THURSDAY SPECIAL : Shouldering Hard Times, and Just About Everything Else

Pity the poor man who has everything--and can’t sell it.

That’s the dilemma nowadays for Joe Sawyers, founder, proprietor and brains behind Sawyers & Sawyers, a North Hollywood operation that’s a pack rat’s dream come true.

Need a VCR you can plug into your car’s cigarette lighter? Joe’s your man. How about a denim jacket decorated by cult leader Tony Alamo? Go see Joe. A stuffed Bengal tiger? Well . . . actually, there you’d be out of luck. Sawyers already sold it for $1,000 to a Minnesota dude rancher who stopped in his store briefly after winning a John Wayne look-alike contest.

Unfortunately, even such an eclectic hoard of merchandise couldn’t help him through the recession. He’s had to move from his once-sprawling showcase store to a cramped, unmarked former print shop, and lately it’s been one bout of hard times and bad luck after another.

“Every day I live, it gets easier to die,” he muses.

It wasn’t always that way.

Back in the glory days, customers streamed into Sawyers’ 2,500-square-foot store on Lankershim Boulevard, eager to troll for good deals at a rummage sale gone haywire.

There were cut-rate knife sets, 5-foot Chinese vases, dolls, stereo systems, hair curlers, lawn mowers, never-worn designer clothes from a bygone era (Jordache jeans, anyone?), ersatz religious relics, plastic replicas of cheese and sausage, tennis rackets, rings, even an enormous, hand-carved wooden Buddha (cash only please). New stuff would pour in that Sawyers bought for pennies on the dollar at auctions and liquidation or surplus sales.

Back then, Sawyers was also the mainstay of movie prop masters, many of whom he met during his previous 20-year career as a transportation coordinator for various studios.

“Universal was big numbers for me,” Sawyers, now 60, says. “Universal would come down and buy enough stuff to show a swap meet in a movie. Then a car would come through (the set) and destroy all the stuff--but the good thing is, I never had to take it back.”

He left the world of show biz (“that phony environment”) a decade ago to begin hawking his goods full time, expanding a business he had been operating out of the back of his station wagon. For the first five years, he had a space in the local Teamsters office before moving onto Lankershim at the end of the ‘80s.

Business was sufficiently brisk to inspire the double name, Sawyers & Sawyers, although there was still only one of him. “I figured I worked twice as hard. Plus, it was a catchy name,” he explains.

He kept abreast of commercial trends, kept a sharp eye out for big sales and kept faith that there’s a market for virtually anything, no matter how outlandish. And gleefully he undercut major retailers with a zest that sprang from his Sicilian roots.

“There was just something about beating the system,” he says. “It was good to hear a guy who’d just come from Circuit City, ‘They want 50 more dollars for that TV.’ ”

But soon the troubles began.

First, the Community Redevelopment Agency eliminated easy parking near his store. Authorities ticketed motorists who parked in adjacent alleys, including Sawyers himself. Then, just after he underwent bypass surgery, Sawyers was given notice to shape up the building for earthquakes or ship out. He left in mid-1992.

“They wanted me outta there,” he growls, still bitter. “I was the only one that was making a living there.”

It was no small task moving everything to a small building on nearby Cleon Avenue, tucked in a desolate industrial zone. But the merchandise went back out on display and up went a sign proclaiming: “Sawyers & Sawyers: Factory Fresh Fish”--a red herring, of course, “so nobody would ever rob me. Who the hell’s gonna rob you for fish?”

Unfortunately, business went downstream; Sawyers admits now the location was a mistake. Which finally drove him, three months ago, to the tiny, low-slung quarters he inhabits on Cahuenga Boulevard just north of Burbank Boulevard, hard by massive electrical towers and beneath a billboard advertising salsa.

“Right now I’m still not over the shock” of moving again, which was so demoralizing he renounced retail sales for the time being in favor of wholesale, Sawyers says.

The Christmas season, usually a boon, was a bust. Few people came, and now Sawyers, a short, stocky man with glasses and a grizzled beard, only has the energy to open his crowded shop for regulars and old chums. Items are piled high on shelves in no particular order. Boxes remain unopened. Aisles allow browsing only by skinny folk.

The place has the musty air of an unopened tomb. Like King Tut’s resting place, there’s a little antechamber littered with rubble (in this case, wicker baskets), and when you peer into the dimness beyond, you can discern wonderful things--everywhere the glint of plastic. Like Tut’s tomb, however, the inventory is a fraction of what once was, the rest plundered by looters or recession.

And Sawyers himself is more curator now than peddler. He’s also dispirited. Even the discovery of a collection of expensive stuffed and mounted fish isn’t enough to restore his old enthusiasm.

“Every day I live, it gets easier to die,” he says again.

But he’ll keep trying to sell his stuff until the curtain falls. That much he knows. After all, you can’t take it with you, and Joe Sawyers certainly has a lot of it.