My audition at Scores West called for putting on a slinky polyester outfit, fake hair and too much makeup, and then slithering around a small stage half-undressed while a belching manager stared at me. I downed three shots, got on the stage, and after 30 seconds, they hired me.

It sounds easy, but managers would make girls they had no intention of hiring dance on that same stage for up to 20 minutes. Why? Because they could. Everyone wanted to work at Scores.

The place was in its heyday when I worked there in 2005-06. Howard Stern was extolling its virtues every week, and Scores publicist Lonnie Hanover and his crew would pop by regularly. It felt more like an exclusive club with naked chicks than any topless joint I’d ever worked at, with a restaurant, a hugely expensive bar, private rooms in the back and a swanky VIP area.

Lindsay Lohan, Kate Moss, the Foo Fighters, Christina Aguilera, the Giants – even Stevie Wonder came in, which always cracked me up. I mean, what did he get out of a place with an (ostensible) no-touching-just-looking rule?

I have mixed feelings as I watch the Scores empire implode – I feel it’s good riddance, but I’m nostalgic.

Scores West, by the Hudson on West 28th Street, had its liquor license pulled after four strippers and two managers were charged in a prostitution sting early this year.

Shuttered since April, real-estate broker Alex Picken of Picken Real Estate told The Post that the building – up for sale for $40 million – may have a buyer who would split the building into commercial space and a strip club, perhaps with a new name.

Like many of its customers, Scores woke up the next morning, broke, hung over, with everything looking a lot less pretty.

Even during the flush days, I saw the vulgarity and stupidity that would lead to its demise. The managers, most of them ex-cops with a .38 tucked in a holster under an Armani jacket, were, with few exceptions, arrogant and lecherous.

If it was a slow night, they’d pass the time by paying girls to make out with them (and more) in the back rooms. And sometimes they wouldn’t pay – the girls would do it for free knowing that their reward would be getting introduced to the high rollers.

The first time I sat at the bar, a manager eyed me up. “Hey, doll, you new here?” he snorted with disgust, eyeing the Yankee game on the flat screen while expertly harpooning a graying slab of gyro meat from his tin takeout plate. “I ain’t seen you around before. You gotta boyfriend?” They always made sure we had their numbers.

The two house moms – employed to look after the dancers, dole out safety pins and stop catfights in the dressing room – were not much better. One was an unemployed actress, the other an ex-stripper.

The high fees the girls had to pay the house to dance – up to $150 depending on the night – and too many girls working the busy shifts from Thursday to Saturday meant the strippers were anxious, ruthless and nervy, constantly on the move to try and make enough money.

One girl threatened to kick my head in when I sat next to a guy while she was onstage – clients were jealously guarded.

Some made extra by selling coke, ecstasy or weed to customers. One British girl would make a huge show of how illegal it was to provide coke to guys who requested it.

She’d go on for at least an hour before giving her drug dealer a call and taking a cut of the vastly inflated profits. She’d wink at me and say, “S- – – goes on here,” and then waft away to slide onto a guy’s lap.

At least one manager also supplied drugs, a guy who had a reputation for drugging girls, according to one 18-year-old dancer I was friends with. I was warned away from him many times, but I had an unpleasant experience with him in a private room once that left me bruised, disgusted and shaken for days afterward.

Of course, I still went back to work – even though as the club got more popular, it became harder to earn.

To make good money, you had to get in with the managers, who would push you onto private Champagne Room customers. To get in with the managers, they needed to know that you could be trusted to keep quiet if they arranged for you to have sex with a guy, or provide “services.”

They also needed to know that they would get their hefty cut of everything you earned – a minimum of 10 percent, but if you wanted “work,” which meant you’d put out, more like 20 percent plus.

If you were getting a grand for working a private room, then they were getting their $150 to $300 kickback, plus the $50 you were meant to give them to keep on their good side.

A few “select” girls were pushed onto guys or were part of a kind of prostitution ring. Most girls, like myself, were not and would be furious to be considered prostitutes.

Ironically, there was a strict no-touching rule on the main floor of the club – you could dance with one leg touching the guy, your hands resting gently on the back of his chair, with a foot or so of distance between you. No grinding, no full-body contact, no knee-to-groin contact.

But on my first night, I met an 18-year-old who sighed sadly and said: “You know what happened to me the other day? It was, like, my first night here. I was in the Champagne Room with this guy, and he said he’d give me 400 bucks to j- – – him off. So I was like, ‘OK,’ you know? What the f- – -, it’s money, and afterwards he gives me four bills. I get upstairs and they’re 20s. F- – -in’ a- -hole.”

Then there was the consistent overcharging of credit cards. I was sitting in the dressing room one evening applying makeup when the house mom received a call from someone complaining that his credit card had been overcharged. We laughed at yet another sucker falling prey to the place.

And I’d overhear snatches of suspicious conversation between managers as they took someone’s credit card. The owner of the card would then be pushed into a private room, plied with drinks and girls and handed a bill hours later when he was too drunk to figure out whether the amount added up.

Then someone like Usher would wander in with a huge entourage, and you’d start to feel like you were in some insane mobster movie, and all the bad things about the place would feel glamorous and cool, rather than as sordid and as seedy as they did the next morning when you woke up in bed with rolls of 20s.

All the girls lined up in one long row to dance for Usher. When it came to me, he eyed me up, shot me a look of utter disdain, shook his head no, and nodded for the girl behind me to come forward instead!

I felt Scores starting to unravel in my three short months there. It was too much: too expensive, too arrogant, too hedonistic – too stupid. They got busted because people got careless about hiding the drugs, the credit-card fraud, the tax evasion, the prostitution.

Everyone knows if a guy who isn’t spending money straight up asks you for sex, he’s a cop. But that’s how they caught the Scores girls, who had obviously gotten too careless from doing it so frequently and had blatantly not been warned.

Every single strip club I worked for in New York City would drill that rule into their dancers – no sex, and certainly not for someone who requests it without dropping a couple grand first.

No one was taking the threat of the law seriously, laughing it off as if it didn’t apply to them. There was a pervading sense of immortality, as if everyone – strippers, managers, owners and servers alike – would never grow old or deal with the consequences of their time there.

It’s a source of endless amusement to me that this Eden has now ended, and many are paying a hefty price.

Ruth Fowler is the author of the memoir “No Man’s Land” (Viking).