Putting a Price on Weirdness at Boardwalk : Tourism: Rent-paying merchants want an ordinance on peddling enforced. But officials say some of the offbeat activities at the famed beach area may be protected by right to free speech.

The tourist from Chicago stared at the crowd around him on the Venice boardwalk.

His wife was getting her hair wrapped in colorful strings and beads. A bare-chested fellow with a ponytail stopped to ask the hair-wrapper how much it would cost to get his entire body waxed. A guitar player in a white turban sailed past on roller skates. Then came a poodle dressed in clothes.

“Oh, Lord,” the man from Chicago muttered.

His wife stood up--a strand of pink string dangling five inches longer than her short, frosted hair. “Do you like it?” she asked, beaming. Her husband smiled weakly. “It’s pretty,” he said.

For years tourists have flocked to Venice on weekends to walk and gawk at the wild side of life. These days their favorite fad is hair-wrapping--the weaving of colorful strings, beads, bells and feathers around a strand of hair. In two years, the number of hair-wrappers has grown from a handful to up to 70; still customers wait up to an hour to experience a wrap. “I’ve never felt my hair particles quite like this,” exulted one client Sunday afternoon as he danced to the melody of a musician playing a one-string guitar.

“It has revolutionized Venice Beach,” said “Twigger,” the barefoot wrapper who is credited with bringing the trend to the beach. “Nothing’s been so potent.”

But their success has tossed Twigger and his fellow hair-wrappers into the middle of a storm over who has the right to profit from weirdness and wares on the boardwalk.

The rent-paying merchants in the stalls and stores on the east side of the boardwalk complain that the rent-free west side is getting too crowded with artists, musicians and unlicensed peddlers who sell everything from bikinis to custom-made doodles for Birkenstock sandals.

In addition to the ever-present entertainers and artists, there are growing numbers of tarot card readers, incense sellers, and now the swarms of old hippies and young gypsies on blankets doing hair wraps for a “donation” of $7 to $10. “There’s just too much craziness,” complained Donald Feinstein, a member of the Ocean Walk Merchants Assn. who lives near the boardwalk.

Business operators claim that the peddlers are stealing customers during a summer when business is already down 30% because of chilly weather and the recession.

“They’re paying no rent and no taxes and they’re on public property,” complained Geno Vent, the owner of the Muscle Beach Hair Salon, which also does hair wraps. “How can a legitimate businessman compete with a hundred girls sitting out in the open?”

Merchants are pressuring police to enforce a city ordinance that prohibits peddling on public property. But Kelly Shea, an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department’s Pacific Division, said that officers have been given conflicting directions from the city attorney’s office about whether violators will be prosecuted. Much of the confusion has been over which activities on the boardwalk are protected by the constitutional right to free speech.

A proposal by Councilwoman Ruth Galanter currently before the City Council aims to clarify the debate by declaring that all political, philosophical, ideological and religious activities are protected. Rick Ruiz, Galanter’s press deputy, said that any artist or performer who does not charge set prices but solicits donations also has a constitutional right to expression.

But the measure makes no mention of artists and performers, and many on the boardwalk are outraged at what they see as an open window for scores of practitioners of strange activities to continue to solicit on the boardwalk.

“Does that mean I can just go out there and flip pancakes for donations?” asked Carol Berman, the executive director of the Venice Town Council. She was speaking at a weekly Tuesday meeting of a group of boardwalk merchants and artists.

This week, it was attended by a dozen merchants and residents, two tarot card readers, a cartoonist, and Harry Perry, the turbanned guitar player who is a boardwalk institution.

Most of the people at the meeting complained that Galanter’s proposal sidesteps the issue of what to do about the assorted musicians and artists.

“We’ve worked so long for a law to go into effect, and to have it now with all these gray areas just defeats the whole purpose,” said Diane Bush, chairwoman of the Ocean Front Walk Committee.

Shea, speaking for the Police Department, told people at the meeting that she is more concerned about protecting hair-wrappers--some of whom are teen-age runaways and homeless people--from crime than about enforcing what promises to be just another ambiguous law.

“It needs more definition,” she said. “What is considered art?”

A hand-lettered sign on Twigger’s blanket claims that hair wrapping is an art handed down to the Grateful Dead by the Pharaohs--with a few stops in between. Twigger claims he learned the craft at the venerable rock group’s concerts and he was the first to bring it to Venice Beach.

“I’m an artist,” he said. “I paint on hair. I put a lot of creative energy into each wrap.”

Practitioners say that each wrap is different. “Eagle,” for example, has a wrap that tells the story of his life. A miniature skull represents his relationship with his girlfriend, he said. Three feathers symbolize the girlfriend and her two children, and a black heart represents her other boyfriend.

Some of the hair-wrappers, who pride themselves on being so laid-back that they don’t worry about having a house to sleep in at night, say they are baffled by the fury they have provoked. For many of them, wrapping is an art and a way to earn enough money to keep floating from one Grateful Dead concert to the next.

“Hey, man, what happened to America and free enterprise?” asked Anthony B., a wrapper who left Boston two months ago. He said he learned from a friend how to wrap hair after police busted him for giving unlicensed massages on the boardwalk.

Wrappers argue that the merchants who are trying to kick them off the beach actually profit from their presence, since they are a part of the weirdness that draws tourists like the couple from Chicago in the first place.

“There’s no place in the world like Venice Beach,” said Crystal Hunt, an 18-year-old hair-wrapper. “Most of the people who come out here come for people like us.”