A Tour de Force : Venice: Joe Sigler doesn’t offer your average walking tour. The man who calls himself ‘the best-known figure’ in the area gives visitors a theatrical look at an offbeat community and its colorful history.

Joe Sigler’s office is the corner bar stool at the Sidewalk Cafe.

He has no phone. He has no beeper. For that matter, he has no real home. But despite well-ventilated jeans and a beard reminiscent of Rip Van Winkle, Sigler has a business of sorts. Since 1988, he has been giving walking tours of Venice, the seaside community he has lived in, off and on, for 33 years.

You can find Sigler almost every day at Horizon Avenue and the Boardwalk. As much a fixture of the beach as the swami on roller blades and the sellers of incredible shrinking T-shirts, Sigler sits in front of a wood-burned portrait of himself by sand sculptor Scott B. Dosch and a handsome sign advertising “Joe’s Walking Tours of Venice” airbrushed by muralist Rip Cronk.

“I’m probably the best-known figure in Venice,” says Sigler, who is equally confident of his insider’s knowledge of Venetian history and lore. “Anything I tell you,” assures Sigler, “you can take it to the bank.”

Predictably, Joe’s are not your average white-bread tours.

Among his offerings are what he calls “my short Jim Morrison tour,” 20 minutes that take visitors past such landmarks as the Westminster Avenue apartment building where the late rocker once parked his guitar and the site of the now defunct Soul Kitchen, the soul-food restaurant at Main Street and Westminister Avenue where, according to Sigler, Morrison ate when he had it together enough to eat.

Although Sigler is professionally grateful for Morrison’s death-defying charisma, he is obviously not the late singer’s greatest fan. “I drank beer with him on the beach in 1965,” Sigler says. “Once was enough. He was very arrogant and not too coherent most of the time.”

Sigler says his typical customer is fairly well-educated, usually female, usually white. He is happy to show one person the sights, but he has also piloted groups as large as 50 through the city’s streets, he says. Sigler says he has never had any trouble on any of his tours, despite Venice’s reputation as a higher-than-average crime area.

“I took six drunk college girls in the middle of the night, and it was just fine,” he recalls.

Sigler never uses a script, although he occasionally refers to a tattered paperback history of “The Venice of America” by Jeffrey Stanton. Sigler also has a collection of articles about Venice that he has torn from magazines. He sometimes does research at libraries and newspaper offices but says his best source of information is the people who have lived in Venice for years.

Packaging is an important part of Sigler’s product. He has a flair for the theatrical, a soft-spoken but compelling spiel that lets customers know the city they are touring is something special.

As he tells the couples from Iowa and elsewhere, “On July 4, 1905, our founder, Abbot J. Kinney, opened the gates to flood the canals with seawater. The party started, and it hasn’t stopped until this day!”

Under California law, Sigler, like the street performers and others who live by their wits on the beach, are not allowed to charge for their services. Instead he asks for a donation, hoping he’ll get $10 to $20 per person.

As he explains, pointing to the surf from a stool at the Sidewalk Cafe, “Nobody on that side, whether it’s the man who jumps on glass or the Tarot reader, can charge. It’s all donations only. Some say ‘I want seven to 15 bucks,’ but I don’t do that. I want to be squeaky clean.”

Sigler was born almost 48 years ago in Tulsa, Okla., a town he left at age 15 because it threatened to bore him to death. Over the years, he has flipped burgers, installed car stereos and delivered messages. He managed a hotel in Haight-Ashbury when San Francisco was almost as powerful a magnet for teen-agers as Venice is today.

Sigler carries his history around with him in a succession of tattoos: blurred images acquired when he was a Seabee in the 1950s, a peace sign from the ‘60s, screaming skulls from the less-mellow ‘70s, a Harley-Davidson symbol from his biker period in the early ‘80s. “I’m not sure about the ‘90s,” he says, contemplating his inky mementos. “I think I’ve had enough.”

The most requested tour in his repertoire, he says, is of Venice’s world-famous wall art. Sigler talks knowledgeably about each of the city’s dozen murals. As he points out, he is even featured in one--Cronk’s epic homage to Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus,” called “Venice Reconstituted,” at Windward Avenue and Speedway.

Sigler recalls the day he learned he had achieved wall-art immortality. “I was sitting in my office and having a cocktail and about 30 people came in and said, ‘You’re on the mural!’ I was honored.”

Sigler’s desire to deliver what his clients may or may not pay for has led him to educate himself far beyond the bounds of his formal 10th-grade education. He points to a new Cronk work-in-progress and explains, “That’s called a trompe l’oeil style of mural. It’s a French word for ‘What fools the eye fools the mind.’ ”

One of the joys of the job is making people aware of things they might walk right by without his expertise, Sigler says. He points out unobtrusive architectural details like the handsome tile flowers that decorate a seedy beachside building. He takes groups inside the Cadillac Hotel, a beachfront hostel usually accessible only to foreigners, to see the last of the gondolas that once plied Venice’s now fetid canals.

As an insider, Sigler knows things about Venice that the Chamber of Commerce isn’t going to tell you. He points out that ladies of the evening sometimes rest their wares on the steps of the Christian Science Reading room at Main and Brooks Avenue.

According to Sigler, Venice is now Southern California’s No. 2 tourist attraction, second only to Disneyland. Ten million visitors pass through Venice every year, he says. Most don’t hire Sigler, but he gets by. His wardrobe is no prize-winner but his shades are by Body Glove. He isn’t in the habit of paying rent, which means home has sometimes been a sleeping bag unrolled on a rooftop, but he lives where he wants, close to the sound and smell of the ocean.

“I’d rather sleep on the beach in Venice than in a house in Van Nuys,” he says.

Sigler has “no family to speak of.” But he is part of the close-knit Venice community. He does things for people, and they do things for him. The Sidewalk Cafe takes his phone calls and holds his mail.

He remembers the way Venice was when he first arrived from Tulsa--before it cost $80 a month to rent a space to park your car.

“There was nobody here then,” he says. “You could sit out there and smoke a joint or drink a beer or play a guitar or read a book of poetry.” In his view, Venice changed forever when the world’s athletes and the international press came to Los Angeles for the 1984 Olympics. “Every damn one of them came to Venice,” he says, “and the cat was really out of the bag.”

Sigler doesn’t much like the gentrification of Venice or the appearance of boardwalk mini-malls or the litter explosion. And he certainly doesn’t like what’s happened to Santa Monica Bay.

“Only two kinds of people go into that water--surfers who don’t mind glowing in the dark and tourists who don’t know how nasty it really is. The locals never go in, especially with a scratch or an open wound. I haven’t been in for 10 years.”

But Venice is his home. “I’m not leaving again,” he says. “I seldom go past Lincoln.”

It is also his fortune, such as it is.

Thanks to the tours, and his talent for getting by, Sigler has managed to live without public assistance.

“I’ll fend for myself, thank you,” he says. “There are some people out there who need it. Let them have it.”