshit and impose upon some stranger the unblinking glare of my journalistic determination. My probing questions would cause The Stranger to open up in a way she never expected, and The Stranger, in tears, would admit secrets previously unrevealed even to herself.

But I stammered a bit, clinging desperately to the old small talk. Where are you from? I asked. When did you move to Denver? What brought you here? To this third question, Patricia replied that her sister (actually a best friend incorporated into the family at a young age) is dying of AIDS, from her long-ago days of shooting up. Part of me wanted to start talking about the weather. (A storm had blown in, and was whipping up quite quickly around us.) But just a few more benign questions from me led to the Sylvester disclosure.

So, I don't think I deserve the credit for cutting through the small talk. Mostly, I just listened. I took 15 minutes of my life, waiting under an awning for the rain to pass, and turned my attention to a fellow human being. For me, self-trained as I am to avoid eye contact and maintain a defensive posture and disinterested gaze, this was an uncomfortable leap. For Patricia, it was a casual, street-corner conversation. If she had engaged me first, I would have muttered something about being busy and kept walking.

What is it about me/us/middle-class-suburban-raised-white-Americans that makes us so loath to the frank recounting of a stranger's true feelings? Why do I, the interviewer, struggle to maintain eye contact while the woman baring her soul gazes intently at me without flinching? Where in the race/class/social/generational divide did our comfort zones fork so drastically away from each other's? Is it something about renting an apartment within a few blocks from home and getting around by bus that makes Patricia more comfortable with strangers? Is it simply a personality trait? Or is it the wisdom of years, the perspective of surviving being repeatedly stabbed in the face by someone you knew and loved?

In any case, Sylvester stayed on Patricia's trail. Out of the hospital, she took refuge in a Safehouse in Rhode Island, but never felt like that was a place for her. She went home, and bought the only gun she ever owned. The plan was this: Let Sylvester think he'd won; wait for him to show up at the house; and Bang. No Sylvester. No son in prison. Any punishment for vigilante justice squarely on her own shoulders.

But Sylvester went to Colorado, where Patricia's beloved dying "sister" lived. He got within 100 yards of the sister's home, and he died of a heart attack. Patricia received notice from the Aurora Police Department. "I cried for happiness," she says. "I just thank the Lord that I made it and he didn't."

Fifteen minutes goes by fast. So I can't say why Sylvester dropped dead during his plight for revenge, and I don't know whether some of the details have been exaggerated, simplified, condensed. Really, I have a lot more questions about Patricia Riggins than I have answers, but I do know these things:

• She has one son, 33-year-old Michael, who's still in Rhode Island with the rest of their family.
• Michael's father was the love of her life. She was 15 when they met and 17 when she had Michael. They never married, but stayed together until she was in her 30s, when his penchant for other women took its toll. "I was his number one," she says. "But he had too many kids, and too many girls."
• She married Sylvester at age 42, but they had known each other "forever." Everyone called him Taddy.
• She will be 50 soon.
• She's skittish about men now. A lot of them ask for her phone number at work, but she's not having it. "There is no number," she tells them.
• She still wants a man in her life. "I still got quite a few good kicks left over," she says.
• But when the time comes, she'll do a background check on the guy before even considering a date. She called into a radio-show therapist recently to make sure that's healthy. The shrink gave it the go-ahead.
• Patricia's sister, a 50-year-old mother of seven, moved to Denver because the city offered more medical support for someone dying of AIDS. "They have a little more going for you in Denver," Patricia says. "She can live longer."
• Patricia is happy to be in Denver. Although she misses her family terribly, she says she needed a "change of place, and change of face" and now is enjoying life to the fullest. "I'm just the luckiest girl in the world," she says.
• She rides the bus to visit her sister, volunteers at an organization for AIDS patients and works six days a week in the dry-cleaning operation at Smiley's Laundromat on Colfax Avenue, Denver's most notorious street.
• Having lived her whole life in small-town Rhode Island, she considers Denver a big city and is shocked by the boozing, begging and homelessness she sees from her seedy Colfax post. "Some stuff I've never seen in my life, and some stuff I don't ever want to see again," she says.
• She's Catholic, but explains: "I do my prayin' at my own leisure."
• She doesn't dwell on Sylvester. The nightmares are over, and she certainly doesn't bother getting sentimental about their brighter times together. "Hell no," she says. "I'm just glad he's fuckin' gone. He wouldn't have stopped until he killed me."
• All the same, that tattoo on her chest isn't making her lose any sleep. She dismisses the possibility that she would regret the lifelong reminder of her homicidal husband, in the form of a pouncing cartoon cat with its teeth bared and claws raised, being etched forever into her skin. "That is nothing," she says as our quarter-hour together ticks off the clock. "It's a character. I'm gonna get Tweety beside him with a baseball bat."

Why I picked Patricia Riggins:

We both were standing under a long awning on Colfax, Denver's gritty crown jewel, seeking shelter from a sudden, pounding rain. Neither of us had anywhere to go unless we wanted to be soaked to the bone. She was smoking a cigarette, and we stood staring across the street at a liquor store and pizza joint. This is exactly the type of situation when people start blathering away with insincere chit-chat about things no one could care less about.

Frankly, I thought she might be a prostitute. It's not just that I'm shallow and judgmental, but we were on East Colfax, and this is hooker-central. Not three minutes earlier, a man bicycling slowly by me asked if I was working. I had on a dirty T-shirt, baggy Capris and pink flip-flops. I told him no, and I would dress nicer if I was.

Finally, I had headed to the area around Smiley's Laundromat, where Patricia works, because it's obviously a place swimming with stories. It's only two blocks from my house, and in my frequent walks past I've squirmed at the clientele, who tend to have missing teeth and the general smell of dirt and booze. But mostly, I just love the signs hanging outside and painted on the windows. Here's what four of them say: "PLEASE stop cheating yourself. Start using Denver's #1 Laundromat and Drycleaners"; "Smileys. One of Denver's most exciting landmarks. A place you will never forget"; "Denver's Friendliest Laundromat"; "WARNING by the Denver Police Department: If you walk across this parking lot, and you are not washing clothes at Smiley's, you will be arrested, sent to jail, and prosecuted to the fullest extent possible."